Yahoo! and Gannett are hiring! Join them and recruiters from other top media companies and universities at the ONA09 Career Summit & Job Fair, Thursday, Oct. 1, at the Hilton San Francisco to hear about current openings.
Writing meaningful Java benchmarks is a tricky business. It's well known that the Java Virtual Machine's just in time (JIT) compilation process means that running an application for a few seconds won't let you predict the performance of the application over hours or days of uptime. In spite of this, developers often rely on micro-benchmarks to set performance SLAs for their applications.
SAP (Business Objects) has recently released Crystal Reports for Eclipse version 2.0 to provide reporting solutions for Java-based applications. This is available as free to use (within an organization) and has the advantage that it is built on the most tested and reliable component (Java Reporting Component in Crystal Reports) that has been in market for quite a few years now. This article discusses the features of CR4Ev2.0, usability of its designer and API, and starting off with an overview of Crystal Reports product architecture.
Dell demonstrated the industry’s first Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) solution based on industry standards using technologies from Intel and Citrix to help improve virtualization performance across networked servers and storage. The companies collaborated to develop technology based on PCI-SIG I/O Virtualization specifications and Intel Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O (Intel® VT-d) to allow multiple operating systems to share a physical interconnect
A round-up of the problems, opportunities and issues being discussed October 6, 2009 in Washington, DC, at SYS-CON's 1st Annual Government IT Conference & Expo (www.GovITExpo.com), a 1-day deep dive into the new wave of Internet-based technologies that are changing the way that Federal agencies leverage, procure and utilize IT.
Ok, so, here are my thoughts on Ulitzer... As a blogger, I focus on traffic and I spend quite a lot of time optimizing my SEO. Since the target audience of my articles is much greater than the reach of my blog, Ulitzer is actually helping me increase my content reach. Moreover, Ulitzer does it in a very fair way since links back to my posts or other locations are without the evil "nofollow" providing a nice SEO boost. It also gives me some good metrics that are very useful data point on the effectiveness of my blog article. And last but not least, it allows my article to appears in news.google.com, which is a very nice channel extension. So, all of these to say that while Utilizer might be seen as a competing channel to bloggers, I think that bloggers should realize the tremendous value it could bring to their blog. I think to materialize this value to bloggers, some sort of WordPress plugin would be very useful. I think that allowing bloggers to show and combined Ulitzer/SYS-CON stats, comments, Tweets/ReTweets with their blog posts would be a killer feature. Another approach would be to expose a simple REST API (just HTTP JSON gets) and do a sample Wordpress plugin showing developers how to integrate Wordpress with Ulitzer. Anyway, just some random thoughts.
With IP networks taking on many new challenges from VoIP, rich multimedia and other high-bandwidth consuming and high-priority applications, SMBs need to be sure the network connectivity between their business and Cloud Computing provider is protected with controls for reliable Internet circuit availability, and for optimizing delivery of traffic to critical applications.
Commoditized from solution to feature, from feature to function, load balancing is no longer a solution but rather a function of more advanced solutions that’s still an integral component for highly-available, fault-tolerant applications.
Unashamed Parody of Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Load balancers: I'm not dead.
The Market: 'Ere, it says it’s not dead.
Analysts: Yes it is.
Load balancers: I'm not.
The Market: It isn't.
Analysts: Well, it will be soon, it’s very ill.
Load balancers: I'm getting better.
Analysts: No you're not, you'll be stone dead in a moment.
Earlier this year, amidst all the other (perhaps exaggerated) technology deaths, Gartner declared that Load Balancers are Dead. It may come as surprise, then, that application delivery network folks keep talking about them. As do users, customers, partners, and everyone else under the sun. In fact, with the increased interest in cloud computing it seems that load balancers are enjoying a short reprieve from death.
They aren’t. Trust me, load balancers aren’t enjoying anything. Load balancing on the other hand, is very much in the spotlight as scalability and infrastructure 2.0 and availability in the cloud are highlighted as issues today’s IT staff must deal with. And if it seems that we keep mentioning load balancers despite their apparent demise, it’s only because the understanding of what a load balancer does is useful to slowly moving people toward what is taking its place: application delivery.
Load balancing is an integral component to any high-availability and/or on-demand architecture. The ability to direct application requests across a (cluster|pool|farm|bank) of servers (physical or virtual) is an inherent property of cloud computing and on-demand architectures in general. But it is not the be-all and end-all of application delivery, it’s just the point at which application delivery begins and an integral function of application delivery controllers.
Load balancers, back in their day, were “teh bomb.” These simple but powerful pieces of software (which later grew into appliances and later into full-fledged application switches) offered a way for companies to address the growing demand for Web-based access to everything from their news stories to their products to their services to their kids’ pictures. But as traffic demands grew so did the load on servers and eventually new functionality began to be added to load 
balancers – caching, SSL offload and acceleration, and even security-focused functionality. From the core that was load balancing grew an entire catalog of application-rich features that focused on keeping applications available while delivering them fast and securely. At that point we were no longer simply load balancing applications, we were delivering them. Optimizing them. Accelerating them. Securing them.
So it made sense that in order to encapsulate the concept of application delivery and move people away from focusing on load balancing that we’d give the product and market a new name. Thus arose the term “application delivery network” and “application delivery controller.” But at the core of both is still load balancing. Not load balancers, but load balancing. A function, if you will, of application delivery. But not the whole enchilada; not by a long shot.
If we’re still mentioning load balancing (and even load balancers, as incorrect as that term may be today) it’s because the function is very, very, very important (I could add a few more “verys” but I think you get the point) to so many different architectures and to meeting business goals around availability and performance and security that it should be mentioned, if not centrally then at least peripherally.
So yes. Load balancers are very much outdated and no longer able to provide the biggest bang for your buck. But load balancing, particularly when leveraged as a core component in an application delivery network, is very much in vogue (it’s trendy, like iPhones) and very much a necessary part of a successfully implemented high-availability or on-demand architecture.
Long live load balancing.
Related blogs & articles:
On Thursday, September 10th, 2009, I moderated a panel at the 1105 Group’s Enterprise Architecture Conference in Washington, DC entitled, “SOA Goes Mainstream – An Industry and Government Roadmap.” On the panel we had two Federal government agency representatives and two industry representatives, with one of the industry representatives providing a FedEx case study as the basis for their SOA experiences.
The excessively sharp-eyed of you may have noticed that I have recently switch from listing tags at the end of posts to using WordPress tags at the end of posts. Here's why. Not that you should care. When tagging first took off, there weren't a lot of good places to link ...
The main topic of this week and the most fundamental component of the cloud is infrastructure as a service (IaaS). This component refers to all the elements of delivering a Web-based service including servers, Internet connectivity, transport routing and sometimes higher-level functions for enhanced performance and scalability.
Build Release Management (BRM) is truly the next generation of IT Change Management. With BRM, you can get compliant and implement total process automation while continuing to work with whatever version control tool, testing application or IDE you are currently using. Download this essential eBook "The Curious Case of Build Release Management" and learn the basics of what BRM is, why users love it and why every application development team should consider it.
Hosted Solutions, a provider of IT infrastructure as a service (IaaS), announced today that the company has significantly expanded its suite of application hosting and management capabilities to include support for a full range of leading business applications, including Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, WebSphere, WebLogic and JBOSS.
In light of today’s compressed development cycles, multi-tiered application architectures and complex technologies, many organizations are challenged to get reliable yet scalable enterprise Java applications out the door in a timely manner. Devoting a small amount of energy throughout the development process to identify, address, and correct performance obstacles can lower the risks and costs associated with poorly performing applications over the life of the code.
Oracle bought a hard-to-miss piece of the front page of the Wall Street Journal Thursday to run an ad apparently in hopes of arresting the increasing erosion in Sun’s server business. The bulleted ad is addressed to Sun customers and says Oracle “plans to spend more money developing Sparc than Sun does now; spend more money developing Solaris than Sun does now; have more than twice as many hardware specialists selling and servicing Sparc/Solaris systems than Sun does now; [and] dramatically improve Sun’s hardware performance by tightly integrating Oracle software with Sun hardware.”
What could you do with your code in 20 Lines or Less? That's the question I ask (almost) every week for the devcentral community, and every week I go looking to find cool new examples that show just how flexible and powerful iRules can be without getting in over your head.
29 editions later and still going strong. The 20LoL is a testament to just how many different things can be done with iRules in just a few lines of code. Just imagine the possibilities if this were the 30LoL.
This week I’ve got three more examples, all from the forums. Today we’ll cover dealing with port numbers in HTTP requests, checking pool status from within an iRule, and more fun with nested switching. The community keeps putting out fantastic examples so I just keep on writing about them. Keep it up.
Removing HTTP request port numbers
http://devcentral.f5.com/Default.aspx?tabid=53&forumid=5&postid=62227&view=topic
Hoolio came up with a trio if examples of how to deal with port numbers in your HTTP requests. All of them are good, depending on your situation, but I’m only going to highlight one here. Go check out the forum post above to see the other two and get the context of the thread.
when HTTP_REQUEST {
# Check if Host contains a colon
if {[HTTP::host] contains ":"}{
# Redirect client to requested host minus the port and preserve the original URI
HTTP::redirect "https://[getfield [HTTP::host] ":" 1][HTTP::uri]"
}
}
Checking pool member status
http://devcentral.f5.com/Default.aspx?tabid=53&forumid=5&postid=62093&view=topic
User cmbhatt, another one of our power-users, came up with a very cool example of using the LB::select command and HTTP::respond to show the status of a selected pool member. It even has a built in meta-refresh so you can continually monitor the status. Pretty neat stuff.
when HTTP_REQUEST {
if {[HTTP::uri] eq "/status" } {
scan [LB::select] %s%s%s%s%d command current_pool command2 current_member current_port
eval [LB::select]
set response "<html><head><title>$current_pool Pool Status - [clock format [clock seconds]]</title><meta http-equiv='refresh' content='10; url=http://[HTTP::host]/status'></head>"
if { [active_members $current_pool] < 1 } {
append response "POOL NAME:$current_pool<br/> CURRENT MEMBER:$current_member:$current_port<br/> STATUS: DOWN <br/></body></html>"
} else {
append response "POOL NAME:$current_pool<br/> CURRENT MEMBER:$current_member:$current_port<br/> STATUS: UP <br/></body></html>"
}
}
HTTP::respond 200 content $response "Content-Type" "text/html"
}
More nested switching and pool selection vs. redirection
http://devcentral.f5.com/Default.aspx?tabid=53&forumid=5&view=topic&postid=62162
This rule stemmed from cmbhatt, once again, then I went in and made some tweaks where I think it made sense, as you can see in the thread. The idea is that the user is looking to do some inspection of first the host, then in some cases, depending on what the host is, the URI as well. Based on what’s found either a load balancing decision is made or a redirect is issued. This is yet another awesome example of how iRules can turn something that would be ridiculously tricky or even impossible elsewhere into something pretty straight-forward.
when HTTP_REQUEST {
switch [HTTP::host] {
"www.mydomain.eu" {
switch [HTTP::uri] {
"/" { HTTP::respond 301 Location "http://www.mydomain.eu/zz/index.html" }
default { pool mydomain_eu_pool }
}
}
"www.mydomain.be" {
switch [HTTP::uri] {
"/" { HTTP::respond 301 Location "http://www.mydomain.eu/be/zz/index.jsp" }
default { pool mydomain_be_pool }
}
}
"www.mydomain.nl" { HTTP::respond 301 Location "http://www.mydomain.eu/nl/zz/index.jsp" }
"www.mydomain.fr" -
"mydomain.fr" { HTTP::respond 301 Location "http://www.mydomain.eu/fr/zz/index.jsp }
"www.mydomain.lu" { HTTP::respond 301 Location "http://www.mydomain.eu/lu/zz" }
}
}
There you have it, three more iRules to get you on your way in less than 21 lines of code. Feel free to submit ideas, suggestions of feedback, as always.
#Colin
SpringSource, a provider of Java application infrastructure and management, has announced that iCIMS, a provider of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) talent acquisition solutions, has deployed SpringSource Hyperic HQ, a key part of SpringSource’s full solution set, which covers the entire build, run, manage lifecycle for Java application development.
Sun said Wednesday that it’s got an update to its MySQL Enterprise subscription called MySQL Enterprise Fall 2009 that will let DBAs graphically drill down into database bottlenecks to improve application performance. The widgetry can be had for the moment on a free 30-day trial subscription. Sometime in the next month it’ll go commercial.
During my RichFaces session at JBoss World 2009, I showed three small examples of using Ajax with RichFaces 3.3, JSF 2, and RichFaces 4. I thougth it would be a good idea to show you the difference or more correct the similarities between the three. I will be blogging more about RichFaces 4 [...]
This blog post demonstrates creating an ADF Faces RC af:tree component that sources its data from a hierarchical database table, and supports drag n drop of the nodes.
Both these topics have been discussed and demonstrated by other excellent bloggers, the core of this post is to bring both concepts together, with my usual own proof of concept documentation that may be useful to readers.
The ADF Faces RC support for hierarchical data sources was defined by Chandu Bhavsar.
The drag and drop support for af:trees was documented by Luc Bors.
(Definitely the kudos for this post must go to both Chandu and Luc for their posts that sparked the inspiration for mine)
Data model
In this example we'll use the following table:
CREATE TABLE organisationsNote the FK between the table and itself, essentially modelling that an organisation has sub-organisations (or agencies).
(org_id NUMBER(4,0) NOT NULL
,parent_org_id NUMBER(4,0)
,name VARCHAR2(35) NOT NULL
,CONSTRAINT org_pk PRIMARY KEY (org_id)
,CONSTRAINT org_parent_fk
FOREIGN KEY (parent_org_id)
REFERENCES organisations (org_id));
ORG_ID PARENT_ORG_ID NAMEHierarchical af:tree
------ ------------- -------------------------------
1000 (null) Sage Computing Services
1010 1000 Training Division
1030 1010 Self Study Program
1040 1010 Classroom Training
2264 (null) Australian Medical Systems
3210 (null) Conservation Society
3214 3210 Forests Division
3216 3210 Rivers Division
4394 (null) Newface cosmetics
3842 (null) Institute of Business Services
3843 3842 Marketing Services
3844 3842 Financial Services
SELECT Organisations.ORG_ID,6) You don't need to modify the LeafOrgView query. For completeness it's described as follows:
Organisations.PARENT_ORG_ID,
Organisations.NAME
FROM ORGANISATIONS Organisations
WHERE Organisations.PARENT_ORG_ID IS NULL
SELECT Organisations.ORG_ID,7) Create a VO Link between the ParentOrgView and LeafOrgView as follows:
Organisations.PARENT_ORG_ID,
Organisations.NAME
FROM ORGANISATIONS Organisations
Essentially:
Essentially:
Essentially:
Note the first level of the tree has been defined as model.ParentOrgView.
Note how the Tree Level Rules only has 2 nodes, but to the right of each node is the child of the current node. Of specific interest in the hierarchical relationship between LeafOrgView and LeafOrgView__2.
