Recently I was entering names of contacts in iOS and noticed that from iOS 5 onwards, Apple have allowed us to add new fields for each individual of 'Related People'. Obviously this makes sense with respects to friends or family, though currently this seems to be nothing other than a mere placeholder. Strange for an innovative company, so I am wondering if Apple is building a social feature or future applications that will allow developers and itself to exploit the connections that I am entering, for the benefit of the user of the device ... We will have to wait and see, but you can bet that whatever it it will be game changing.
There is absolutely nothing on earth more delightful, more anticipatory, more scintillating than unwrapping a new product from Apple. It’s like Christmas, New Year’s Eve and the 4th of July all rolled into one. The rising action as you remove the plastic, the exclamation off awe as you see the device nestled in its VacuFormed tray, the sensual exhilaration as you remove it from the box – such was my moment this afternoon as I unboxed my new MacBook Air 13″ 2.0GHz dual-core Intel Core i7 (Turbo Boost up to 3.2GHz), 8GB, 512 Flash. This puppy is so hardcore, Apple just lists is specs on the bottom of the MacBook Air page without giving you a way to purchase it. This is the MacBook Air that dreams are made of … it’s beyond Mac Fanboy love … it is an unmarked badge of honor for “geeks in the know.”
I want to preface this by saying that I’m an Android fan boy. I’ve owned a device running each and every version of Android at some point, from the G1 with Android 1.0 (did it have a codename?) through my Galaxy Nexus with Ice Cream Sandwich, and Jelly Bean coming soon. I have also never owned an iPhone. Just wanted to get that out there, in the interest of full disclosure.
In this article I will provide you an effective and optimized approach of Factory Design Pattern in Java. As you know theFactory Method Pattern or popularly known as the Factory Design Pattern is one the design patterns under the category of "Creational Design Pattern". The basic principle behind the pattern is that at run time we get an object of similar type based upon the parameter we pass. There are many articles on this pattern and developers implement in various ways to achieve it. In this article I will show you how to create a better and most effective way of designing factory design pattern.
This white paper examines how you can maximize the value of your mainframe applications, and highlights the most cost-effective and pragmatic ways to improve your ROI. Learn how Micro Focus are revolutionizing the way mainframe applications are developed, modernized and tested in order to significantly benefit your business.
The great smartphone boom is about to end. That’s according to one savvy tech prognosticator, Bill Whyman, head of the investment research firm International Strategy & Investment‘s tech strategy research team, who tends to look more than a couple quarters ahead. Whyman contends that as smartphone penetration reaches 50% sometime next year, the market will start to slow for the first time. That will put pressure on all the players, from struggling RIM to to Google‘s newly acquired Motorola and even to so-not-struggling Apple. Assuming Whyman’s right, here’s what he thinks happens next.
This article gives you an inner insight into the design of a better singleton design pattern. In this article you will be able to learn how break a singleton design if it not designed properly. It will help you to follow the best practices adopted in the industry. A few days ago when I was in my home town, one of my sub-juniors from my colleague attended an interview in an MNC and was severely injured in that interview process. I mean he could not qualify the interview because of the difficult questions fired by the interview panel. When I came back to Bangalore, he sharedthe embarrassing situation he confronted during the technical interview. Based upon his experience today I am writing this article on the Singleton Design Pattern. By the way my junior colleague has nearly four years of experience in Java. One of the controversial questions he faced was "What is the Singleton Design Pattern and how will you write a robust singleton class? " However let me give you the basic and critical outlines of the Singleton Design Pattern frequently used at the time of project/product development.
There have been many articles and thoughts on the mWallet, where the mobile device takes the place of a physical wallet containing cash and bank cards and this is evolving fast. I'm wondering now, with the fantastic growth in Mobile and the combination of the Tablet Device, that we are now in the era of the mBriefcase. Look at the definition of a briefcase on Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Briefcase .A box shaped bag or case containing documents, papers, diary and even a laptop computer
The CTOvision Mobile Application is now available in the Apple iTunes application store. The application focuses on content we create for technologists, but it also contains a curated list of coming events we believe are of high interest plus curated lists of the videos we want to bring to your attention on topics like Big [...]
This post by BobGourley was first published at CTOvision.com.
Starting July 24, CloudPassage will extend its SaaS Halo cloud server security to cloud servers running Windows in public and hybrid cloud environments. The company found in a recent survey that 74% of cloud users are running a mix of both Windows and Linux servers in the cloud. It estimates that Windows servers, which are exposed to exploits such as the recent RDP vulnerabilities announced by Microsoft, make up more than 40% of the public IaaS market. Halo guards against attacks in the cloud and protects RDP and other sensitive services, while automating other Windows cloud server security tasks.
ActiveState has wheeled out Stackato 2.0, its revved application platform for creating a private Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). It fancies it’s a “Ferrari,” claiming it’s “screamingly fast, can turn on a dime, and grips the road in any weather.” That’s good. Maybe that way it’ll be able to pull away from the pack. The PaaS market is starting to look like the New York subway at rush hour. Anyway, the Canadian outfit figures the widgetry redefines PaaS for the enterprise and extends Stackato’s position in “PaaS polyglot compatibility,” a fancy way of saying it can be built out of any language on any stack on any cloud.
Microsoft has colored Windows Server 2012 Azure and white-boxed it for service providers and hosting outfits disenfranchised by Amazon, creating in the process a cloud operating system that it can rattle under the nose of the vCloud-pushing VMware. What it’s done exactly is add Azure-y features to Windows Server so service providers can build Azure-like infrastructure clouds out of their Windows Server data centers and offer turnkey cloud services. They don’t have to use Microsoft’s infrastructure. They can have their own branded IaaS clouds. A newfangled Service Management Portal built into Windows 8’s new Metro user interface can deliver Azure-like services like automated web site hosting, high-scale web sites and Windows or Linux virtual machine hosting. The widgetry’s extensible APIs let developers connect their hosted applications to other people’s specialized services, their own on-premise resources and Windows Azure if they want.
Okay, kids, you can finally do pure end-to-end JavaScript programming and then deploy entire applications in the cloud. 4D, which is branching out from its long-established Mac database roots, has launched both an open source and commercial version of its Wakanda JavaScript development platform, the first-ever full-stack JavaScript development platform for web and mobile business applications. Company CEO Luc Hollande says, “Developers no longer need to learn, integrate and maintain different technologies in different languages.” And not to worry Lawrence Livermore Lab is an early adopter, hosting the apps on its own internal infrastructure.
When JBoss 7 was released, those familiar with earlier versions were taken by surprise – many familiar features were gone or completely redesigned. For instance, the JMX Console – a long-time staple of JBoss administration – was missing. While RedHat says JMX is still supported, their focus has clearly shifted – away from JMX and on to a new management indrastructure, specifically designed for JBoss. In this article I will show you how to use the HTTP/JSON Management API along with the Monitis open API to collect JBoss 7 statistics and upload them to Monitis. So let’s get started. After you have installed JBoss 7, you will need to create a management user by invoking the add-user.sh management script as described here. Once the app server is up and running, verify your admin user can login by logging in from the CLI at a shell prompt.
It has now been reported that the Smartphone adoption in China, has now overtaken the Featurephone adoption. This is a major milestone in any geographic region, but in one of the worlds largest growing countries, this is a great step and shows the snowball effect of expecting powerful computing power in your pocket. An effect that will be reproduced in all areas of the globe. We are now at a stage in our lifestyle, when growing amounts of users are using their mobile devices as their primary source of information, before they reach for a laptop. They also expect to have this information anywhere and at any time, within seconds of the origin of the data, for example when the news breaks.
Tiggzi started an a cloud-based visual mobile app builder. You can build HTML5, jQuery Mobile apps connected to any REST APIs. You can also export the app as Apache Cordova (PhoneGap) and use its device API, to get an Android, iOS or Windows Phone app. Tiggzi app builder comes with a powerful REST API editor as as well visual data mapping editor, where you can map services to the UI (and the other way). It’s an excellent fit for the “small” API explosion happening right now. Everyone is exposing their resources as REST APIs and want developers to build apps using their APIs. Most API provides offer some specific functionality such as sending an SMS message and that’s fine and very useful but what happens if you need a custom backend or a place to store app data? Another example is Facebook. Facebook API is obviously very powerful and if you need to post to the Timeline, you can easily do that. But if you are building a ToDo like app, you can’t store your tasks in Facebook. There are a number of backend as a service companies that you can use today but that required signing up for another service. We relized this is a unique opportunity to provide the complete mobile stack for developers: cloud app builder (IDE) and cloud backend services.
Deron Williams, NBA point guard and savior of ironic sport liking, just inked a new contract to stay with the Brooklyn Nets. Well, inked is the wrong word as Williams actually signed his 5 year $98 million contract on an iPad. With his finger.
The European Court of Justice (ECJ), the European Union’s version of America’s Supreme Court, told Oracle last week that it can’t stop the resale of its customers’ castoff software, specifically the stuff that’s downloaded from the Internet. It held that the new owner can download the “used” software from Oracle’s site along with updates and patches covered by the original maintenance agreement. Oracle tried to argue that downloaded software was different from software physically transmitted on a CD or DVD. The decision, which isn’t specific to Oracle, has serious implications for just about every developer. The Financial Times imagines it creating a “multimillion dollar market for second-hand enterprise software licenses” like Microsoft’s or Adobe’s – particularly given all the surplus perpetual licenses available because of layoffs. And, after talking to lawyers, the paper figures “it could also have broader ramifications for other digital products such as film, music and ebooks.”
While JavaScript’s popularity grows daily, it’s not obvious if enterprise developers spoiled by predictable languages like Java or C# will fill comfortable with it. If they won’t – the cost of the JavaScript-based projects will remain high. Just take a look at this code snippet on the right – I’ve been using Firebug,the Firefox add-on to run it. The code is on the right, and the result of invoking the function doIt() is on the left. Yes, it outputs 10 on the console. If you don’t know why it did so, get ready do allocate a substantial time for doing a really thorough testing of your HTML-JavaScript application. People say that if you cut your finger don’t blame the knife. True. Should we even use sharp knives? Yes, if we are very careful and responsible adults. But we shouldn’t give sharp knives to kids. And majority of today’s enterprise developers are kids playing with legos, a.k.a. frameworks. Unfortunately, you can’t get away with creating an enterprise Web application without programming in a raw language. This is when the fun begins. Let’s embrace it, but be careful.
The million dollar question has been "Can an organization move all its applications to a public cloud?". Instead of moving all applications to the public cloud, many organizations are choosing a hybrid approach where on-premise resources can be leveraged and can interact with external resources. A hybrid cloud is a combination of public, private and community clouds. Most private clouds are internal, however there can be situations where private clouds are hosted at a vendor site. For this discussion, I am focusing on the private clouds that are hosted internal to the organization. Utilizing hybrid clouds may require redesigning systems based on a determination of what data resides internally and what data can be moved externally. Generally organizations choose to have critical and sensitive data reside internally and move non-sensitive data outside the organization. Core business applications or services can be retained internally and can interact with the non core applications or services that can reside external to the organization. One of the programs I led in the past used the public cloud to gather non sensitive information and subsequently this data was funneled internally. This information was then manipulated and rendered for applications that performed customer reporting and related business intelligence.
Often we see the workload to a web application measured by throughput. It’s a way of quantifying the volume of requests/responses in relation to time. Transactions per second or TPS is the most common ratio used. A performance test plan usually contains certain throughput goals. The “GO or NO GO” decision for rolling out a new release or architectural change relies heavily upon a web application handling a certain TPS. Management wants a “Pass” stamp, but it’s your job to make sure that the achieved TPS is indeed realistic – not an illusion of phony numbers. My advice is to “keep it real” by generating workloads that represent all the true characteristics of production. Faking it leads to false positive test result: a certain TPS was met and the Pass stamp was awarded, but the conditions were unrealistic. For example, you could achieve a 460 TPS result by hitting mostly lightweight transactions, or by running a low load of virtual users with little or no think time. In each of these cases, the throughput would be “High” but the workload does not represent what’s really happening in production. Not even remotely. What’s worse, if you “Pass” a performance test using these unrealistic methods, you have no idea if the deployment is going to withstand the production workload. If the applications falls over….guess who is on the hot seat? This could be an unintentional outcome, so be sure your tests are setup properly and create a realistic workload.
Terracotta offers data optimization technologies that take current IT capabilities and enable scalability, availability and performance. They offer services, support software and solutions such as BigMemory, which stores “big data” in machine memory for ultra-fast access, Enterprise Ehcache, which plugs into enterprise applications and expedites integration and high-performance scalability, and Quartz Scheduler provides simple and flexible job execution from within execution code. While Big Data is clearly more than a just a buzzword, our data is exploding at an exponential pace, there is a need for solutions that manage big data in all forms. Terracotta offers the ability to store big data in memory (even Terabytes), providing faster access for applications. By keeping big data close, and local, applications can run more smoothly and incur tenfold performance gains.
Social sports are in the air. The NBA playoffs just ended with a big social bang. The MLB is about to kick off the most social All Star Game ever. NBC is preparing for a social TV infused Olympics. Wimbledon is being shared across the social web and Euro 2012 was second on the social [...]
I am not an Information Security expert – I am the Lead Designer at Hurricane Labs. I do not know the detailed best practices of securing a network or how to set up a SIEM such as Splunk. You may be asking yourself, “Why the heck is this guy even writing an article on a blog about Information Security?!” Hold on a second – what I propose is an outsider’s perspective on the idea of information security as a whole. My perspective may not be the same as that of an information security specialist, but that’s the point. The purpose of this article is to hopefully be entertaining, but to also allow me to rant, or vent my frustrations with things having to do with security – whether it be company practices, or even just the way we share our information on social networks. I hope to write a few blog posts in the coming weeks. Hopefully you will get a little enjoyment out of this as well – at my expense, of course.
Node.js, the V8 (Chrome’s JavaScript runtime) based platform for building fast and scalable network applications, is gaining substantial traction among developers and entering the application stack of many silicon valley companies. Like every new technology or piece of software there is enough FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) around Node, so I am going to write … Read More ...