One of my colleagues this week was consolidating the results from our recent Application Performance Management survey, and one interesting finding was that 40% of customers have at least one release cycle a month. Out of those respondents, one third experience a Severity-1 incident each month as well. That’s a pretty compelling pair of statistics, and they might explain the continued frustration and conflict between development and operations teams. It’s also perhaps the reason why this DevOps underground movement can no longer be ignored (even by Gartner). There is no doubt development organizations have become agile, but does deploying this frequent change make the business more or less agile? For example, if one in three releases creates a Severity-1 incident, then surely agile development becomes a risk to the business. We’re at the point where Operations either has to start managing change better or simply restrict the amount of change that can occur.
If we search for MVC frameworks we found many variants: MVC1, MVC2, MVC3, MVP, MVVM and PureMVC. Let's discover the main difference between PureMVC and the other variants. According to the MVC definition from wikipedia: "Model View Controller (MVC) pattern creates applications that separate the different aspects of the application (input logic, business logic, and UI logic), while providing a loose coupling between these elements." But if we search for MVC frameworks we found many variants: MVC1,MVC2,MVC3,MVP,MVVM and PureMVC. The question is which one is the best to use? As any debate like that, there's no unique solution, it depends on many factors.In this article we try using JavaDepend to discover PureMVC indepth, and talk about the main difference between it and the other variants.
The blog post is written by Crawford Comeaux an independent mobile app developer that recently participated in Startup Weekend down in Baton Rouge, LA and ended up winning. This post is about how he used StackMob and Tiggr to quickly build a web app prototype during the Startup Weekend event. His app is called AudienceAmp and he needs your help to win Global Startup Battle. Please vote here if you like his idea. Here is his story. I love Startup Weekends! They provide me a chance to easily find like-minded people looking to make their ideas a reality and they’re nothing but fun. Grueling, exciting, stressful fun. On any given weekend, there’s likely at least one going on somewhere in the world. I’ve been to four of them, successfully pitched one of two ideas at each and my teams have placed three times. These things are like crack for wannabe entrepreneurs with ADHD…or at least for THIS wannabe entrepreneur with ADHD! If you are not familiar with the program, you can find out more here.
In early JVM releases, it was common to delegate Java monitor operations directly to operating system monitors, or mutex primitives. As a result, a Java application experiencing lock contention would exhibit high values of system CPU utilization since operating system mutex primitives involve system calls. In modern JVMs Java monitors are mostly implemented within the JVM in user code rather than immediately delegating them to operating system locking primitives. This means Java applications can exhibit lock contention yet not consume system CPU. Rather, these applications first consume user CPU utilization when attempting to acquire a lock. Only applications that experience severe lock contention may show high system CPU utilization since modern JVMs tend to delegate to operating system locking primitives as a last resort. A Java application running in a modern JVM that experiences lock contention tends to show symptoms of not scaling to a large number of application threads, CPU cores, or a large number of concurrent users. The challenge is finding the source of the lock contention, that is, where are those Java monitors in the source code and what can be done to reduce the lock contention.
Cloud Computing Journal asks a variety of members of the ecosystem, from CIOs to independent consultants to marketeers, about where the i-Technology industry is headed next...here are their views on what's in store in 2012, starting with Nigel Dunn, Principal at Calx Europe – a European Business Acceleration Company specialising in working with vendors, service providers and channels in developing and implementing plans for growth in the Cloud market.
With cloud computing adoption and growth well established, more cloud vendors are entering the market and differentiating themselves by providing specialized services that focus on specific customers, geographies, applications or service models. Cloud services focused on optimizing business-critical applications make sense for enterprise customers looking for high-performance, highly available infrastructures. But as a cloud customer, how do you know if your managed cloud provider truly has a specialized touch when it comes to optimizing, for example, BI applications from Oracle or ERP solutions from Microsoft? Generic cloud infrastructure is insufficient for the demands of business-critical applications. IT executives seeking the efficiencies of cloud computing for critical enterprise applications need to evaluate the overall application expertise of their cloud infrastructure providers and assess their application expertise and their ability and flexibility to optimize their cloud infrastructure for business-critical applications. Application optimization needs to be addressed across the entire technology stack, from the physical hardware to the service delivery architecture to the application.
Autonomy’s new owner announced its first real-time Autonomy software, called Autonomy IDOL 10, available December 1, a surprisingly short eight weeks after the deal closed. It’s reportedly capable of integrating – as HP suggested it would be – with HP’s more conventional Vertica acquisition done in March. Together they’re supposed to handle 100% of a company’s data. Of course it’d not like the stuff is integrated with a more widely used RDBMS. However, IDOL 10 is supposed to provide a single processing layer so organizations can extract meaning and act on all forms of information, including audio, video, social media, e-mail and web content, as well as structured data such as customer transaction logs and machine-based sensor data.
Egnyte wants you to bury your file servers – their day is over – and now it claims you can throw your FTP servers into the hole too like they were grave goods to be discovered and wondered over by some next-century archeologist. In their place Egnyte (given the silly way we spell things you’re supposed to say ignite) proposes its HybridCloud, a next-generation storage, file-sharing and backup scheme originally targeted at SMBs that lately – at least in the last three quarters – has been attracting large accounts, including 30 departments in the Fortune 1000. It’s thought to resolve a psychological barrier to cloud adoption by reassuringly keeping copies of what’s in the cloud on-premise. That’s obviously why they call it HybridCloud. Companies aren’t supposed to feel they’re losing control of their data.
The Daily, a made-for-the-iPad start-up national news service that kicked off in February, claims it’s heard from anonymous sources that Microsoft is adapting Office to the iPad. The blog puts the price at around $10, because that’s what Apple charges for its own iWork Pages, Numbers and Keynote programs. ZDnet’s Mary Jo Foley, who usually has the inside track on things going on at Microsoft, says she wouldn’t be surprised but wonders exactly how much functionality such a thing would have since Microsoft has to be wary of cannibalizing its second-biggest cash cow.
Apple’s Surprising Marketing Blunder. Along with hoards of other people, I upgraded my perfectly good iPhone 4 for the new iPhone 4S. Am I happy? No. It's a Product and Marketing #FAIL. Shocking - coming from the best marketing and product development company in the galaxy. I "listened" to the iPhone 4S launch - from live blog streams. I was honestly quite disappointed. A faster processor? The iPhone 4 was fast enough for me. Same "defective" exposed-glass design that is guaranteed to shatter the first time you drop it (my first iPhone 4 lasted two days). Heck, you can't even show your new iPhone off because it looks identical to the old one. No crowds of people asking you "what do you think of your new iPhone????"
All in all I highly recommend this book as a learning resource for Java. It covers a ton of topics and covers them in detail with plenty of examples. I would expect to find this in any good Java programmer's library. I have had several Deitel books in the past and I would say my biggest disappointment with this one was finding out that there were no Deitel bugs to find on the cover. I have not had a Deitel book for a while and really enjoyed having one back in my hands. If you have never owned a Deitel book, you owe it to yourself to get one sometime. If you are a Java developer, or want to be a Java developer, I would recommend starting with this one. I am from the .NET camp and I am doing my best to go all out learning Java. This book has definitely helped with goal. This book covers a ton of information. Some of the topics covered Classes, Objects, Methods, Strings, Control Statements, Arrays, ArrayLists, Object-Oriented Programming, Exception Handling, GUI Components, Graphics, Java 2D, Regular Expressions, File Serialization, Streams, Object Serialization, Generic Collections, Generic Classes, Generic Methods, Applets, Java Web Start, Multithreading, Networking, Accessing Databases with JDBC, JavaServer Faces, Web Services, and UML.
Like evolution, constant technological change is unstoppable, whether through improvements or the emergence of entirely new technologies. This is especially true in the hosting industry where a new generation of more flexible and efficient platforms is emerging to take advantage of the cloud. Historically, hosting services have been very inflexible. For example, a customer looking to change out servers rented from a hosted service provider would have to wait for several days, sometimes resulting in a significant blow to credibility and other losses. Amazon, with its infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) solution, was able to reduce that operation to minutes, yet still left most of the server administration tasks to users. Later, first generation platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings, like Google AppEngine and Heroku, allowed developers to upload their application code to a preconfigured environment, but with a trade-off. Developers often had to rewrite code to run on the vendor’s platform and give up control of the execution environment.
Samsung has persuaded an Australian appeals court to overturn the temporary injunction Apple got from a lower court on October 13 forbidding the sale of Samsung's Galaxy Tab 10.1 on the grounds of patent infringement. The iPad-competitive widget can now be sold ahead of a trial whose date has yet to be set. Apple is expected to appeal. The appeals court Friday said it had doubts about the justice of the injunction that the lower court slapped on the Samsung tablet. It was expected to rule this week on Samsung's bid to lift the restraint. Samsung argued that the lower court failed to consider whether Apple would actually win at trial. The presiding appellate judge reportedly found it difficult to believe Apple couldn't keep track of the damages it might suffer if it successfully pursued its patent accusations. Apple has claimed the impact isn't limited to iPad but also to Samsung's effects on iPhones, Mac computers and applications because they're tied to one another, a claim the appeals court called "speculative."
Being new to Java I am interested in finding out the low-level nitty-gritty details of the Java HotSpot VM. This book was definitely the right choice for that. I must admit being a veteran .NET developer helped when digging into the different concepts and there are a ton of them. One of the things I really liked about the book is that although it leaned towards Oracle, it also included Windows and Solaris. There are 12 chapters. Chapter 1: Strategies, Approaches, and Methodologies, Chapter 2: Operating System Performance Monitoring, Chapter 3: JVM Overview, Chapter 4: JVM Performance Monitoring, Chapter 5: Java Application Profiling, Chapter 6: Java Application Profiling Tips and Tricks, Chapter 7: Tuning the JVM, Step by Step, Chapter 8: Benchmarking Java Applications, Chapter 9: Benchmarking Multitiered Applications, Chapter 10: Web Application Performance, Chapter 11: Web Services Performance, and Chapter 12: Java Persistence and Enterprise Java Beans Performance.
The US International Trade Commission overruled one of its own administrative law judges, who thought the Mac tread on S3’s IP, and threw out an S3 Graphics patent complaint against Apple’s Macs, iPad and iPhone, saying it has no case. HTC of course is buying S3 for $300 million ostensibly for patent protection. Now it looks like that was a dumb idea; its patents may not be valid or the IP may belong to AMD. The ITC, which can bar imports, did not explain its decision. HTC says it may appeal. Bloomberg expects the decision to put pressure on HTC’s shares.
The interest in mobile applications started towards the end of last millennium! Since then, as the saying goes, lot of water has flown under the bridge. The technology scenario has changed beyond recognition. None of the platforms which are popular today was in existence when we started our mobile journey. In fact, if you look back, you will find that every three years there is a churn in among the popular platforms. One of the top 3 popular mobile platforms will lose out to an upstart and a new leader also emerges. Three Year Technology Churn Cycle Three years back we were still talking about 5 platforms (iPhone, RIM, Symbian, Windows and JME) apart from mobile web. Though iPhones had started becoming popular, features phones accounted for majority of the market. In the enterprise Blackberry (RIM) still ruled. Outside the US, Symbian based Nokia devices were by far the most popular devices. Android was still in the realm of emerging technologies with interesting possibilities but no market share. HTML5 was something that was expected to happen somewhere in the distant future. iPad simply did not exist!
Are you running an eCommerce site that relies on Third-Party Services such as Address-Validation, Credit Card Authorization or Mapping Services? Do you know how fast, reliable and accurate these service calls (free or charged) are for your web site? Do you know whether it has an impact on your end users in case one of these services is not available or returns wrong data? In last week's webinar Daniel Schrammel, IT System Manager at Leder und Schuh (responsible for sites such as www.shoemanic.com or www.jelloshoecompany.com), told his story on the impact of third-party online services to their business. One specific problem they had was with a service that validates shipping address information. If the entered shipping address is valid, users can opt for a "cash on delivery" option that is highly popular in the markets they sell to. If the address can't be validated or the service is unreachable, this convenient way of payment is not available and users have to go with credit card payment. As the eCommerce platform used to run their online stores also comes from a third-party provider, the Leder und Schuh IT team has no visibility into these third-party online service calls, whether they succeed and how that impacts end-user behavior.
Networks have become a strategic asset, the life blood of organizations. Once considered a “techy thing,” networks are now mission-critical for every member of the organization – from the IT manager to the marketing VP to the CEO. An increasing number of companies now recognize the impact network quality has on the customer experience and, in turn, on the bottom line. Providing a great customer experience, every time, is vital for limiting churn and building loyalty. This has led many organizations to adopt a strong quality assurance program to test and monitor all contact center services. This is particularly important in environments that must support multi-channel and multi-service applications. The complex configurations needed to enable voice, video and data to share network resources puts a tremendous strain on bandwidth and creates problems that can be very difficult to isolate. And the proliferation of mobile devices has added an entirely new set of issues and customer behaviors.
There’s a rather obscure JDeveloper bug that only effects IE7, for af:columns in af:tables that show af:outputText fields based on dates that are null (phew, try and say that with a mouth full of wheaties). It occurs in 11.1.1.4.0 and 11.1.2.0.0 (and all versions in between it’s assumed). In the previous picture from IE7 if you look closely, you’ll notice that the HireDate2 column has lost its border for the null entries. Note the other columns even when they are null, still have a border. If we look under IE8 (or any other browser for that matter) we see the problem doesn’t occur at all:
Birst figures it’s scored an industry first by making its cloud-based Mobile Business Intelligence (BI) SDK available for the Apple iPad. The new iOS SDK lets developers embed highly interactive and visual Birst-powered business analytics in their native iPad apps. Taking advantage of the iPad’s gesture-based interface, they can build mobile applications that filter information of interest and drill into details on both charts and report tables. The widgetry saves developers from having to concentrate on the plumbing, such as the data warehouse, data integration, data quality and core BI engine, and lets them focus on building business intelligence into their applications. By writing to Birst’s Mobile APIs, the company says they can bypass the complicated data integration, quality and consolidation issues that underpin BI implementations.
A couple of months late, as is its time-honored fashion, AMD Monday wheeled out its 16-core Interlagos server chip, based on its new long-awaited Bulldozer architecture and formally christened it the Opteron 6200. There’s also the Valencia, a smaller low-power eight-core chip now officially designated the Opteron 4200. It’s got them pointed at virtualization, the cloud and HPC hoping to revisit the market share gains and margin expansion it experienced years ago with its first Opterons before the ill-fated Barcelona crushed its lead. On a good day it currently holds about 5% of the market but it’s hoping to make a bigger dent in emerging markets like China.
Boundary, a real-time network monitoring-as-a-service (MaaS) start-up that’s been pretty sub rosa since it got organized last year, surfaced Tuesday sporting a Big Data analytics platform as well that’s supposed to do what Hadoop and Cassandra do but a thousand to tens of thousands times faster. The company was started by CEO Benjamin Black, who was engineering director at Microsoft Windows Live involved in building one of the largest content delivery networks in the world and co-authored the first documents on what would become EC2 as principal engineer for Amazon infrastructure. He also led the design and implementation of new layer 3 network for Amazon’s production network. Boundary’s been operating since January on $4.1 million of Black and LightSpeed Venture Partners’ money spent in part apparently on Boundary’s own infrastructure. Its widgetry, currently in beta, works with public clouds like EC2, of course, and private clouds and across physical and virtual systems.
Activist investor Relational Investors LLC has reportedly taken a ~1% position in Hewlett-Packard and its co-founder Ralph Whitworth has gotten a seat on the inimitably dysfunctional HP board. His appointment will raise the number of seats to 14. According to Bloomberg Whitworth took advantage of the precipitous plunge in HP’s stock price on August 18 when former HP CEO Leo Apotheker announced that HP was buying Autonomy for close to $10.3 billion, abandoning webOS devices and might dump its PC business, a move it nixed last month. Apparently he kept buying through September. He will reportedly join the board’s compensation committee and its finance and investment committee. Bloomberg says it contacted HP CEO Meg Whitman and chairman Ray Lane last month and told them “he’d bring credibility and focus Hewlett-Packard on using its cash to buy back shares, increase its dividend or put more money into research and development.” Apparently they folded like a house of cards a few weeks later.
Now that it’s decided to keep its PC arm HP has unveiled its first Apple MacBook-aping metal-encased Ultrabook laptop, targeted at the business user and positioned as “designed to bridge the gap between professional and personal life.” God willing it’ll deliver a highly competitive nine hours of battery life. The skinny Core i5-based 3.3lb Folio measures less than 18 millimeters deep and is fitted with a 13.3-inch HD BrightView display. It features Intel’s Rapid Start Technology, a backlit keyboard for low-light conditions and a 128GB solid-state drive. HP has fitted one model out with a TPM Embedded Security Chip that protects e-mail data as well as information on the hard drive. There’s a dock too. And it comes with Windows 7 and 4 gigs of memory.
Collabnet has hoisted its ScrumWorks Pro Agile project management tool into its Codesion public cloud development platform and made it on-demand. It says developers can now “code, connect and deploy” software on an enterprise-grade platform backed by 24/7 support, uptime SLAs and integrations with the usual development solutions and both public and private cloud production environments. Figure Amazon, Google App Engine, Force.com and Joyent. CollabNet supplies ScrumWorks for use on-prem but the company’s cloud proposition is richer. Users also get tools like Apache Subversion, Git, Trac, Bugzilla and CollabNet’s Agile ALM platform TeamForge plus the cloud’s backup, visibility, tracking and provisioning.