James Gosling, the so-called father of Java, started working at Google Monday after stalking out of Oracle last year and slamming the door after it acquired Sun. One might imagine he’s been under a non-compete ever since, considering it’s just about a year since he found the Oracle harness chaffing. Oracle of course has subsequently sued Google over the way it uses Java in Android. Gosling said on his blog that he doesn’t know what he’ll be working on – which seems hard to believe – “I expect it’ll be a bit of everything, seasoned with a large dose of grumpy curmudgeon,” but he expects it to be “interesting fun with huge leverage.” It is assumed it will be related to Java and Android and the lawsuit. After he left Oracle he blogged about how “during the integration meetings between Sun and Oracle, where we were being grilled about the patent situation between Sun and Google, we could see the Oracle lawyer’s eyes sparkle.”
Terracotta has enhanced the Quartz Scheduler, the de facto standard for Java job scheduling, giving it improved management, greater control and optimal scale and simplifying a key component of cloud orchestration. It’s the first rev of the stuff since Terracotta acquired the open source project in September of 2009.
In my last article I explained what a major Garbage Collection is. While a major Collection certainly has a negative impact on performance it is not the only thing that we need to watch out for. And in case of the CMS we might not always be able to distinguish between major and minor GC. So before we start tuning the garbage collector we first need to know what we want to tune for. From a high level there are two main tuning goals.
Google accused the Chinese government Monday of screwing with Gmail and making it look like it was Google’s problem. It said China has been making it hard for Chinese users to access the e-mail system and send e-mails or IMs since the end of January. “There is no technical issue on our side,” it said, “we have checked extensively. This is a government blockage carefully designed to look like the problem is with Gmail.” Google also complained about “highly targeted and apparently politically motivated attacks against our users. We believe activists may have been a specific target.”
Deutsche Telekom, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Verizon and Yahoo, all big network owners, said Monday that they have formed a standards-setting Open Networking Foundation (ONF) that’ll promote an approach to networking called Software-Defined Networking (SDN) that makes networks programmable like computers. They got 17 other companies to sign up including heavyweights like Cisco, Broadcom, Juniper Networks, NTT, IBM, HP and VMware. ONF says SDN works through relatively simple software changes and applies to all kinds of networks including data centers, wide area telecommunication networks, wireless networks, enterprises and homes. SDN is supposed to give network owners and operators better control over their networks, let them optimize network behavior and prioritize data.
Trying to get its arms around the possible component shortages, postponed product launches, higher parts prices and the impact of iPad 2 on laptops, Barclays Capital has cut its PC growth projection for 2011 from 8% to 5% as a result of the disasters in Japan and weaker-than-expected demand. It expects Q1 to be down 10% sequentially, Q2 flat with Q1 and a rebound in the second half. The Japanese government calculates the March 11 earthquake and tsunami could cost $309 billion, close to three times the cost of Katrina, making it the costliest natural disaster in history.
Dell has put out its third generation of micro servers and it’s not making the things custom-made any more. They’re going mainstream, targeted at shared and cloud computing infrastructures. Dell says the widgets are optimized for dedicated and virtualized IT hosting and Web 2.0 environments. It calls the stuff the PowerEdge C5000 line, which includes the C5125 and C5220. Applications are supposed to run on individual dedicated physical servers without compromising on price, power or density.
Intel has apparently sacked the guy who’s been running its Atom operation. Anand Chandrasekher suddenly said Tuesday that he’s leaving Intel “to pursue other interests.” The company immediately moved Intel Architecture Group (IAG) VPs Mike Bell and Dave Whalen in to co-manage the Ultra Mobility Group (UMG). IAG chief David Perlmutter said in the canned announcement that “Intel remains committed to this business,” a statement that immediately underscored the fact that Intel is unhappy with the progress of the Atom against ARM and its many minions in tablets and smartphones. Even Windows 8 is going to run on ARM.
Java EE and .net continue to be the major enterprise platforms. With their clones taken up the PaaS space on cloud, it is all the more important for the enterprises to think in terms of interoperability. This article analyzes the interoperability between two major PaaS platforms in .net and Java EE respectively.
In a recent post we have shown how the Java Garbage Collection MXBean Counters have changed for the Concurrent Mark-and-Sweep Collector. It now reports all GC runs instead of just major collections. That prompted me to think about what a major GC actually is or what it should be. It is actually quite hard to find any definition of major and minor GCs. This well-known Java Memory Management Whitepaper only mentions in passing that a full collection is sometimes referred to as major collection.
OSGi technology brings a number of much needed benefits to the Java enterprise application market, and is disruptive in that it impacts the software development, deployment, and management practices of many organizations. OSGi impacts deployment given the shared, modular nature of OSGi, meaning application code must be written differently to capitalize on the benefits of OSGi. Equally important, application management processes need to be adjusted, given the highly shared nature of OSGi modules across many applications. This article provides a high-level overview of OSGi, and the impact this framework is having on the software lifecycle.
With Java EE being a major platform on enterprise, a good PaaS platform like vFabric is very exciting. This gives lot of choices for existing Java EE based applications to move to the Cloud. The comparison with Windows Azure is done only for the new Cloud applications or building new SaaS. Again we expect both these platforms to get upgraded to very many new features which will boost the SaaS market. At this time for new applications Windows Azure is ahead, but vFabric is a good choice for migrating existing Java EE applications to Cloud. We will definitely see integration aspects between them for the good of enterprises.
VMware has acquired open source software company WaveMaker, which brings non-programmers into the Spring fold .WaveMaker's technology is built on the Spring programming model of another of its recent acquisitions, SpringSource. It provides a graphical tool that even non-developers could use to build Java applications by simply using a visual drag-and-drop method. The apps could be as simple as one featuring forms to build a page that lets end users enter a credit card to purchase a product or they could encompass more multi functional business reports that pull together financial and human resources data. Users can then deploy their creations directly to an internal cloud or to a variety of other platforms, including Amazon, Rackspace, OpSource and Eucalyptus. The software runs on Windows, Mac OS, Red Hat, Ubuntu and other operating systems and supports numerous databases including MySQL and Microsoft's SQL Server databases.
Join us March 30, 2011 at 9 a.m. Pacific Time for the online event “Evolutionary Fabric, Revolutionary Scale: A Nondisruptive Way to Handle Dynamic Data Center and Cloud Environments.” See how Cisco is evolving its standards-based fabric portfolio to simply and securely deliver any application to any location at scale. Cisco customers will talk about their top challenges in the data center environment and the steps they’re taking to solve them. Experienced industry analysts will talk about new data center and cloud computing trends and the strategic role of the data center fabric.
IBM said Monday that it was going to put $38 million into a new Asia Pacific Cloud Computing Data Center in Singapore, adding to its centers in Germany, Canada and the United States and its 13 global cloud labs, seven of which are in Asia-Pac in China, India, Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Vietnam and Singapore. The new Singapore facility is scheduled to launch in April offering the company’s infrastructure as a service (IaaS) cloud portfolio to start along with IBM and third-party software. IBM said the addition reflected demand for both public and private clouds. IDC figures the Asia-Pacific cloud market excluding Japan will grow an average 40% a year rate through 2014 to reach $4.9 billion.
In this white paper, we will be discussing an important trend in IT development and deployment architectures: the evolution from JEE Application Servers to lighter weight Java containers. As evidenced by the growing popularity of Tomcat server – according to Evans Research, Tomcat is in use at 68 percent of all organizations (50 percent of which are built in Spring), making it the most widely deployed application server on the planet – many IT organizations have been re-thinking their commitment to commercial JEE application servers. This is due to challenging business environments that drive the need for more cost-effective application architectures and, just as important, the trend toward the use of more lightweight and efficient mechanisms for application development. This also becomes even more important as organizations begin to consider building applications for deployment into the cloud future. When IT organizations talk about “migrating” their applications, they generally are focusing on one or more of three distinct situations.
Tomcat is without question the most widely utilized Java Web Application Server. Initially a favorite of application developers because of its system friendly footprint, simplicity, and performance, Tomcat has now become an enterprise production environment in some IT organizations. In many more, it is relegated to usage in development environments only, because Tomcat lacks manageability, control, and monitoring capabilities, many of the applications originally developed on Tomcat have been deployed on commercial JEE Application Servers for production. This means that what were lightweight applications become burdened by the huge footprint of un-needed features and complexity. Additionally, while Tomcat does enable choice of support strategies, most IT organizations feel the need for expert commercial support. Given all the advantages Tomcat provides, it is important to find solutions to these deficiencies. This whitepaper will help IT managers understand the advantages of SpringSource tc Server. Based on 100 percent Tomcat, tc Server adds a number of critical functional capabilities as well as professional support led by Apache Tomcat community insiders.
Large Enterprises need to evaluate between Build Vs Buy Vs Reuse in acquiring new business or technical capabilities. Like Software components, this Build Vs Buy Vs Reuse plays a key role in setting up Private Clouds Too and this article analyzes the options. The cloud infrastructure is owned or leased by a single organization, delivered over a private network and is operated solely for that organization, either by that organization (internal private cloud) or by an outsourcer (external private cloud). Private cloud is the implementation of cloud services on resources that are dedicated to your organization, whether they exist on-premises or off-premises. With a private cloud, you get many of the benefits of public cloud computing-including self-service, scalability, and elasticity-with the additional control and customization available from dedicated resources.
Commercial Java Platform Enterprise Edition (JEE) application servers have grown so large, complex, and overloaded as to slow application development, complicate deployment, and impose expensive licensing burdens for bundled features IT doesn’t need. Equally important, their heavy footprints make them ill-suited for today’s virtualized data centers. In response, Java developers by the millions have discarded bloated JEE containers in favor of lean software platforms. The choice of a large majority of Java developers today, these lightweight frameworks and application servers harmonize development with IT operations – delivering streamlined application development, huge savings of time and expense, simplicity of deployment, built-in performance management, and the small footprint required for virtualized and cloud environments.
When building distributed applications one of the central performance-critical components is serialization. Most modern frameworks make it very easy to send data over the wire. In many cases you don’t see at all what is going on behind the scenes. Choosing the right serialization strategy however is central for achieving good performance and scalability. Serialization problems affect CPU, memory, network load and response times.
We're beginning to see a real marketplace for open source-based integration and middleware, and in many ways the open source versions are advancing the value and variety of these services beyond where the commercial products can quickly tread. What's more, as cloud and SaaS services become more common, ways of integrating data and applications assets -- regardless or origins -- will need to keep pace. Standardization and inclusiveness of integration points and types may be much better served by a community approach, and open source licenses, than waiting for a commercial product upgrade, or costly custom integrations.
COBOL has evolved and is breaking free. Visual COBOL R3 gives you FREEDOM, CHOICE and MORE: FREEDOM to deploy wherever you want, JVM, .NET, AZURE, CHOICE of development environment, VS2010 or Eclipse and MORE COBOL language enhancements to deliver MORE productivity, faster. Read the Visual COBOL R3 brochure to learn more about COBOL: NO BARRIERS.
Micro Focus Visual COBOL delivers the richest development experience for COBOL programmers available on Windows and Linux. Using the Eclipse rich client platform as an integrated development environment (IDE), the needs of the COBOL programmer are the primary focus. In parallel, the enhancements to the COBOL language make it even easier to use to build modern object-oriented applications. The Visual COBOL Development Hub and Visual COBOL for Eclipse solve these problems by providing a rich desktop development environment based on the Eclipse IDE with high-performance server-based tools for managing builds, source code access and debugger engine.
Oracle Wednesday put out GlassFish Server 3.1, delivering on the roadmap laid out at last year’s JavaOne and adding new high-availability features in the areas of load balancing, failover, state management and centralized administration. There’s supposed to be a 34% improvement in high-availability performance over GlassFish 2.1.1. As the reference implementation for Java EE, GlassFish Server is the proving grounds for the upcoming Java EE 7. Oracle says GlassFish complements its WebLogic Server 11g, designed to run the broader portfolio of Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g and large-scale enterprise applications.
Promotion is a problem faced by every API developer. Long nights of coding have given form to the stroke of genius you had six months ago in the cafe. You’ve just written the API that will serve as the front door into your application. But how do you document this so that your peers will use it—and hopefully make you rich in the process? Java had Javadoc, an innovation that managed to strike a surprisingly effective balance between ease of use and systematization (three cheers for strong typing and static binding). Web services “solved” the interface definition problem with WSDL, a standard only its authors could love (and some of these won’t admit to participating in conception). To the registry crowd was left the task of devising clever ways to document a SOAP API around the torturous abstractions of WSDL so that humans could grok it as effectively as the machines. Few would argue that their solutions were, well, solutions.