Links for February 24th through March 5th

Posted on March 5, 2012 by Vinny

InfoQ: Running Heroku on Heroku – Noah Zoschke discusses self-hosting, bootstrapping, cross-compiling, avoiding circular dependencies, distributed process management, all in the context of running Heroku support apps on Heroku.
HTTPie: cURL for humans – HTTPie is a CLI HTTP utility built out of frustration with existing tools. The goal is to make CLI interaction with HTTP-based services as human-friendly as possible. HTTPie does so by providing an http command that allows for issuing arbitrary HTTP requests using a simple and natural syntax and displaying colorized responses:
InfoQ: AMQP in Financial Service – Hanno Klein explains how AMQP is used by Deutsche Börse and where it fits within their strategy.
Chrome to be deployed on State Department computers worldwide | Geek.com – On January 26th, when Secretary Clinton was asked what could be done about the painfully slow update process for Internet Explorer, she announced that the State Department would be deploying Google Chrome to their offices worldwide
Field Guide to Web Applications from Google – This field guide is designed to help you create great user experiences in your web apps. Whether you’re building your first web app, or are just looking for ways to improve existing experiences, there’s something here for you!
Pinterest Is Not A Virtual Pinboard via @codertrader – In summary, Pinterest is not a Virtual Pinboard. It is the answer to consumers engaging with brands, something Facebook has been unable to do.
Continuous Improvement: The Importance of the Team Retrospective — Application Development Trends – Even good agile teams can get better. Mark J. Balbes walks you through how retrospectives have impacted his team and shows you options for yours.
When will tablets outsell traditional PCs? | asymco – Given these assumptions, the day when the tablet market (by units) will exceed that of traditional PCs will come sometime in the fall of 2013.
How To Be Happy Anywhere | Fast Company – For my job I spent 300 days traveling the world last year. I met a lot of happy people. Who they are and where they live will surprise you.
Introducing Spring Hadoop | SpringSource Team Blog – VMware have announced the availability of Spring Hadoop, which integrates the Spring Framework and the Apache Hadoop platform. The project provides a convenient mechanism for the configuration, creation, and execution of the various services and utilities such as MapReduce, Hive, Pig, and Cascading jobs via the Spring container
Spring Thread Pool Services – Java Code Geeks – Thread Pools are very important to execute synchronous & asynchronous processes. This article shows how to develop and monitor Thread Pool Services by using Spring. Creating Thread Pool has been explained via two alternative methods.
Interpreted Languages: PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby – A side-by-side reference sheet – Interpreted Languages: PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby (Sheet One) – A side-by-side reference sheet
Working With Data in Sencha Designer | Learn | Sencha – This screencast provides an overview of the data layer in Sencha frameworks and demonstrates how you can use Designer to use the data capabilities. We explore the basics of creating stores, defining record structure using models, using proxies and readers to load data, sorting and grouping data, previewing loaded data, and attaching stores to views.
Sencha Touch 2 RC—Now with Native Packaging | Blog | Sencha – Today, we’re happy to announce the release candidate of Sencha Touch 2 as well as our native packaging for Windows and Mac.

Links for February 19th through February 24th

Posted on February 24, 2012 by Vinny

The Sun is Setting on Rails-style MVC Frameworks « caines.ca/blog – I'm becoming more and more certain that this means that Rails-style MVC frameworks on the server-side are going to end up being phased out in favour of leaner and meaner frameworks that better address the new needs of thick-client architecture.
Trigger – cross-platform app framework – The simplest way for web developers to create native iOS and Android apps from a single HTML5 codebase
InfoQ: Writing Usable APIs in Practice – Giovanni Asproni presents techniques for writing usable APIs: using user's perspective, naming, the caller should have the control, explicit context, error reporting, logging, organizing.
InfoQ: Tailoring Spring for Custom Usage – Josh Long uncovers some of the hooks available in the Spring framework: life cycles, scopes, beans, resources, XML marshallers, REST, transactions, caching, Spring Integration adapters, and others.
WhySQL? Why Evernote is sticking with MySQL instead of NoSQL – There are a few reasons that we’ve decided to store all of your account metadata within a single (replicated) MySQL instance instead.
The Pope is Apparently not a Republican – The world of finance, while necessary, no longer represents an instrument that favours our well-being or the life of mankind, instead it has become an oppressive power, that almost demands our adoration, mammon, the false divinity that truly dominates the world.
JPA Applications in the Era of NoSQL and Clouds – Introducing OGM by Hardy Ferentschik @ JUDCon London on Vimeo – In this talk we discuss briefl y the different NoSQL solutions and show where Hibernate OGM fits into the picture. Hibernate OGM (Object Grid Mapper) is built on the robust and proven Hibernate core engine and helps you to port existing JPA (Hibernate) applications to alternative storage engines decoupling application code from a specific NoSQL solution
OnLive Desktop Plus Puts Windows 7 on the iPad in Blazing Speed – State of the Art – NYTimes.com – The news today is the new service, called OnLive Desktop Plus. It’s not free — it costs $5 a month — but it adds Adobe Reader, Internet Explorer and a 1-gigabit-a-second Internet connection.
The 6 Major Mobile Trends for 2012 – About Agility – Mobile is one of the big trends for 2012, and with the year just starting, it's a great time to make some predictions about what will happen in the upcoming months. So here they are, the 6 major mobile trends for 2012:
Steve Jobs Solved the Innovator’s Dilemma – James Allworth – Harvard Business Review – That "subtle difference" — of flipping the priorities away from profit and back to great products — took Apple from three months away from bankruptcy, to one of the most valuable and influential companies in the world.
RESTEasy lets you build RESTful Web Services and RESTful Java applications – RESTEasy is a JBoss project that provides various frameworks to help you build RESTful Web Services and RESTful Java applications. It is a fully certified and portable implementation of the JAX-RS specification. JAX-RS is a new JCP specification that provides a Java API for RESTful Web Services over the HTTP protocol.
The “Unhyped” New Areas in Internet and Mobile | TechCrunch – I'm very excited about what the next few years will bring — the rate of change is accelerating and the possibilities are endless!

Links for December 23rd through December 26th

Posted on December 27, 2011 by Vinny

For Start-Ups, Sorting the Data Cloud Is the Next Big Thing – NYTimes.com – The amount of data being generated globally increases by 40 percent a year, according to the McKinsey Global Institute, the consulting firm’s research arm. And while Splunk has a lead in selling software to analyze machine data, big data is big enough to create new opportunities for a multitude of start-ups, many of them using the open-source software Hadoop.
The Dumbest Idea In The World: Maximizing Shareholder Value – Forbes – The recognition that maximizing shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world is an obvious but still a radical idea. Like all obvious, radical ideas, in the first instance it will be rejected. Then it will be ridiculed. Finally it will be self-evident and no one will be able to remember why anyone ever thought otherwise.
Words of wisdom from John Gruber in this holiday season. – How much will I be willing to pay then to be able to go back in time, for one day, to now, when he’s eight years old, he wants to go to movies and play games and build Lego kits with me, and he believes in magic?
Spring Data Neo4j – The Best NoSQL database for Spring – Spring Data Neo4j enables POJO based development for graph databases like Neo4j. It extends annotated entity classes with transparent mapping functionality. Spring Data Neo4j is part of the bigger Spring Data project which aims to provide convenient support for NOSQL databases.
Java 8 Status Updates | Johannes Thönes – The two big new language features of the upcoming Java SE 8 release are Lambda Expressions and Modularity. For both, status updates have been released these days. I’ll share the links with you, so you might read through them over the holidays
Microcaching: Speed your app up 250x with no new code – Fenn Bailey – The idea behind microcaching is to cap the amount of requests that can make it through to your app by letting nginx bear the brunt of your pageviews by caching content for a very small amounts of time (ie: 1 second or less).
Berkeley Explains Why Google Trumps Microsoft | Wired Enterprise – The University of California at Berkeley has chosen Google over Microsoft for its campus-wide email and calendar services, and it will tell you why — in great detail.
It’s Always Sunny in Silicon Valley – Businessweek – The Valley's techies live in a bubble of prosperity. Optimism has its advantages, but some worry the region may lose touch with the rest of the world
Windows 8 picture password is ‘Fisher-Price toy’ says father of 2-factor authentication – The Windows 8 feature that logs users in if they touch certain points in a photo in the right order might be fun, but it's not very good security, according to the inventor of RSA's SecurID token.

Links for December 16th through December 19th

Posted on December 20, 2011 by Vinny

What Happened To The 9 Programming Languages To Watch in 2011 | Javalobby – Last year, I wrote a post entitled 9 Programming Languages To Watch In 2011. Now that 2011 is basically over, let’s see what happened to these languages over the course of the year.
Video: Dart – A Language For Structured Web Programming – Marakana – Seth Ladd, Developer Advocate at Google, introduces us to Dart at the Silicon Valley Google Technology User Group meetup on December 7th, 2011.
StatHat – Invent stats on the fly. Track data instantly, up to the minute, accurately. – StatHat is a tool to track statistics and events in your code. In just one line, you can track any number and StatHat will generate graphs instantly, send you alerts, and let you embed the graphs on your own site.
Introducing Siesta: A Testing Tool for Ext JS | Blog | Sencha – Testing your code brings lots of advantages, perhaps the biggest one is that it increases your confidence in your codebase. How do you know your code actually works? How do you know if a small change in the core of your application is safe or if it breaks some feature? The only way is to actually manually verify each and every feature of your system—but that’s not realistic unless you have a test suite.
Partychat — migrating from Google App Engine to EC2 « Vijay Pandurangan’s blog – Google App Engine’s insistence on a different paradigm for development makes migration extremely difficult, since moving to a new platform requires rearchitecting code
ios 5 – How does iOS 5’s iMessage know that the recipient is an iOS 5 device? – Apple – Stack Exchange – When you send a message using the Messages app, iOS seems to magically figure out that the recipient is on iOS 5 and automatically switches over to iMessage (blue messages instead of green SMSs).
InfoQ: JSR 107, JSR 347, Infinispan, NoSQL, Hot Rod, Memcached, CDI and Beyond – InfoQ catches up with Manik Surtani to discuss JSR 347, data grids and Inifinispan. Manik dicusses overlap with NoSQL and support for Memcached and HotRod wire protocol as well.
Connecting a HTML5 application to a MongoDB instance via MongoLab REST API | Tweetegy – I needed a free, document based, online data store so that I could quickly build a HTML5 prototype. As an exercise, I quickly whipped up a simple application that can store basic contact details of people.
MapReduce for the Masses: Zero to Hadoop in Five Minutes with Common Crawl | CommonCrawl – Common Crawl aims to change the big data game with our repository of over 40 terabytes of high-quality web crawl information into the Amazon cloud, the net total of 5 billion crawled pages

Links for November 30th through December 3rd

Posted on December 3, 2011 by Vinny

The death of Steve Jobs: Steve Jobs and America’s decline | The Economist – There are lots of things it could do to improve the ability of and incentives for American companies and workers to innovate and grow, whether it’s taxing fossil fuels, giving more green cards to foreign scientists and engineers or simplifying the tax code. These days, however, that seems a fantasy compared to more prosaic demands such as, don’t shut down the government, starve critical government agencies of funds or default on the national debt.
cmdln.org (a sysadmin blog) » Blog Archive » Install git on CentOS cpanel server – cpanel has blocked all perl packages from being installed or updated because they don’t want updates to break or conflict with their packages. Thankfully yum provides a nice one time workaround for this kind of situation.
Niklas’ Blog: Java 7: Project Coin in code examples – This blog introduces – by code examples – some new Java 7 features summarized under the term Project Coin. The goal of Project Coin is to add a set of small language changes to JDK 7.
Moving from SVN to Git in 1,000 easy steps! « Code as Craft – This past summer we completed a project that spanned several months of planning and preparation – moving our source control from Subversion to Git. The code that runs our search engine, front-end web stack, support/admin tools, API, configuration management, and more are now stored in and deployed from Git. We thought some of you might find our approach migrating an 80-100 person engineering team interesting and possibly instructive.
A Look at the NoSQL Landscape | Javalobby – Take a look at the current landscape of NoSQL stores and figure out why you might need NoSQL in this recent podcast where Bruce Elgort talks with Mark Myers from the London Developer Co-op.
scribe-java – The simple OAuth Java lib! – Welcome to the home of Scribe, the simple OAuth Java lib!
ql.io – A declarative, data-retrieval and aggregation gateway for quickly consuming HTTP apis – ql.io combines SQL, JSON, and a few procedural style constructs into a compact language. Scripts written in this language can make HTTP requests to retrieve data, perform joins between API responses, project responses, or even make requests in a loop. But note that ql.io's scripting language is not SQL – it is SQL inspired
InfoQ: SpringOne 2GX Keynote: Next Generation Applications – Ben Alex along with a SpringSource team present the future of mobile applications, authorization, data, and application architecture as seen by VMware.
InfoQ: Scala+GWT Brings Scala to the Browser, New Documentation Site and Scala Days 2012 Announced – Grzegorz Kossakowski has recently released the third milestone version of Scala+GWT. Scala+GWT allows you to write Scala code and then run it in the browser by compiling it to JavaScript via Google's Web Toolkit. This allows you to write statically checked code but with less boilerplate than Java requires.
Running Ext GWT 2 and 3 Together | Learn | Sencha – As a migration strategy, both Ext GWT 2 and 3 can be used at the same time. This allows an application to be upgraded to v3 over time, rather than all at once.
Move The Web Forward | Guide to getting involved with standards and browser development – Whether you're a talented web developer, web-slinging since the days of tables and font tags, or you're a hobbyist hacker, there are a number ways for you to give back. Below, we list some of the ways that anyone can contribute back to the web platform.

Links for November 27th through November 30th

Posted on November 30, 2011 by Vinny

Upgrading to Sencha Touch 2 PR2 | Learn | Sencha – This has been a brief introduction to some of the updates you should be aware of when using Sencha Touch 2 PR2, and hopefully you enjoy working with it and benefiting from the major enhancements these small changes on your part can bring.
VMware’s Cloud Foundry Ranked Top Developer Platform – New VMware kid on the PaaS block takes "best overall" honors, while Google App Engine is best public and IBM SmartCloud best private cloud platform in Evans Data survey.
Following Digital Breadcrumbs To ‘Big Data’ Gold : NPR – What do Facebook, Groupon and biotech firm Human Genome Sciences have in common? They all rely on massive amounts of data to design their products. Terabytes and even zettabytes of information about consumers or about genetic sequences can be harnessed and crunched.
The Twelve-Factor App – In the modern era, software is commonly delivered as a service: called web apps, or software-as-a-service. The twelve-factor app is a methodology for building software-as-a-service apps that
Humane JS – A simple, modern, framework-independent, well-tested, unobtrusive, notification system. – Humane JS – A simple, modern, framework-independent, well-tested, unobtrusive, notification system.
Learn, build, and deploy Ruby web apps using Rails and Sinatra – We're going to teach you how to build your first Ruby web application in 3 minutes and deploy it live to the internet. Don't worry, you won't have to install or setup anything. We'll take care of all those pesky little details: Ruby, Rails, Git, Gems, configuring SSH keys, and deploying your application to a server
Don’t Send That Email. Pick up the Phone! – Anthony Tjan – Harvard Business Review – As digital communication accelerates the pace at which people form and broaden relationships, it is also decreasing the rate at which people are willing to resolve issues professionally and directly in-person
I Write Like – Check which famous writer you write like with this statistical analysis tool, which analyzes your word choice and writing style and compares them with those of the famous writers.
Inside McKinsey – FT.com – The world’s most prestigious consultancy prides itself on its intellectual prowess and ethical standards. But this year, an insider trading scandal surrounding former McKinsey luminaries has left staff and alumni reeling
Freakonomics » The Way We Teach Math, Sciences, and Languages Is Wrong – Despite spending 5 percent of the hours that I spent in school, with the self-study method I became far more competent in the language.
Codes from the Underground – What if SMTP and Sinatra Had a Baby? – smtproutes is what you’d get if Sinatra and SMTP had a baby. It’s not an email server with a capital S. smtproutes is a lightweight framework for rapidly prototyping web-services on top of SMTP.

Links for November 9th through November 13th

Posted on November 13, 2011 by Vinny

The End of Borders and the Future of Books – Businessweek – An inside look at the real reasons for the once-beloved chain's demise
New features and improvements in Hibernate 4.0 – New features and improvements in Hibernate 4.0
Hibernate Core Migration Guide : 4.0 – Get ready for Hibernate 4.0 with this Hibernate core migration guide.
Google Web Toolkit Blog: GWT and Dart – Meanwhile, rest assured that GWT will continue to be a productive and reliable way to build the most ambitious web apps — and even games like Angry Birds. Key projects within Google rely on GWT every day, and we plan to continue improving (and open-sourcing) GWT based on their real-world needs
Migrating from Ext GWT 2.x to 3.0 – Migrating from Ext GWT 2.x to 3.0 presentation from @darrellmeyer of Sencha.
Foreigners Don’t Take IT Jobs, They Create Them – Global-cio – Executive insights/interviews – Informationweek – Research shows that immigrant-founded companies generate billions in revenue and employ hundreds of thousands of Americans, so why do so many people want to seal our borders?
Kundera – A JPA 2.0 compliant Object-Datastore Mapping Library for NoSQL Datastores – The idea behind Kundera is to make working with NoSQL Databases drop-dead simple and fun.

Links for October 8th through October 11th

Posted on October 11, 2011 by Vinny

JavaOne: Comparing Java Web Frameworks – Finally, he finished with an interesting thought – that one of the main scalability issues with any web framework is people i.e. the competencies and preferences of the developers on the team.
Comparing Mongo DB and Couch DB – MongoDB – We are getting a lot of questions "how are mongo db and couch different?" It's a good question: both are document-oriented databases with schemaless JSON-style object data storage. Both products have their place — we are big believers that databases are specializing and "one size fits all" no longer applies.
Why Dart is not the language of the future – Dart fails to provides the advantages of static languages, without compensating by the flexibility of dynamic languages. Nothing has been learned from the dynamic language renaissance of the last ten years; nothing from the functional world; nothing even from the slick concurrency model of Go and its goroutines, also from Google.
So I think it's a step backwards in language design. With Node.js and Coffeescript around, and the programming paradigms they allow, Dart looks already obsolete and inadapted.
minuteproject – WS-JEE is minuteproject track to quickly have a webservice based on JAX-WS on top of a backend with JPA2 layer – WS-JEE is minuteproject track to quickly have a webservice based on JAX-WS on top of a backend with JPA2 layer
The new iPhone portfolio and implications on ASP | asymco – The iPhone is now available as five different variants with 10 different price points. Prices and options may vary by country, but I took the US portfolio as the baseline and illustrated it:
Apple’s Next Big Thing Already Here: Siri More Than Speech Recognition, Analyst Asserts – Forbes – Siri is unique because it meshes voice recognition capabilities with both sophisticated artificial intelligence capabilities and tight integration with the phone’s other software — such as its calendar and address book — and its GPS system
Review: 4 Java clouds face off | Application Development – InfoWorld – CloudBees, Google App Engine, Red Hat OpenShift, and VMware Cloud Foundry reveal the pleasures and perils of coding on a public cloud platform
Chrome Remote Desktop BETA – Chrome Web Store – Chrome Remote Desktop BETA is the first installment on a capability allowing users to remotely access another computer through the Chrome browser or a Chromebook.

Links for September 17th through September 20th

Posted on September 20, 2011 by Vinny

Video: Running Java Web Apps on the Cloud – Here is a quick screencast that shows how to instantly deploy Java web applications on the cloud with Heroku.
New application layering and persistence choices in Spring Roo 1.2 | SpringSource Team Blog – The newly-released Spring Roo 1.2.0.M1 (see announcement) includes frequently requested support for architectural layers which can be tailored to the needs of the application. This article provides an overview of Roo's new service and repository layer features.
India to topple Japan as world’s 3rd-largest economy – The Times of India – India might become the world's third largest economy in 2011 by overtaking Japan in terms of gross domestic product (GDP)
Apple – iPad in Business – St. Louis Urgent Cares: iPad makes the rounds with physicians. – Dr. Saggar agrees. "iPad lets us be human beings when we’re with patients," he says, "instead of someone who comes in for just a few seconds and then walks out. For a medical practice, I think using iPad is a no-brainer."
The Most Patriotic Thing You Can Do « blog maverick – So be Patriotic. Go out there and get rich. Get so obnoxiously rich that when that tax bill comes , your first thought will be to choke on how big a check you have to write. Your 2nd thought will be “what a great problem to have”, and your 3rd should be a recognition that in paying your taxes you are helping to support millions of Americans that are not as fortunate as you.
10 things to remember about Netflix while scratching your head about Qwikster – SplatF – 10 things to remember about Netflix while scratching your head about Qwikster
Netflix investors overreact to new forecast: The streaming numbers are what matters – SplatF – Here’s the thing, though. The future of Netflix is in its streaming business — not its business of mailing DVDs to people via the U.S. Postal Service. And Netflix only trimmed its forecast for streaming customers by 0.2 million, or 1%. The biggest cut, meanwhile, is 0.8 million DVD-only subscribers, or 27% of that customer base. But that’s Netflix’s old business, not its new one.

Links for August 28th through September 8th

Posted on September 9, 2011 by Vinny

GOP Presidential candidates talk about science is like listening to children talk about sex – Listening to GOP Presidential candidates talk about science is like listening to children talk about sex: They know it exists, they have strong opinions about what it might mean, but they don't have a clue what it's actually about.
Nick Farina – Git Is Simpler Than You Think – For me, understanding the structure of the object database was my Eureka moment for Git. After that, I could start to understand not just how Git worked, but why
Thinking about the Social Enterprise – confused of calcutta – As customers begin to reorganise businesses around themselves, there will be many problems to solve, problems of federation and interoperability and portability. Problems that have been obfuscated in the past by incumbents with vested interests. Problems that will be solved by the Social Enterprise.
Akamai thrives in the spirit of its lost founder – The Boston Globe – Akamai is bringing its customers into cloud computing, mobile computing, data security, and the delivery of HD video. And with 95,000 servers in 72 countries, and 2,200 employees, the company delivers 15 to 30 percent of all Web traffic worldwide.
Why Summer Vacations (and the Internet) Make You More Productive – Derek Thompson – Business – The Atlantic – People who complain about presidential vacations should get out more. Indeed, they might be better workers for it. The science of productivity tells us breaks matter more than overtime.
Why developers should be force-fed state machines – Shopify – Hopefully, reading this text has made you more aware of state machines and you will be applying them more often when developing a web application.
Design by Contract in Java with Google – Design by Contract is a powerful approach for building simple and robust software. Contracts for Java isn't the first attempt to bring this approach to Java, but it's a simple and powerful implementation that might become a standard tool for ensuring Java software validity.
BoltJS – UI Framework from Facebook for creating Javascript mobile apps. – BoltJS is a UI framework designed by Facebook to be compact, fast and powerful. It is written entirely in JavaScript and runs in the browser, needing no server backend.
H-P’s One-Year Plan – WSJ.com – Dumping it is a beautiful absurdity that one analyst, Jayson Noland of Robert W. Baird & Co., described as "like McDonald's getting out of the hamburger business."
madrobby/keymaster – keymaster.js is a simple micro-library for defining and dispatching keyboard shortcuts. It has no dependencies – keymaster.js is a simple micro-library for defining and dispatching keyboard shortcuts. It has no dependencies

Vinny Carpenter’s blog

{ “passion”: “software development” }

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