Monthly Archives: August 2012

Links for August 23rd through August 29th

Posted on August 29, 2012 by Vinny

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• VMware Horizon Suite is ThinApp, AppBlast, Octopus and Horizon all put together – VMware Horizon Suite brings together many of the technologies here at VMware – Project Octopus, Project AppBlast, ThinApp, VMware Horizon Application Manager and VMware Horizon Mobile, as well as the management of VMware View
• MongoDB 2.2 Delivers Improved Analytics and Faster Performance | 10gen – 10gen Announces New Features Including Real-Time Aggregation Framework and Multi-Data Center Deployment for Easier Development and Operating at Scale with MongoDB
• Cross-Platform Mobile Apps with HTML, JavaScript and PhoneGap – Christophe Coenraets discusses strategies for creating large JavaScript MVC apps, and using PhoneGap for accessing native device capabilities and for packaging HTML apps.
• Concordion is an open source tool for writing automated acceptance tests in Java @mvorpagel – Concordion is an open source tool for writing automated acceptance tests in Java
• GWT to Dart Code Migration – This video presents Dart equivalents for various GWT libraries and idioms, techniques for interoperating with existing GWT server backends, and tricks to allow Dart code to talk to existing GWT and Javascript code.
• Learnng C with GDB – Blog – Hacker School – Hopefully I've convinced you that gdb a neat exploratory environment for learning C. You can print the evaluation of expressions, examine raw bytes in memory, and tinker with the type system using ptype.
• Check lambda support in IntelliJ IDEA 12 EAP build 122.202 @mvorpagel – A new EAP build 122.202 of IntelliJ IDEA 12 has been released. The build contains improved JDK8 lambda inference and initial code insight features:
• A Blow To HTML5 – Branch – What we’re seeing with Facebook’s iOS app is not a sign that Facebook is turning against HTML5, but rather a shift in their priorities for a native app — that the optimal mix for their app is more native, less HTML5.
• The Pragmatic Architect – To Boldly Go Where No One Has Gone Before – It’s the architect’s job to uncover the things "in between" as early as possible, make them explicit, and decide about them. This, paired with sound knowledge in relevant architecture methods and technologies, as well as their deliberate practice, is architecture mastery: thoughtful design at a software system’s pain points that ultimately decide its success or failure.
• Under the hood: Rebuilding Facebook for iOS – Today we released a new version of Facebook for iOS that's faster, more reliable, and easier to use than ever before. The development of this new app signals a shift in how Facebook is building mobile products, with a focus on digging deep into individual platforms. To understand how we approached this shift, let's take a look at how Facebook has evolved on mobile.
• Facebook Speeds Up iPhone and iPad Apps – NYTimes.com – The focus on native code in apps raises questions about whether Facebook is getting ready to abandon its roots as an open Web platform. Mr. Ondrejka says that’s not the case. He explained that Facebook’s mobile Web site is still where it gets the most activity. But for apps, the company found that wrapping native code around Web technology was not ideal. Many users have complained about the performance of the apps.

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Links for August 19th through August 23rd

Posted on August 23, 2012 by Vinny

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• Using RubyMotion to Build JavaScript Based iOS Apps – Using RubyMotion to Build JavaScript Based iOS Apps
• Manage Creativity in Your Company by Dedicating Time | Inc.com – How can we afford to put our business on hold for a month to "mess around" with new ideas? How can we afford not to? We would never have had such a burst of creative energy had we stuck to business as usual.
• Typesafe Raises $14M From Shasta, Greylock, And Juniper To Commercialize Scala | TechCrunch – Typesafe allows developers to effectively develop robust applications that address the dual challenges of large-scale distributed “cloud computing” applications and massively multicore hardware platforms while still integrating seamlessly with the Java infrastructure,
• DeftJS – Essential extensions for enterprise web and mobile application development with Ext JS and Sencha Touch – DeftJS enhances Ext JS and Sencha Touch’s APIs with additional building blocks that enable large development teams to rapidly build enterprise scale applications, leveraging best practices and proven patterns discovered by top RIA developers at some of the best consulting firms in the industry.
• Future of Data Architecture: NoSQL, Big Data, Linked Data and the Cloud – In this panel, Siddharth Anand, Dwight Merriman, Ashish Thusoo, Damien Katz, Tom Wilkie and Akmal Chaudhri (moderator) answer questions on NoSQL from the audience.
• Introducing WireMock – an HTTP service stubbing library – WireMock is a tool that allows HTTP exchanges to be stubbed and verified. It does this by creating an actual HTTP endpoint, rather than by stubbing or mocking the HTTP client class. It can be used directly from within JUnit (or your weapon of choice), run as a standalone process or deployed into a container with the aim of covering off a wide range of testing scenarios.
• How big data can transform healthcare | opensource.com – Modern improvements in health and healthcare systems allow individuals to further amass and analyze data, and unlock even more secrets about human health and healthcare.
• AppFog And Rackspace Want To Break Your App Out Of Amazon’s Walled Garden | TechCrunch – AppFog has only been available on AWS’ infrastructure, but CEO Lucas Carlson has been promising a one click migrate between clouds for a while now. What AppFog announced today is that its service would be available through the Rackspace Cloud Tools Marketplace.
• Solving the Two Week Problem by Developing in the Cloud | OpenShift by Red Hat – We didn’t create a cloud-based IDE because it was novel. We did it because the consistency of the development experience is orders of magnitude better than current options. It’s only getting better from here. With our enterprise-class foundation in OpenShift, the Cloud9 platform is setting the stage for the future of development. Start your next application today at c9.io.
• Listening to Complainers Is Bad for Your Brain – Exposure to nonstop negativity actually impairs brain function. Here's how to defend yourself.
• 6 things I do to be consistently happy – One of the most important things I’ve learned during this time is that I perform the best when I’m happy. It really does change everything. If I’m happy then I’m more productive when hacking code, I’m better at answering support, and I find it easier to stay focused.
• Font Awesome, the iconic font designed for use with Twitter Bootstrap – Font Awesome 2.0 – the iconic font designed for use with Twitter Bootstrap

Links for August 14th through August 17th

Posted on August 17, 2012 by Vinny

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• Hibernate 4.1.4: Envers tests run & pass on multiple DBs – Envers is an entity auditing framework, making it possible to store and query for historical data.
• Integration At Scale: Lessons Learned From The New Enterprise Web – David Laing, Neels Burger, Neil Pellinacci, Parand Tony Darugar, and Scott Morrison (moderator) discuss the impact of integration of various interconnected devices, web technologies, and cultures.
• OAuth – Everything You Want to Know (Hopefully) – Pratap Chilukuri explains what OAuth is and how it works, exemplifying using the protocol with an example.
• Choose the "Right" Database and NewSQL: NoSQL Under Attack – Talk #1: Stefan Edlich suggests choosing a NoSQL DB after answering about 70 questions in 6 categories, and building a prototype. Talk #2: Edlich presents NewSQL solutions counteracting NoSQL.
• Eli Collins on Hadoop – Eli Collins discusses Cloudera's CDH4 release, which tasks are well suited for Hadoop, Hadoop and MapReduce vs SQL, the state of Hadoop, and much more.
• Sears Competes On Big Data and Loyalty Programs – Forbes – Sears has a very intensive big data program to drive customer loyalty; the sophistication surprised me and should interest investors.
• Where Does Big Data Meet Big Database? – Ben Stopford takes a look at the Big Data movement, its development and implications, reflecting on a future where NoSQL solutions and traditional ones coexist.
• Panel: How Banks Are Managing Their Data – Frank Tarsillo , John Davies, Jon Vernon and Ari Zilka (moderator) discuss the technologies and architectures used these days to manage large amounts of sensitive data in top financial institutions.
• Video: Spring Roo—Not Just another RAD Tool! | SpringSource.org – In this presentation, SpringSource's Josh Long and Spring Roo in Action authors Ken Rimple and Srini Penchikala introduce Spring Roo 1.2, and then go further, exposing Roo's powerful addon-based underbelly. They introduce Roo's OSGi bundle support, and introduce how add-ons can be used to generate code, install templates, respond to addition / removal of annotations, and expose both open-source and internal-company libraries for use by your developers
• Spring Data – One API To Rule Them All? – Spring Data is a high level SpringSource project whose purpose is to unify and ease the access to different kinds of persistence stores, both relational database systems and NoSQL data stores.
• The Good, The Bad & The Ugly (Clojure & JRuby) – Allen Rohner discusses the benefits and the problems of mixing Clojure and JRuby running them in the same process, making some recommendations at the end.
• Google Web Toolkit Blog: GWT Support for Mobile App Development – If you’re interested in using GWT to build mobile apps and mobile web apps from a single codebase, then you’ll want to take a good look at mgwt. The following is a guest blog post from Daniel Kurka, the creator of the mgwt library.
• anic – Faster than C, Safer than Java, Simpler than *sh – anic is the reference implementation compiler for the experimental, high-performance, implicitly parallel, deadlock-free general-purpose dataflow programming language ANI
• Sencha Architect 2.1 Now Available | Blog | Sencha – Sencha Architect is now even better! Release 2.1 is finally here and the team is excited to share what we've been working on for the past three months. The goal for the first minor release was to improve performance and stability while continuing to add functionality that helps developers do even more.

Links for August 10th through August 13th

Posted on August 13, 2012 by Vinny

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• The iPhone Has Passed a Key Security Threshold – Technology Review – In fact, in its efforts to make its devices more secure, Apple has crossed a significant threshold. Technologies the company has adopted protect Apple customers' content so well that in many situations it's impossible for law enforcement to perform forensic examinations of devices seized from criminals. Most significant is the increasing use of encryption, which is beginning to cause problems for law enforcement agencies when they encounter systems with encrypted drives.
• NoSQL Database Technology: A Survey and Comparison of Systems – James Phillips presents the origins of NoSQL, followed by a comparison of various NoSQL solutions and ending with an architect’s view of Couchbase.
• Big Data Architecture at LinkedIn – In this interview at QCon London, LinkedIn’s Sid Anand discusses the problems they face when serving high-traffic, high-volume data. Sid explains how they’re moving some use cases from Oracle to gain headroom, and lifts the hood on their open source search and data replication projects, including Kafka, Voldemort, Espresso and Databus.
• Facebook Moving To The JVM | Nerds Central – Facebook are looking to move PHP on. Why, because clock cycles cost money. Their first approach was hiphop, a PHP to C+++ cross compiler. Now they are looking into compiling PHP to run on the multi-language VM. The presence of Facebook engineers at the Java Language Summit in San-Francisco along with there interest in implementing PHP using invoke-dynamic on the JVM is a the shock. The main seismic event will be nothing less that the complete removal of interpreters from main stream general purpose programming.
• How Big Data Became So Big – Unboxed – NYTimes.com – THIS has been the crossover year for Big Data — as a concept, as a term and, yes, as a marketing tool. Big Data has sprung from the confines of technology circles into the mainstream.
• Beyond the Mockito Refcard – part 2 – convenient mocking beans in the Spring context with Springockito « Solid Soft – Beyond the Mockito Refcard – part 2 – convenient mocking beans in the Spring context with Springockito
• Springockito – A toolset to ease the creation of mockito mocks within spring based integration tests, – This is a small extension to spring that simplifies way of creation mockito mocks in the intergation tests' related context xml files.
• Vaadin App on Google App Engine in 5 Minutes – Java Code Geeks – In this tutorial you'll learn how to create your very first Vaadin web application, how to run it on a local AppEngine development server and how to deploy it to the Google App Engine infrastructure. And all of that in about 5 to 10 minutes.
• Max Little: A test for Parkinson’s with a phone call | Video on TED.com – Parkinson’s disease affects 6.3 million people worldwide, causing weakness and tremors, but there's no objective way to detect it early on. Yet. Applied mathematician and TED Fellow Max Little is testing a simple, cheap tool that in trials is able to detect Parkinson's with 99 percent accuracy — in a 30-second phone call.
• Google Open Sources Leak Finder, a JavaScript Tool for Detecting Memory Leaks – Google has open sourced Leak Finder, a tool inspecting the heap of JavaScript applications in order to find memory leaks.

Links for August 5th through August 9th

Posted on August 9, 2012 by Vinny

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• U.S. Should Adopt Higher Standards for Science Education: Scientific American – Teachers, scientists and policymakers have drafted ambitious new education standards. All 50 states should adopt them
• Testing SQL Server Code with TST – Enter TST. TST is an Open source Unit Testing framework specifically meant for testing SQL Server Database Code.
• Fr. Naus retires after 50 years at Marquette – Rev. John Naus, S.J., has retired after serving Marquette for nearly five decades. From his days as Tumbleweed the Clown, his famous Christmas cards and long tradition of celebrating 10 p.m. Mass at St. Joan of Arc Chapel, he has touched many lives.
• Watch High-Speed Trading Bots Go Berserk – Technology Review – The stock market today is a war zone, where algobots fight each other over pennies, millions of times a second. Sometimes, the casualties are merely companies like Knight, and few people have much sympathy for them. But inevitably, at some point in the future, significant losses will end up being borne by investors with no direct connection to the HFT [high-frequency trading] world, which is so complex that its potential systemic repercussions are literally unknowable.
• Long live SOA in the cloud era – SOA’s dictum that ‘everything is a service’ is more relevant than ever – A few years back, SOA (service-oriented architecture) was all the rage. Vendors rushed to remarket everything as SOA, and SOA-washing was the new greenwashing. But in today'srush to the cloud, have we abandoned SOA? If so, we're in trouble.
• A Brave New World of Testing? An Interview with Google’s James Whittaker – To get an answer, I turned to James Whittaker, an engineering director at Google, which has been at the forefront of leveraging the cloud. James is a noted expert and author on software testing, whose team has been managing Google’s cloud computing testing.
• MongoMapper – A Mongo ORM for Ruby – Built from the ground up to be simple and extendable, MongoMapper is a lovely way to model your applications and persist your data in MongoDB. It has all the bells and whistles you need to get the job done and have fun along the way.
• Apache Kafka is a distributed publish-subscribe messaging system – Kafka provides a publish-subscribe solution that can handle all activity stream data and processing on a consumer-scale web site. This kind of activity (page views, searches, and other user actions) are a key ingredient in many of the social feature on the modern web
• Brian ONeill’s Blog: A Big Data Trifecta: Storm, Kafka and Cassandra – We're big fans of Cassandra. We also use Storm as our distributed processing engine. We've had a lot of success using our Cassandra Bolt to create a successful marriage between the two. To date, we've been using Storm to integrate with our legacy technologies via our JMS Spout. Now we're looking to expand its role beyond legacy system integration.
• 9 Reasons Why Your Company Needs A Mobile Strategist – Forbes – As their name implies, these mobile strategists play a critical role in gathering business requirements, building a ‘mobile center of excellence,’ creating a mobile strategy that aligns to the key business drivers, and selecting the right technology and platform to support both short- and long-term needs. At this point, a business without a mobile strategy is a business without a strategy at all.
• Principles of User Interface Design – Principles of User Interface Design

Links for August 1st through August 5th

Posted on August 5, 2012 by Vinny

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• ProGuard – A free Java class file shrinker, optimizer, obfuscator, and preverifier – ProGuard is a free Java class file shrinker, optimizer, obfuscator, and preverifier. It detects and removes unused classes, fields, methods, and attributes. It optimizes bytecode and removes unused instructions. It renames the remaining classes, fields, and methods using short meaningless names. Finally, it preverifies the processed code for Java 6 or for Java Micro Edition.
• Nevado JMS 1.0 GA for Amazon Web Services Released – We’ve released the final 1.0 version for our JMS driver for Amazon Web Services’ queue and notification services (SQS/SNS).
• typica – A Java client library for a variety of Amazon Web Services – This is a simple API to access Amazon's SQS, EC2, CloudWatch, AutoScaling, ELB, SimpleDB, SNS, FPS and DevPay LS web services. It uses the QUERY APIs. This code is thread-safe and works very reliably to the best of my knowledge
• GWT 2.5 SuperDevMode and Google App Engine – Now an Amazing Combination – With the advent of GWT's new SuperDevMode (SDM), you can easily modify your Java client code and see it quickly reflected in GAE's development environment without any restart necessary. This is an addition to the other native Java debugging features introduced as a result of SDM. Below is a quick screencast of this capability:
• SwitchYard is a lightweight service delivery framework providing full lifecycle support for developing, deploying, and managing service-oriented applications. – SwitchYard is a lightweight service delivery framework providing full lifecycle support for developing, deploying, and managing service-oriented applications.
• Piecon / Pie charts in your favicon! – A tiny javascript library for dynamically generating pie charts in your favicons.
• Securing OAuth2-Enabled, Multi-Tenant Applications with Spring Security – Robert Winch explains how to secure a multi-tenant application with Spring Security and how to enable OAuth 2.
• MongoDB SQL Server Importer – If you want a quick (but kinda dirty) way to import your SQL Server database to MongoDB, this is your tool. MongoDB SQL Server Importer (Sql2Mongo) is for those who wants to leverage their existing database to learn MongoDB.
• Which freaking database should I use? | Data Management – InfoWorld – In the era of big data, good old RDBMS is no longer the right tool for many database jobs. Here's a quick guide to choosing among NoSQL alternatives
• Extreme Performance with Java – Charlie Hunt explains what can be done to lower the latency introduced by the Java GC and JIT, including coding tips, and introducing tools for tuning the performance of Java applications.
• Journey Through The JavaScript MVC Jungle | Smashing Coding – There are modern JavaScript frameworks that can assist with bringing structure and organization to our projects, improving how easily maintainable they are in the long-run.
• Protean Echo | Fuse all your cards into one – Echo is the last payment card you'll ever carry. It's your debit, credit, loyalty, and prepaid cards – even your student ID – all combined into a single, elegantly crafted card.
• No Excuse List – The best place on the web to learn anything, free. – The best place on the web to learn anything, free.
• Legit – Git Workflow for Humans – Legit is a complementary command-line interface for Git, optimized for workflow simplicity. It is heavily inspired by GitHub for Mac.
• Automating Unit Tests | Blog | Sencha – Unit tests are an important part of the software development process. By clearly defining what we expect from our code, unit tests allow us to develop a high degree of confidence that our applications will function as intended. Automating our unit tests reduces the number of bugs and decreases the amount of time we need to spend manually testing our code.
• Cloud News: Rackspace Deploys OpenStack, AppFog Delivers a PaaS | Cloud Zone – Rackspace’s deployment marks the first time that any company has deployed a large-scale OpenStack powered service offering and starts to deliver upon the broader OpenStack vision of open and hence federable clouds.
• Jeff’s SOA Ruminations: Setting-up GWT 2.5’s SuperDevMode – One of the most exciting features of GWT 2.5 is what is called SuperDevMode. As a replacement for the previous DevMode, it allows you to debug your Java code (and Javascript) directly through Chrome's Browser's Developer Tools
• Sun Veterans Create SDK for Native Java on the iPhone — Application Development Trends – Codename One, an Israel-based startup founded by two former Sun Microsystems engineers, is developing a new software development kit (SDK) designed to allow Java developers to create native applications for multiple mobile/tablet platforms.
• Integrating Java Spring Apps on Heroku with Force.com REST APIs – Recently I co-presented a webinar about how to integrate Java Spring Apps on Heroku with the Force.com / Salesforce.com REST APIs. Check out the recording:
• Rich JavaScript Applications – the Seven Frameworks (Throne of JS, 2012) – Despite the differences, I’d argue there is one killer feature all the above technologies share: the idea of Model/View separation. This is a classic design pattern that predates the web itself by about 20 years. If you’re building even the most basic kind of web application UI, you’ll almost certainly benefit from applying this on the client.