Sun is going to shut its plant in Linlithgow, Scotland, its only factory outside the US, throwing about 140 people on the street. The move is part of its plan to cut 6,000 jobs, roughly 18% of its workforce.
Service integration is crucial to the success of any SOA solutions. Traditional service integration often involve using non-standard and proprietary technologies, resulting in solutions that are expensive to develop, difficult to manage, and stubborn to adapt to the business evolvement. Java Business Integration (JBI) is an effort focused on standardizing the core architecture elements of integration architectures.
Want an easy way to build installers for Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, Linux, IBM i, Mac OS X, and more? Try InstallAnywhere 2009! From the makers of InstallShield, InstallAnywhere is the most popular installation tool for Java developers. Create bulletproof installers for any platform in minutes – no expertise needed. Try it now! Click here to access InstallAnywhere 2009, the free Acresso Software Download.
This white paper highlights the major problems with developing UNIX installer using shell scripts. It also discusses how Java is being used as a successful alternative to shell scripting for enterprise installations. The paper additionally covers how Java developers use InstallAnywhere to quickly author reliable installers. Download it now! Click here to download the White Paper.
What are best practices for building installers for Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, Linux, IBM i, and more? Find out in this Webinar. Learn how to build a single project file that generates installers for every platform you target. Also see a demo of InstallAnywhere, the #1 installer tool for Java developers. Watch it now! Click here to access the webinar!
In today's Internet age, most developers are building Web applications prolifically. As applications move to the Web, it has become increasingly more important to be able to gauge their performance and load capability. Developers must be able to predict how much traffic a Web site will be able to handle and make smart choices on how to design an application so that it can handle a potential blitz of users.
What new cloud technologies are coming over the horizon? Which vendors are driving the most Enterprise-relevant innovation? SYS-CON's Cloud Computing Journal expands its list of most active players in the fast-emerging Cloud Ecosystem.
"In conjunction with Amazon S3 and Amazon CloudFront in the EU, Amazon Web Services customers can now locate their storage, distribution, and compute in Europe, better allowing them to achieve low latency to their European customers and to meet EU data storage requirements when applicable,” said Peter De Santis, General Manager of Amazon EC2 as Amazon.com today announced that it has extended Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) to Europe.
It appears that Sun is killing off its Sun Grid proto-cloud, the almost four-year-old Solaris 10-based utility computing platform offering grid compute time by the hour, only to replace it with some other form of cloud. Exactly what remains cloudy. The struggling company has a new cloud computing unit under SVP Dave Douglas, several hundred dedicated engineers and a cloud CTO, Lew Tucker, the guy who built Salesforce.com’s AppExchange marketplace, working on the vision.
There's a new release of OpenSolaris out – OpenSolaris 2008.11 – out a whole three weeks before the end of 2008. There was a 2008.05 release, aka Project Indiana, in May but that wasn’t as commercial or production-oriented as this one. Both run only on x86 machines, not Sun's own Sparc chip – at least not yet. New features in 2008.11 include Time Slider, a Gnome GUI that makes Sun's not-for-the-uninitiated Zettabyte File System (ZFS) functionality, like instant data snapshots, available to all users.
Southeastern Asset Management Inc, now Sun’s largest stockholder, wants on to Sun's board, which has so far failed to stop the company from imploding. Sun has agreed to give it two seats but both companies have to agree on who sits in them. When they might be filled is unclear. Whether Southeastern, which is known to invest in what it thinks are undervalued companies, has any fixes for what ails Sun is debatable.
For a business to be sustainable today, it must be supported by a truly sustainable architecture. This type of architecture must have built-in agility and reusability. To be able to support the disparate end-to-end transaction components involved in converting leads to cash, this architecture must be sufficiently free form in its inter-business process communication. All businesses require this, whatever the business model.
It's a wonder it has the entry fee, but Sun Thursday showed up for the RIA race against Adobe’s Flex, Flash, and AIR and Microsoft's Silverlight – and for that matter the open source AJAX – riding JavaFX 1.0. According to Sun it's one of the most significant advances ever to come out of its stable. Once called JavaFX Desktop 1.0, it was at least two years in the making.
Parallel programming in Java is becoming easier with tools such as the fork/join framework, Pervasive DataRush, Terracotta, and Hadoop. This article gives a high-level description of each approach, pointing you in the right direction to begin writing parallel applications of your own. Companies today are swimming in data. The increasing ease with which data can be collected, combined with the decreasing cost of storing and managing it, means huge amounts of information are now accessible to anyone with the inclination.
Unit testing is hard. There I said it. Although I have been developing software for the past 18 years I still find that putting my applications through their paces via unit testing is difficult. I have learned the lesson (I'm sure like many of you) the hard way. Unit testing is probably the most important part of software development. We all get caught in the trap once in a while when we believe that there is no need to test a piece of software we just wrote.
As a software journalist, there are times when certain vendors will shut the door on reporting opportunities that might represent too much of an "inside view" of their technology or their organization. I've been to more developer events than I can remember where I've been handed a large red or yellow press badge so that I can be easily identified and kept out of the inner sanctums reserved for customers or employees.
Doing network I/O on the user interface (UI) thread is bad. Most developers know that and can tell you why; unfortunately, it’s still done. At this year's JavaOne, one of the keynote JavaFX demos bombed because the network was slow, something that would be forgivable had the entire application's UI not frozen, which required it to be restarted, only to trip up again a few minutes later.
Carl Icahn, the activist stockholder – and champion of the apparently futile “Microsoft Buys Yahoo” plan – who pushed his way onto the Yahoo board by dint of a threatened proxy fight, bought roughly 6.7 million shares of Yahoo the Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday before Thanksgiving.
Overall, very exciting times, and a great event put together by the folks at SYS-CON! There was a lot of excitement and optimism throughout the event. As someone put it: cloud computing is about 700 days old. That means that there are a lot of arguments about definitions, and where things are going, and so on. And that also gives a lot of vibe and a lot of fresh community spirit.
Over the course of the past few decades, the consumer media industry has evolved from a slow-moving oligopoly dominated by a handful of vertically integrated networks to a highly fragmented and competitive marketplace of content creation, publication, and distribution players. This disaggregation of the industry value chain, in combination with the proliferation of content sources, channels, and media formats has created a daunting logistical challenge for anyone attempting to deliver content to the consumer in the right format, at the right time.
As you can imagine, I spend a lot of time speaking to people about service-oriented architecture (and its variants for infrastructure and enterprise) and about how best to create a true implementation (or at least, an effective one). There is a great deal of detail in creating such an artifact – design yes, but also implementation, operational details, governance, and a myriad of other tasks that can easily take up a chief architect’s entire day.
Are you a victim of outdated call center design syndrome? Symptoms include chaotic agent desktops, frustrated agents, miserable first-contact resolution rates, and angry customers calling back again and again. If you recognize these symptoms, then you're most likely a victim. This article will offer a service-oriented architecture (SOA)-based cure for outdated call center syndrome.
Sun, which desperately needs to monetize its software, has put out a new release of MySQL with a gold-level subscriber-only Query Analyzer tool that it’s praying users will pay for. The tool monitors query performance and quickly pinpoints and corrects problem SQL code. It promises to “turbo-boost” the speed and uptime of MySQL database applications. One user reported it tripled his performance; 30% appears more normal. It’s integrated into the MySQL Enterprise Monitor, a key part of Sun’s MySQL Enterprise subscription offering. Subscriptions, as usual, go for $599 to $4,999 per server per year. The gold level costs $2,999 a year. An unlimited site-wide subscription starts at $40,000 a year.
IBM is going to buy Transitive, the British cross-platform virtualization firm that salvaged legacy Macintosh programs and made Apple's move from IBM to Intel chips as graceful as a prima ballerina’s pirouette. Transitive is clever at running applications written for one kind of microprocessor and operating system on multiple platforms with little or no modification and could probably be made to run all legacy apps in virtualized form on a single hardware platform.
ILOG has announced ILOG JViews 8.5, the latest version of ILOG’s Java-based visualization suite, with new features that enhance the creation of Rich Internet Applications as well as desktop applications. ILOG JViews 8.5 adds support for the Eclipse platform including the new ILOG JViews Graph Layout module, and additional support for Ajax frameworks to help developers build interactive user displays for RIA faster. With seven modules targeting diagrams, charts, graph layout and map displays, ILOG JViews demonstrates ILOG’s role as innovator and industry leader in providing solutions for high-end visualization applications, such as large-scale industrial monitoring systems or Web-enabled road traffic information systems.