I’ve been using Steve Jobs and Apple as examples in my software blog dedicated to the creation of Great Software. Although Steve Jobs is thought of as being the Mac/iPhone/iPad/iPod guy, he’s also a software hero. At least he’s one of my software heroes. Steve Jobs’ Apple doesn’t just build products. They understand the market and the consumers better than anyone else. And then they create something that defines and totally owns that market. Their deep understanding of the needs, wants and priorities of the consumer and their “make no compromises” approach allows them to do this.
Apple’s new CEO Tim Cook, who’s been filling in for Steve Jobs off and on for years now, sent an internal e-mail out Thursday that was, of course, leaked to the press. It reads: “Team: “I am looking forward to the amazing opportunity of serving as CEO of the most innovative company in the world. Joining Apple was the best decision I’ve ever made and it’s been the privilege of a lifetime to work for Apple and Steve for over 13 years. I share Steve’s optimism for Apple’s bright future. “Steve has been an incredible leader and mentor to me, as well as to the entire executive team and our amazing employees. We are really looking forward to Steve’s ongoing guidance and inspiration as our Chairman.
On Wednesday, August 24, 2011, Steve Jobs resigned from Apple as its CEO. He will stay as chairman of the board, handing over the CEO mantle to Tim Cook. Even though this was sort of expected ever since Steve went on his medical leave early this year, the news of his resignation came as a shock – that it finally happened. Much has been written since last 24 hours on his legacy and brilliance in the tech industry, his obsession with elegant design and simplification for users. He was way ahead of everyone else in this industry by not a year or two, maybe ten years. I love this poster of his words, so profound. Guy Kawasaki said that Steve was made of a different operating system than the standard entrepreneur/innovator.
Perhaps the ultimate adage in show business is, “Leave ‘em wanting more.” As a professional speaker for the better part of three decades, the constant reminder is it is “better to stop too early than too late.” And, this afternoon, Steve Jobs showed he knows that all business is show business as well as any executive who ever lived. Certainly, we hope and pray there is no subsequent annoucement about his health. However, why would he desire the role of Chairman of Apple’s Board of Directors if he didn’t plan on being around? Instead, look at what he has done. He returned to the company he had founded years earlier during a time it was on life support — with many investors calling for the corporate equivilent of “pulling the plug” — and simply turned it into the most valuable organization on the planet.
I don’t like most of the Flex MVC frameworks cause they force me to write more code. I do like frameworks and tools that let me write less code. But there is no free lunch and, at some point, even productive frameworks, tools, and libraries reach critical mass and the finger pointing game begins. Today, I’ve been working on an application that was supposed to display a list of orders form a relational DBMS. Not a rocket science. But let’s go over the languages, libraries, tools, and frameworks I had to use for this.
I will be in Vienna, Austria, September 7-9 teaching a 2-day JSF, RichFaces workshop, plus presenting 2 sessions at one-day conference. The workshop and the conference are co-sponsored by Objective and UNIQA. The first two days are dedicated to hands-on JSF and RichFaces workshop. This is a great opportunity to learn everything you need to build rich enterprise applications with JSF and RichFaces.
JavaServer Faces (JSF) technology is used for developing server-side user interfaces (UI) for Java EE applications. JSF 2.0 architecture has introduced several new features, most of which we shall discuss in this article. The salient new features in JSF 2.0 are State Saving, Facelets, Navigation, Validations, Scopes, AJAX, Resource Handling, Composite Components, View Params, Client Behaviors, Event Handling, and Exception Handling. In JSF 1.2 the full component tree is saved/restored. Attributes are also stored and restored. Saving and restoring the full state has performance and memory issues as the complete state has to be saved and restored and the size of the state saved could be large. In JSF 1.2 each UIComponent saves/restores its own state in the component hierarchy using saveState and resoreState methods in StateHolder. If state saving were to be optimized, it would have to be added to each component class in the hierarchy.
In a move that could cut into aspirin sales, Xsigo Systems has developed a virtualized Server Fabric meant to save a whole lot of people a whole lot of screwing around mapping paths, assigning IP addresses, configuring switches, switch ports and VLANs and pulling cables just to connect a virtual machine to some network resource. See, it does in a click what can take days doing by hand and enables end-to-end network connections from VMs to servers, networks, storage and other VMs by virtue of a private virtual interconnect. The widgetry is advertised as “the industry’s first fully virtualized infrastructure for cloud-optimized data centers.”
The “cloud era” of information technology is upon us. Connectivity is pervasive and everyone and everything is connected. Readily available, low-cost, Internet-based services providing access to new capabilities and infinite amounts of information have given rise to a new set of experiences and expectations for technology users. Furthermore, a new generation is entering the workforce, one that has grown up with technology at their fingertips, one that expects immediate gratification and instant results and one that is ambivalent to traditional IT controls. These tech-savvy business users are mixing the technology experiences from their consumer lives with those of their profession to morph into a new “prosumer” workforce. And they are able to drive game-changing innovation without a dependence on IT intervention. This is the reality of the cloud computing economy; it’s the forcing function behind the creation of new goods and services, new business models, new routes to market, and new ways of engaging customers. Simply put, cloud services are the enablers for the next frontier in business and government, one where technology-enabled services are easily sourced and woven into the enterprise fabric. However, cloud sourcing can also introduce new levels of complexity and business risk without the appropriate levels of integration and governance. This has given rise to a new class of service provider – the cloud service broker.
Nimbula, the start-up put in train by the team that developed EC2, has updated its so-called cloud operating system – at some point we must debate what exactly a cloud operating system is and if that’s what Nimbula really is – meanwhile it’s, um, still kinda hazy what all Nimbula actually supports and who’s supporting what – but the outfit says Director 1.5 is now capable of supporting a geographically distributed cloud and calls it an industry first. The software is supposed to manage the many geographic locations of a multi-site cloud from a single view. It’s supposed to improve the cloud experience for users since they can access any resource worldwide with a single login and deploy their workloads to any of the sites in a self-service manner.
DigiTimes says it’s heard from its redoubtable downstream sources that Apple has scratched the notion of iPad 3 being available this year maybe because Samsung and LG can’t get decent yields on a 2,048x1,536 9.7-inch “retina display” panel and Sharp’s are too expensive. On top of which Apple’s high-resolution demands also mean a larger backlighting source and apparently a single-edge light bar won’t do plus the panel is reportedly having trouble meeting Apple’s physical thinness, rich color and toughness requirements. DigiTimes claims iPad 3 was supposed to launch in the second half “with a supply volume of 1.5–2 million units in the third quarter and 5–6 million in the fourth quarter.”
After shedding its stealth cocoon back in the spring when it announced it got a $13.2 million A round, two-year-old Nutanix finally launched its Google-like Complete Cluster on Tuesday. It’s supposed to make virtualization simple and cheap. The thing is a modular plug-and-play building block appliance that puts storage and compute in the same box so virtualized data centers can be built without a SAN or NAS just like Google has been doing all these years. The start-up says that aside from contributing pain-in-the-neck complexity and pricey overhead to whatever it touches, pre-Internet SANs, or for that matter NAS, are dated, monolithic, slow, inelastic, undistributed, frazzled by virtualization and a bitch to manage. They’re also a habitual bottleneck and an impediment to private clouds.
Tiggr is a Web-based IDE for building mobile Web and native apps. Today I’d like to give you 15 reasons why this new-of-a-kind IDE deserves your attention. 1. Mobile Apps IDE in the Cloud – Access Your App Anytime, Anywhere Tiggr is a mobile apps IDE in the cloud. There is nothing to download. You can work on your app anytime, anywhere. Such a Web-based IDE has been every developer’s “dream” for a long time. 2. Build with jQuery Mobile Components Prototype and build the UI with popular jQuery Mobile components. jQuery Mobile is a cross-platform and cross-device mobile framework. It has already been tested to work on many many devices and platforms, so you don’t have to do it.
I wanted to use my article to tell you about some of the best productivity apps I have come across in the last year, which have really transformed how I work. If you are like me and constantly on the move and your Converged Mobile Device (SmartPhone and/or Tablet) has become your virtual office, then these mobile device apps could really helped you out, as they have me: # Evernote lets you gather notes, articles, ideas or presentations on your iPhone or Android phone and can then synch them to your computer. What makes Evernote worth the hype is the fact that whatever you note down gets almost instantaneously synced to the cloud. For instance, if you write a note on your iPad it will pop up on your Android Evernote or on Evernote.com and so on. This is very handy indeed, as the problem of transferring documents from one device to the other has been eliminated.
One of the screenshots Apple used to persuade the Regional Court in Düsseldorf last week that Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1 is a dead ringer for its iPad 2 and should therefore be barred in all of Europe except Holland because it infringes Apple design rights is inaccurate according to WebWereld.nl, a Dutch IDG publication, which went scurrying off to tell Samsung all about it. The point of the look-and-feel comparison on page 28 of Apple’s complaint (see below) is ostensibly to show that Samsung copied the iPad’s rounded corners, flat surface, metallic frame and icons. However, side-by-side the two devices look to be the same size when in reality they’re not.
JSF is the standard UI technology in Java EE, but on its own, it lacks tools for effectively building real-world rich enterprise applications. RichFaces 4, an open source extension for JSF, fills this development gap. RichFaces Core provides major enhancements for Ajax request customization, rendering and execution options, the JSF client queue, and more. RichFaces UI provides a large number of rich out-of-the-box components. RichFaces Skins makes it possible to change the look and feel of entire applications on the fly. The RichFacesComponent Development Kit streamlines building custom components.
There are very few pieces of software where a casual approach can be taken to the process of software development. Software development is intrinsically a difficult process, gathering requirements, design, development and testing all taking large effort. In reaction enterprises have setup and adopted strict development processes to build software (or at least the successful enterprises have ;-).
ADF and JDeveloper are sold as productivity boosters for developers. Yet in the end they are just a technology platform. By themselves they don't solve the complexities of software development process as a whole (though they do make parts of it easier).
ADF and JDeveloper are sold as productivity boosters for developers. Yet in the end they are just a technology platform. By themselves they don't solve the complexities of software development process as a whole (though they do make parts of it easier).
This leaves IT departments struggling, as they might like the potential of ADF as a platform, but they intrinsically know there's more to software development, there's the process of development to consider. How will the tasks of requirement gathering, design, development & testing be applied to ADF? And more importantly how to shortcut the process of establishing these for ADF within the enterprise? There's a need to bring the two concepts together, the technology & the process, to help the adoption of ADF in the enterprise.
As ADF matures we're slowly seeing more books on Oracle's strategic JSF based web framework. Up to now the books have focused on the holistic understanding of the technical framework, the tricky & expert level implementation, or more recently the speed of development. Sten Vesterli's Oracle ADF Enterprise Application Development - Made Simple is the first to apply the processes and methodologies of design and development to ADF.
Of particular delight Sten's book starts out by suggesting building a proof of concept to skill up teams in ADF, to learn the complexities, & gather empirical evidence of the effort required. From here a focus on estimation and considerations of team structure are raised, all valuable stuff for the enterprise trying to control the tricky process of software development.
In order to make use of reuse, the next few chapters focus on the infrastructure and ADF constructs that need to be setup before a real project commences, including page templates, ADF BC framework classes and more. This is the stuff you wish you'd been told to create first if you forged ahead in building with ADF without any guidance.
Then chapter by chapter the tasks of building, adding security, internalization and other development efforts are covered. There's even a chapter on using JMeter to stress test your ADF app (with a link back to my blog! Thanks Sten).
As can be seen from the topics, there's relatively little consideration of actually implementing ADF Business Components or ADF Faces RC. As such it must be said reading this book won't make you an expert in the technical side of ADF, but rather will address how you can take a sensible approach to the overall development process.
All in all Sten Vesterli's Oracle ADF Enterprise Application Development - Made Simple is another valuable book in my ADF bookshelf and a recommended read for enterprise specialists looking at adopting ADF into their organisation.
Disclaimer: I know Sten personally and in addition Packt Publishing has provided me Sten's book for free to review.
JadeLiquid is pleased to announce the long-awaited beta release of the WebRenderer Swing Edition 6.0 supporting 64bit systems. The beta of WebRenderer 6.0 includes support for both 32 and 64bit systems on Windows, OSX and Linux (other platforms to follow). The WebRenderer Swing Edition renders in lightweight Swing and is the only commercial strength Java browser SDK with this capability. New features found in the WebRenderer 6.0 beta include an updated Firefox engine, SVG support and overall performance improvements in the areas of rendering and JavaScript. The standard WebRenderer API is implemented and support for the W3C DOM and plugins such as Flash and PDFs are standard. The release of the WebRenderer Swing Edition 6.0 beta demonstrates JadeLiquid's ongoing commitment to provide the best commercial solution for displaying web content within Java applications. Since the first release WebRenderer in early 2003, WebRenderer has continued to break new ground in the Java browser SDK market. With millions of deployments world wide, WebRenderer provides commercially robust web content display in Java applications. WebRenderer has the widest platform support of any commercial Java browser SDK including Windows, OSX, Linux, Solaris and AIX.
Thirty years ago today the IBM Personal Computer was launched igniting a new way of computing that empowered individuals and forever changed the way we work and play. In talking with some of the early pioneers, they knew they were on to something but really had no idea just how impactful the changes would be. It was much more than just an affordable piece of hardware that could run programs. The PC legitimized and demonstrated to the world how individuals equipped with a useful tool could automate a task, eliminate paper, even run a business. No longer were employees limited to what the company MIS ( now known as IT ) department could provide at whatever schedule was dictated. The fact that the PC was also open enough to standardize interoperability, peripherals and third-party applications enabled an ecosystem to develop and scale at an exponential rate. Aside from pure work MIS tasks, individuals also took PCs home for desktop publishing, educating their kids and early gaming. A revolution was born.
SoftLayer Technologies on Tuesday announced that the company experienced continued operational and financial growth in the second quarter of 2011, hitting all new records. Along with other achievements, the company earned $83 million in revenue for the period. “This has been the greatest quarter of growth in our history,” said Lance Crosby, Chief Executive Officer for SoftLayer. “From the innovations we bring to market to our corporate performance and beyond, SoftLayer believes in setting challenging goals and then working harder than belief to attain them. I’m exceptionally proud of the effort from all levels and functions across our company.”
Skytap, the test and dev cloud automation house, has added self-service cloud orchestration and network routing features to its bag of tricks to reduce the time it takes to move complicated virtualized workloads to the cloud. It’s automated the order in which users want multi-machine virtual data centers deployed or shut down and engraves those rules – including time delays – in stone so the sequence repeats itself. Like, say, Active Directory server first, followed by the Team Foundation server, the database server, the load balancer and the web servers.
Hotlink Corporation emerged from two-and-a-half-years underground the other day clutching a check for $10 million from a couple of VCs in one hand and a “super-hypervisor” in the other. The start-up’s got a way to make VMware’s vCenter manager natively support Microsoft’s Hyper-V, Citrix’s XenServer and Red Hat’s KVM hypervisors all at the same time without vCenter even knowing those outlanders aren’t its own ESXi. The HotLink SuperVisor for VMware is meant to appeal to enterprises with heterogeneous widgetry, which must be just about everybody – well, two-thirds of them anyway – and let them mix and match hypervisors depending on cost, mission criticality, application support, performance, engineering and management requirements, SLAs and legacy imperatives.
Red Hat said Wednesday that its three-month-old OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), currently a free developer preview that runs on Amazon EC2, now supports Java Enterprise Edition 6, because it’s been integrated with Red Hat’s open source JBoss Application Server 7. That makes OpenShift, akin to Google App Engine, Microsoft Azure and VMware Cloud Foundry, the first PaaS to deliver JEE 6, a particular Red Hat pet it touts as one of the biggest advances in Java in over 10 years. The widgetry should simplify how application developers build and deploy Java in the cloud. While they code, OpenShift is supposed to fuss with the stack setup, maintenance and operational concerns.
Project Insight, online project management software, is assisting teams with keeping their projects on track during vacation season. With schools out for summer, many resources decide to take some time away from work. Project Insight's powerful resource management capabilities are helping organizations balance their resources' workloads while others are away on holiday. The graphical displays within the project management software make it easy for to effectively monitor the available resources' workloads and balance them accordingly. Many project teams have resources that span across more than just one department and project. Project Insight's resource allocation report can drill down to each project and task from a single view.
When you hear of Platform-as-a-Service what typically comes to mind are names like Heroku, EngineYard, DotCloud, and CloudFoundry.com – hosted Public PaaS providers. But there is an emerging trend where enterprises require PaaS capabilities, but are demanding it on their own terms. They want a PaaS behind their firewall to enable a secure cloud – a private PaaS. In his session at the 9th International Cloud Expo, Bart Copeland is President & CEO of ActiveState Software, will cover: The drivers for Private PaaS How a Private PaaS differs from a Public PaaS What to consider when implementing and deploying a Private PaaS Case studies of enterprises using a private PaaS