Skytap, the self-service cloud peddler, claims its users can now provision a self-service hybrid cloud in less than 10 minutes using a secure, two-way connection between their data center and Skytap’s virtual public infrastructure. Usually setting up a hybrid cloud is a complex, time-consuming, pricey exercise, requiring days of coding, altogether a barrier to adoption. Skytap says it’s reduced the hocus-pocus to a point-and-click GUI used to set up, test and configure IPSec connections between Skytap and the private data center.
Novell said late Thursday that it had gotten stockholder approval for its $6.10-a-share acquisition by Attachmate. Novell still needs US and German antitrust clearance to sell its patents to a consortium of Microsoft, Oracle, Apple and EMC. The acquisition hinges on it. Novell said it is still collecting the information the Justice Department asked for in a second request for information a couple of weeks ago. That second request to both Novell and the consortium came after the Open Source Initiative and the Free Software Foundation complained.
Putting a cloud integration and Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) strategy in play prepares enterprises for the next generation of flexible, distributed and scalable cloud-enabled business applications while facilitating greater operational efficiency, generating more revenue, and helping businesses enter new markets. This free guide from Fiorano discusses various architectures for cloud-based integration in use today, together with the pros and cons of each such architecture. This is followed by a discussion of the architecture requirements for a general purpose, cloud-enabled ESB platform that enables the seamless integration of on-premise, public and private cloud applications.
Pretty much still an Intel loyalist, Dell admittedly acted out of character Monday and wheeled out a high-end AMD Magny-Cours server, claiming to have put more cores, more memory and more I/O in a humble little 2U than anyone ever has. It said it could not get its kind of 96-core density with Intel and that’s before AMD pushes out Bulldozer and Interlagos. The head of Dell’s research computing Tim Carroll and its newfangled Poweredge C product manager Armando Acosta said it makes no never mind with users if it’s Intel or AMD when they have no more power or real estate left and their lust for compute cycles is still unfulfilled.
They say you can’t predict the weather. Like so many clichés, however, this one isn’t quite true. Meteorologists have a host of tools at their fingertips that help them recognize, track and analyze weather patterns in order to support predictions that are often accurate, or at least reasonably close. The same is true in the computing industry, where patterns emerge in data centers and enterprises much as cloud formations become apparent in the skies. With a careful eye and extensive knowledge informed by years of experience and frequent conversations with frontline IT professionals, we can predict future trends with a relatively high degree of accuracy. The beginning of a new decade is an opportune moment in which to forecast where virtualization – the primary IT initiative of our time – will encounter stormy weather and where it might be welcomed by clear skies.
Which mobile device should I target for my application? That's one of the first questions you need to answer as a mobile developer. You might select the device based on personal preference or what looks cool today. The problem is that mobile technology choices are diverse and evolving quickly. The tools and languages used to develop native applications vary wildly and you probably cannot afford to learn them all. Chances are you want to find a way to replicate your application across multiple devices while minimizing your investment. How can that be done?
Terracotta had added native high-performance search to Ehcache, the open source de facto cache for enterprise Java, making it possible to do simple queries and real-time analysis on terabytes of in-memory data, overcoming in the process the latency of making queries to comparatively far distant databases. Leveraging in-memory data stores in support of both transactional and analytical applications is supposed to make real-time query and analysis development costs cheaper because they both use the same native object level APIs. It could also save on hardware like Oracle’s Exadata machines.
OpenXava is a framework for rapid development of business applications using Java or Groovy. It is easy to learn and one can have an application up in no time. At the same time, OpenXava is extensible, customizable and the application code is structured in a very pure object oriented way, allowing you to develop arbitrarily complex applications. The OpenXava approach for rapid development differs from those that use visual environments (like Visual Basic or Delphi) or scripting (like PHP). Instead, OpenXava uses a model-driven development approach, where the core of your application are Java classes that model your problem. This means you can stay productive while still maintaining a high level of encapsulation. The new version of OpenXava, OpenXava 4.1, adds support for JSR-303, the Java standard for validation. Moreover, it contains some interesting features in the list and the collections user interface.
Lately I have seen a spike in questions such as which JSF 2.0 component library is better? Or RichFaces vs PrimeFaces and there is also performance comparison. It’s probably because JSF 2 is being used more and more and people want to know which library to use. I guess that’s fair. Here is my 2 [...]
Netbiscuits, a provider of cloud software service for cross-platform development, publishing and monetization of mobile sites and apps, on Tuesday announced the "HTML5+" extension of its Rich UI Development Framework. A set of new rich user interface components allows Netbiscuits' developers to create the most advanced user experiences for mobile web applications using the latest in HTML5 technology. The extended feature set enables auto-location via GPS (Location Biscuit), animated tickers (Ticker Biscuit) and more advanced image and video galleries (Gallery Biscuit). In addition, Netbiscuits' full Rich UI Framework has been expanded to develop multi-touch navigation, floating layers, swiping galleries, dynamic maps, auto-complete, and get-remote content features for mobile web applications. All rich UI features are adapted to more handsets and platforms, including Windows Phone 7.
SYS-CON Events announced today that Dell Boomi, the market-leading provider of on-demand integration technology, has been named “Silver Sponsor” of SYS-CON's 8th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 6–9, 2011, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York. Dell Boomi is the market-leading provider of on-demand integration technology and the creator of AtomSphere, the industry's #1 Integration Cloud. AtomSphere connects providers and customers of SaaS, cloud and on-premise applications via a pure SaaS integration platform that does not require software or appliances. ISVs and businesses alike benefit by connecting to the industry's largest network of SaaS, PaaS, on-premise and cloud computing environments in a seamless and fully self-service model. Dell Boomi became part of Dell on November 2, 2010.
Ignoring the potentially rock-strewn path that lies ahead of Windows tablets until Microsoft comes up with its promised tablet-friendly ARM-hugging Windows 8, Dell is working on a 10-inch Windows widget that it hopes to put on the market in the next few months. It showed off a non-working mock-up of the thing, called the Dell Business Tablet, at a grand unveiling of its remade PC lines Tuesday in California. It figures the device’s familiar applications, integration, management and governance security blankets will appeal to its stock-in-trade commercial clientele. It gave no indication of the tablet’s specs or price beyond the fact that it’ll be Intel-based. Guess it means the next-generation Oak Trail Atom.
Oracle Monday put out a Cloud File System that’s supposed to help organizations deploy their applications, databases and storage in the cloud. The widgetry was concocted by integrating the company’s Automatic Storage Management (ASM) Cluster File System together with its ASM Dynamic Volume Manager and is supposed to deliver everything needed to deploy a storage cloud. Oracle says it extends cloud characteristics to storage by enabling more effective storage pooling through a network-accessible elastic storage cloud. It’s good for snapshots and replicating files and file systems for backups and disaster protection; it’s got data access security and encryption; and aggregates management operations via file tags. It’ll automate the striping and mirroring of data without any third-party volume management software.
IBM wants its mainframe users to install a patch that will let IBM peer into the Specialty Processors (SPs) they have on their machines so it can see what they’re using the widgets for. And the only reason that Big Blue would want to do that is if it thinks it may lose the antitrust suit filed against it by Neon Enterprise Software. See, Neon’s zPrime software lets mainframers use SPs – which are otherwise called zIIPs and zAAPs and are actually just standard mainframe central processors under another name – to offload and run classic mainframe DB2, CICS, IMS, TSO/ISPF and batch workloads free of IBM’s notoriously exorbitant monthly fees.
XebiaLabs recently launched a new version of its deployment automation software. Deployit 3.0 promises to take away the risks associated with manual or scripted Java deployments, as well as out-of-date procedures. The end result: more productive DevOps teams. Coert Baart, CEO, XebiaLabs, rightly points out that the escalating adoption of virtualization and cloud computing is causing increasingly complex application deployments -- especially with roles of development and operations teams crossing over.
2010 is over and there has been a lot going on in the application performance space. We started this project at the beginning of the year inspired by Stoyan Stefanov’s performance advent calendar of 2009. (There is also one for 2010). Now twelve months later we have our 2010 performance almanac available. According to Wikipedia an almanac is -”… an annual publication containing information in a particular field”. Our performance almanac contains nearly 50 articles of numerous topics around application performance.
Just finished going through the slide deck from the teleconference dated January 24, 2011. It was titled "Is Java A Dead End For Enterprise Application Development?" This document has been authored by Mike Gualtiery, Senior Analyst from Forrester. If the slide deck’s title has a question mark at the end, the author’s blog simply states that Java’s a dead end. Bashing Java is popular these days, but is it justified? I don’t believe so. Unfortunately, people who state that Java’s dead are not the people who use the latest Java technologies day in and day out. Sure enough, people are overwhelmed by the amount of news generated by iOS and Adnroid, while Java (the most popular programming language) gives a perception of a stagnating platform.
Evidently the appeal by the Open Source Initiative (OSI) and the Free Software Foundation (FSF) to the Justice Department to look closer at Novell’s deal to sell its patents to the CPTN brotherhood of Microsoft-Apple-Oracle-EMC as part of its $2.2 billion acquisition by Attachmate has worked. Both Novell and CPTN Holdings got a second request for information from the DOJ on Wednesday just as its Hart-Scott-Rodino (HSR) waiting period was about to expire, according to a new SEC filing. The requests push the HSR antitrust review out 30 days past their coughing up whatever information the regulators are looking for unless they get an early dispensation. That explains why Novell stock, which is supposed to go to Attachmate for $6.10-a-share cash, was closed at $5.97 on Thursday after dipping down to $5.92.
I got a request yesterday morning to asking if there was a way to drop HTTP requests if a certain number was referenced in the Accept-Language header. The user referenced this post on Exploring Binary. The number, 2.2250738585072012e-308, causes the Java runtime and compiler to go into an infinite loop when converting it to java_tweetsdouble-precision binary floating-point. Not good. Twitter is ablaze on the issue, and there is a good discussion thread on Hacker News as well. So how do you stop it?
Oracle has proposed replacing the Apache Software Foundation with SouJava, the Brazilian Java User Group, on the Java SE/EE Community Process (JCP) Executive Committee (EC). The big 20,000-strong user group would be represented by Bruno Souza. There is no other user group on the committee, never has been. Even the usually contrary Simon Phipps, Sun’s former open source advocate, who enjoys throwing brickbats at Oracle from off-stage, couldn’t find anything bad to say about the nomination, blogging that Bruno and SouJava may be able “to use their new position of influence to fix the broken things (like the opaque decision-making and the ability to have FOSS-hostile licensing terms on JSRs).”
ADF Libraries are a very useful feature of JDeveloper 11g. They allow a master application, via the Resource Palette, to load Bounded Task Flows (BTFs) and the BTF's associated ADF Business Components from separate applications, without having to include the BTF and ADF BC objects in it's own application.
In the following picture you can see the Resource Palette exposing adflibChildBTF.jar, a BTF application containing both the ChildBTF bounded task flow, and it's associated Business Components including the ChildAppModule Application Module, Events Entity Object and so on:
If this ADF Library is loaded into a consuming application's ViewController project, the consuming application is free to call the adflibChildBTF's embedded Bounded Task Flow. However it's also free to call directly the Business Components of the adflibChildBTF. This is revealed by the Data Control Panel in the Application Navigator, it will by default include the Application Module of the child application as can be seen here:
Yet this isn't always desirable behaviour, the Child Application may not want to expose all its Business Components for easy picking by the consuming application. For example, you may have included a collection of test Business Components in the Child Application which really aren't appropriate for the consuming application to use, or, you may think it inappropriate for the consuming application to even reference the regular Business Components of the Child Application. How to fix?
When you open the editor for most Business Components including Application Modules, Entity Objects and View Objects, you may notice that the Property Inspector also reflects options for the selected and edited Business Component. In the Property Inspector for each Business Component there's typically a boolean property not included in the associated editors called Library Private. In the following diagram you can see the property inspector for the Application Module from the Child Application:
This property, when set to true for each Business Component (the default is false), means the Business Components will not be available in the Resource Palette when the ADF Library is redeployed (note: you must refresh the Resource Palette to see this effect):
As can be seen in the previous picture, the ChildAppModule Application Module is no longer available in the Resource Palette. In addition in the consuming Application's Data Control Palette, as we've hidden the ChildAppModule, simply it doesn't appear in the Data Control Palette:
Returning to the Resource Palette, you may in fact want to hide *all* of the Business Components. This requires you to simply set the Library Private property of each Business Component to true, and then regenerate the ADF Library JAR. We can see the end effect here:
However it must be noted, in the consuming application, this does not stop the consumed BTF from working. All the Library Private option is doing is hiding the Business Components from the IDE for the user to use. The Business Components are still used by Child Application/BTF when called from the caller at runtime.
Caveat
I've yet to fully use this feature, so be careful to check it works for you, your mileage will vary. If you find any issues I'd appreciate a comment to this blog post, to assist other readers.
Addendum
This feature is available in the latest version of JDev 11.1.1.4.0 through 11.1.1.2.0. It's possibly available in earlier versions, but I'll leave readers to check themselves as I no longer have these earlier JDev versions installed.
In addition this feature works within an Application too, such that the Business Components don't show in the Data Control Palette for the same Application's ViewController project.
The latest tablet figures claim that shipments doubled sequentially in Q4 to 9.4 million units, up 120% from 4.4 million units in Q3, and that iPad – which owned 96% of the market in Q3 – suffered a 21% share loss to Android – up 2,000% – complements of Samsung purportedly getting off two million of its Android-based Galaxy Tabs.
The NetBeans team has just announced that they have discontinued Ruby on Rails support in NetBeans. We realize this news can be sad for some of you. But take it as an opportunity to try a new tool! The kind of tool that evolves fast, stays on the cutting edge and has a passionate community around it. Naturally, we welcome you to try RubyMine as your new Ruby on Rails IDE! And we are not the only ones to do so.
The European Commission has approved Intel’s acquisition of McAfee Wednesday as expected after Intel offered the proviso that its chips would still run software from McAfee competitors. Intel is expected to embed McAfee security widgetry in its processors. Intel reportedly pledged to give McAfee rivals the chip information they needed and promised not to cripple their performance on its chips or McAfee’s on non-Intel chips. The EC said the conditions offered “strike the right balance, as they allow preserving both competition and the beneficial effects of the merger.”
"We are the nation that put cars in driveways and computers in offices; the nation of Edison and the Wright brothers; of Google and Facebook. In America, innovation doesn’t just change our lives. It’s how we make a living." With this one sentence, President Barack Obama ushered in once and for all the Age of Sociotechnology, the age that recognizes the importance of the interaction between people and technology in both workplaces and society.