On behalf of RTL interactive, Netbiscuits, a software platform for the development, operation and monetization of mobile Web sites and apps, has developed an iPhone app for RTL Television, Germany’s most successful private television station. Netbiscuits developed the app in the form of a hybrid application: a combination of Web site and app that employs the latest HTML5 technologies as well as the native functions of the iPhone. The new RTL iPhone app is now available for download from Apples German App Store and can be used for free for a period of 30 days. After this period, a service fee of 1.59 € per month is charged. With regard to content, the new iPhone app utilizes RTL’s mobile portfolio with all of its various functions and offers, such as video clips and live content, in order to enable RTL program highlights to be viewed in an impressive and dynamic manner on mobile devices. In addition to numerous additional services, such as a program planner with a reminder function, a video search feature or viewer review functions, the application also provides access to the entire world of RTL television that is available via the mobile Web site http://mobil.rtl.de, including news, entertainment and program information. Local weather information and numerous subscribable sports, entertainment and news channels round off the impressive range of offers.
I don’t know any other technology that has ever gotten as much of a beating as JavaFX did last week (here, here, and here). JavaFX has become a technology that developers love to hate. It’s like a pinata for developers. JavaFX was first announced at JavaOne 2007 (that’s 3 years ago). Many predicted its death even before version 1.0 was released in December 2008, and many continue to call for its demise. Last week also turned out to be the week where I presented Enterprise JavaFX at the Silicon Valley JavaFX JUG, and also the week that Steven Chin created a petition to open source JavaFX. Don’t get me wrong, JavaFX is very far from perfect. It has it’s problems and challenges (listed below) and its future is hanging on life support right now, but let’s start with the good.
Jinfonet Software, a provider of Java reporting solutions, on Thursday unveiled JReport 10. This new version adds rich visualization and interactive reporting to a robust, agile BI platform, providing embedded operational reporting to developers and self-service reporting to end users. JReport 10 brings Agile Business Intelligence to the next level with rich visualization features. Web 2.0 self-service reporting allows highly interactive reports to be accessible across the enterprise with superior performance and scalability.
It would be an understatement to say that this past decade belongs to the Internet. Starting primarily as a research tool, the Internet has now infiltrated every aspect of life – there is very little today that users do not, or cannot, do online. Moreover, new ways to leverage the Internet to personal and professional advantage arise every day. Evidently, all this progress has had an insidious side-effect – user expectations regarding website performance have sky-rocketed over the years. People expect websites, video and audio to load faster than ever before; otherwise, they lose interest and go to other websites. In fact, research firms have ample findings to support this correlation. A 2009 ResearchLink survey found that 26 percent of respondents would move to a competitor’s website if a vendor’s website failed to perform, resulting in immediate revenue loss of 26 percent and a future loss of 15 percent. Forrester Research also found that 36 percent of unique visitors to a website will leave it if it fails to load within the first three seconds. Three seconds – that’s not a lot of time. Yet, user expectations are warranted, seeing how much progress content delivery technology has made in the past few years. Couple these user demands with an architecture that is not fit to deliver the kind of performance they expect, and what we have on our hands is a big problem for companies whose business thrives on web content and e-commerce.
Apple posted its best quarter ever Tuesday Antennagate notwithstanding. Revenues were $15.7 billion, up 61% year-over-year, a billion dollars ahead of expectations, and 52% from international sales. Earnings were up 78% to $3.25 billion, or $3.51 a share versus expectations of $3.12.
The Sybase Blogs App is ready for iPhone and iPad.... its Free on the Apple App Store. Sybase Blogs Application allows you to keep in touch with all news from Sybase, the industry leader in delivering mobile solutions. With Sybase Blogs Application, you can read technical blog posts from all official Sybase Bloggers; add any blog post you like to your Bookmarks; share any blog post to anyone via e-mail; and watch all Sybase News videos directly in your iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad.
Amid the antennagate kafuffle, an unrepentant Apple is supposed to start selling iPads in nine more countries on Friday, namely, Austria, Belgium, Ireland, Luxembourg, Holland, Mexico, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Singapore. The company said “many more countries” would follow. The device is already sold in the major European markets, Canada and Japan. Wall Street thinks it’s sold 3.3 million of the things so far, which should tickle its third-quarter numbers due out Tuesday.
In Part 4 I discussed the Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse and how it allows you to view, create, and manage JPA entity relationships. The Entity Editor provides a centralized view of all entity relationships, allows you to modify entity properties, and allows you to navigate between the object model, mapping associations, and database schema layers. In Part 5, I will explore persistence settings. The persistence.xml file defines the context for JPA persistence. In this step, you will use the JPA Persistence Configuration Editor to explore the persistence.xml file for your JPA web project.
Recently I had the opportunity to figure out how to manipulate sizing, positioning and text wrapping of chart legends so I thought I'd share what I learned. If you have a chart with legend items that don't fit in the available space, BIRT will do one of two things, depending on the wrapping width option. (Wrapping width is found on the legend layout dialog). If the wrapping width is set to zero, BIRT will simply truncate the legend item text and optionally append an ellipsis. (The ellipsis option is located on the legend entries dialog). If the wrapping width is set to a positive value, BIRT will word-wrap the text. Unfortunately when it does this, it doesn't check the vertical boundaries and long items can end up overlapping.
AMD did better than people thought it would in Q2. Even so it barely looks like number two in a two-horse race. Revenues were up 40% year-over-year to a record $1.65 billion when it was expected to come in with $1.55 billion and it would have earned 11 cents a share, better than the six cents forecast, were it not for write-offs connected with the spin-off of its factories. In reality it lost six cents or $43 million, which is a drop in the bucket compared to previous losses. This time last year it lost $330 million. Its operating income this time was $125 million and its gross margin 45%, roughly 20 points below Intel’s but healthy for AMD. In a canned statement, CEO Dirk Meyer said customers launched a record number of new mobile and desktop platforms.
Well you can’t beat free and that’s what TIBCO’s latest cloudware Silver Spotfire is going to be for the next year. It’s an on-demand analytical BI system with a chi-chi social component. Users – and TIBCO says that means anyone – can create visual analytics and interactive dashboards out of Excel, Access and ODBC data and share reports, dashboards, charts and other visualization and calculations to grow a corporate analytics knowledge base And it can be integrated with social media so users can embed live dashboards into their business blogs and online articles.
There’s a second-generation iPad in the works according to DigiTimes that would add 5.6- and 7-inch OLED screens as well as repeat the current 9.7-inch screen. The smaller screens are supposed to be for e-book readers while the 9.7 is more for multimedia. However, OLED supplies are supposed to be tight and unlikely change much by Q4 when the widgets are reportedly supposed to appear. The first iPad was announced in January and took a while to wend its way out to the street.
Silicon Valley Insider thinks it’s identified the companies that tried to buy Palm and didn’t. Remember Companies A through D that Palm talked about in the merger proxy filed with the SEC? Well, the blog thinks Company A, which offered $600 million cash, was Apple. It was Apple’s second time through (Steve tried to buy Palm years ago) and it was mostly interested in Palm’s patent stockpile but reportedly seemed willing to fund operations. It thinks Company B was Lenovo. It put stock on the table but said it needed time to close the deal. Palm didn’t have time.
Apple’s resident antenna expert Ruben Caballero warned CEO Steve Jobs last year that using a bezel antenna in the iPhone 4 could create reception problems and dropped calls, according to an unattributed story put out by Bloomberg. Another source told the wire service that an iPhone carrier said the same thing but Apple decided to go with the design rather than one of the alternatives it had in hand because it yielded a lighter, thinner and perforce sexier widget. Sexy widgets sell as the iPhone 4 proves. Apple released its alleged software fix for the problem on Thursday ahead of its scheduled press conference on Friday. It’s an operating system update called iOS 4.0.1 and contains a jimmied “formula to determine how many bars of signal strength to display.” InformationWeek says it makes the three lowest signal bars bigger but doesn’t fix the problem and calls it “flat-out visual trickery.”
BIRT Introduced OLAP style data cubes and crosstabs in version 2.2 and while they have been around for some time we still get a lot of questions on how to use and manipulate them. Below are just some of the resources that have been posted to BIRT Exchange that should help you with cubes and crosstabs. To get an idea of what a BIRT cube is and how to tie it to a crosstab report item, take a look at this article which provides a detailed write-up of the technology and supplies some examples. To see a recorded demonstration of a crosstab style report being build see this tutorial video.
If you look at Gartner prediction then the question is not “if” but “when”. In October, 2009, they had predicted that Android as a mobile platform will be at the No. 2 slot after Symbian. There are several other indications this is indeed going to happen. This chart is from a presentation Mobile Devices -The iPhone Is Not The Only Game In Town by Carolina Milanesi Here are some of the other trends that points in the same direction.
Over the past couple of weeks I’ve watched in utter amazement the utterly poor response by Apple to the technical design flaws in the iPhone 4 Antennae. Basically if you hold the iPhone with your left hand you run a high risk of dropped calls. When Steve Job’s was confronted by Rory Sinclair about the issue Steve Jobs responded to Rory “Just don’t hold it that way.” Come on let’s get realistic! It reminds me of the old joke. A man says to the doctor, “It hurts when I do this!” The doctor says, “Don’t do that.” Apple’s latest response is for customers to purchase a bumper for $29.00 to protect you hand interfering from with the device. Wow! Now I feel like the patient in the old joke only now the the doctor response “Don’t do that and pay the receptionist $150 on the way out”. Why doesn’t Apple just give the bumpers away while they fix the problem? Don’t they realize the positive press and customer respect they would gain?
Recently I listened to a large enterprise customer talk enthusiastically about ITCAM’s new agent installation and deployment features. I bet you did a double-take as you read that. Why the enthusiasm? The answer had a lot to do with how the customer delegates IT roles and responsibilities and their desire to go from 500 to 1500 managed JVMs (Java Virtual Machines) without increasing staff.
For your reference, we've listed the Top 10 Performance Problems as we have seen them over the years when working with our clients. I hope this list is enlightening – and I’ve included follow-up links to the blogs to help better understand how to solve these problems. Many libraries out there make remote communication seem like a piece of cake. There is hardly any difference for the developer to call a local vs. remote method. The lack of understanding of what is really going on under the remoting-hood makes people forget about things like latency, serialization, network traffic and memory usage that come with every remoting call. The easy way of using these technologies results in too many calls across these remoting boundaries and in the end causes performance and scalability problems.
Sooner or later, every person reaches a point in life when s/he has to make a decision: iPhone or HTC. I’ve arrived to this destination, and the road forks. In early 21st Century people would just Google it up to find the facts, figures and comparison charts. Unfortunately, the noise-to-signal ratio is getting so high on Google, that it makes it pretty much useless in a decision-making situation. More advanced consumers discovered Amazon.com to be a great helper when it comes to make a purchase decision – their rating systems and almost unbiased user comments will help you to decide faster.
Barclays Capital has cut back on the number of PCs it thinks will ultimately move this year on the theory that the iPad and its ilk will eat into PC volumes. It thinks that 15 million tablets will be sold this year – and with Europe stalling – PC growth will drop from 21% to 19%, with notebooks making the sacrifice. It’s figuring a 30%–40% cannibalization rate in netbooks and low-end notebooks and giving Apple 70% market share at the expense of Microsoft and Windows. Intel is also supposed to lose business to ARM and its followers.
WebLogic Server Scripting Tool (WLST) provides powerful command-line capability for system administrators and developers to configure WebLogic server environments. However, its usage and adoption does not reach its full potential, seen at many working places, due to various reasons. This article gives a detailed example of using WLST to configure some of the latest security provisions (SAML 2.0) of WebLogic server, and provides insights on how to overcome the possible hurdles which prevent one from using the tool. Why WLST and What's Stopping You?
MySQL veterans either disaffected or dismissed by Oracle are starting a new company called SkySQL that will offer “enterprise-class support and services for the MySQL ecosystem.” The outfit is being pulled together by former MySQL SVP of global services Ulf Sandberg and its one-paragraph web site, dominated by a picture of a dolphin, says that whoever else is there – without saying who exactly – are former MySQL employees. However, SkySQL is hiring in “all areas, including support, consulting, training, marketing and sales.” Being detail-free left room for MySQL founder Monty Widenius, who’s formally objecting to the Oracle–Sun acquisition now, to position SkySQL as an alternative to Oracle–Sun, which he evidently blames for running off the old MySQL home team.
IT has a number of options to enable remote access for employees wanting mobile access to email and work applications from their iPads. There are however pros and cons for each option as well as some prerequisite questions to consider. Company iPads - For company owned iPads a likely scenario is to treat iPads similar to mobile phones. If company apps or email are allowed to run native on the iPad then Mobile Device Management ( MDM ) software may be necessary to assure corporate security policy is enforced. BES servers may be in place already for Blackberry's, this type of control may be need to be duplicated for company iPads as well. The forth coming improvements in iOS4 will help with email however additional applications will still require management. If however company data is not allowed to reach the iPad as discussed below, then the management costs and administration could be significantly reduced.
He said he was going to do it and he has. MySQL founder Monty Widenius has made good his quixotic threat to appeal the European Commission’s decision to approve Oracle’s acquisition of Sun – and with it MySQL, which Sun paid a downright silly billion dollars for two years ago. Oracle closed on Sun in January and Widenius had a few months grace to take his case to the Court of First Instance in Luxembourg. It is unclear what he hopes to accomplish since he has basically gone underground and turned off his phone while the futility of the move has already cost him his chief spokesman Florian Mueller.