Links for September 23rd through September 27th

Posted on September 28, 2013 by Vinny

The HTML5 Scorecard: The Good, The Bad and the Ugly in iOS 7 – We’ve been testing the final release of iOS 7 over the last few days against our usual battery of HTML5 tests. Normally we’re effusive about new releases of iOS to the point of fanboy-dom, but this time, and for the first time ever, we’re disappointed in t
Safari on iOS 7 and HTML5: problems, changes and new APIs – In this post I’ll show you the new APIs and abilities and most of the problems that you will need to deal with right now if you have a website or a webapp.
Red Hat brings JBoss middleware to PaaS cloud | ZDNet – The next phase of Red Hat's PaaS strategy focuses on the delivery of key additional Red Hat JBoss Middleware technologies in the cloud as services powered by OpenShift. This will include new integration capabilities, business process management (BPM), and mobile push notifications
Microsoft’s open source BrowserSwarm tool lets developers test JavaScript frameworks across all major browsers – The Next Web – Microsoft today launched BrowserSwarm, an open source tool to help Web developers automate testing of their JavaScript frameworks and libraries across devices and browsers. To take advantage, all you have to do is sign up for free here.
Adventures in RubyMotion: The App Store in 2 weeks – Chris Zetter – RubyMotion is be a great choice for anyone who has Ruby knowledge that wants to build for iOS and OSX. I’ve since opened Xcode again and the Cocoa understanding I got from RubyMotion has made it feel a lot less daunting.
Build Ext JS and Sencha Touch Applications Faster with Sencha Architect 3 on Vimeo – Architect 3 enables developers to build robust applications quickly and easily with new features such as templates, user extensions, code completion and theming. Watch this 1 hour recording where they will demo the latest Architect 3 release and show you how to build your mobile and desktop apps even faster.
AngularJS is amazing… and hard as hell – It's ok if you don't really understand AngularJS all at once. Getting started with the software is completely different that actually using for real applications. It just really takes time, more than you think it will to really get AngularJS.
The Second Coming of Java: Clinton-Era Relic Returns to Rule Web – In the summer of 2011, Bob Lee — the chief technology officer at Square and a former engineer at Google — announced at a prominent software conference that the web was “on the cusp of a Java renaissance.” Two years later, this renaissance is upon us. Like Twitter, many other companies have realized that Java is particularly well suited to building web services that can stand up to the massive amounts of traffic streaming across the modern internet.
Why I Hacked Apple’s TouchID, And Still Think It Is Awesome – Despite being hacked, TouchID is an exciting step forwards for smartphone security and I stand by our earlier blog on fingerprint security. Hacking TouchID gave me respect for its design and some ideas about how we can make it strong moving forward. I hope
How iOS 7’s new APIs change the game for business – Apple's new content-focused management APIs for iOS and OS X should further reduce security doubts of IT admins and CSOs, while keeping users empowered

Links for July 11th through July 26th

Posted on July 27, 2013 by Vinny

What’s New in Eucalyptus 3.3: AWS-compatible Private Clouds for Dev & QA – Review the latest AWS-compatible features in Eucalyptus 3.3, including Auto Scaling, Elastic Load Balancing, CloudWatch, and more.
Learn why Eucalyptus is the ideal solution for developing and testing your apps built for AWS and how hybrid usage between Eucalyptus and AWS will make Dev and QA more agile and productive
Services, Not Devices is the best way forward for Microsoft – The solution to the secular collapse of the PC market is not to seek to prop up Windows and force an integrated solution that no one is asking for; rather, the goal should be the exact opposite. Maximum effort should be focused on making Office, Server, and all the other products less subservient to Windows and more in line with consumer needs and the reality of computing in 2013.
OpenStack’s Future Depends on Embracing Amazon. Now – The time has come for the OpenStack community to choose a public cloud compatibility strategy that will position the project for dominance in the private and hybrid cloud markets.
Udacity Blog: New Course: The Design of Everyday Things – Design 101: The Design of Everyday Things is based upon the new edition of The Design of Everyday Things (revised and expanded: to be published in Fall 2013).
More Git and GitHub Secrets – This is the brand-new, action-packed sequel to the original Git and GitHub Secrets talk I did in 2012. For one, it has more emoji.
ZeroMQ instead of HTTP, for internal services (August Lilleaas’ blog) – This article describes how to use ZeroMQ for RPC calls to internal services. HTTP is the canonical choice for public facing services. But for RPC to internal services in systems composed of many small parts, you're probably better off using ZeroMQ instead
This Explains Everything: 192 Thinkers Each Select the Most Elegant Explanation of How the World Works | Brain Pickings – In 2012, the question Brockman posed, proposed by none other than Steven Pinker, was “What is your favorite deep, elegant, or beautiful explanation?” The answers, representing an eclectic mix of 192 (alas, overwhelmingly male) minds spanning psychology, qu
Google and Microsoft spent a combined $3.4B on infrastructure last quarter — Tech News and Analysis – Microsoft invested $1.79 billion in “property and equipment” during its fiscal fourth quarter, while Google’s second quarter saw it invest $1.61 billion
Divshot 1.0: Visual Front-End Development for Bootstrap and Beyond – Today we are proud to take the wraps off of Divshot 1.0. This next stage of our visual HTML builder for Bootstrap (and Foundation, and Ratchet) is simple like a mockup tool, powerful like a text editor, and packs more new features than you can fit in a <marquee> tag.
Tableau takes its data-analysis software to the cloud – Tableau has gotten into the SaaS game with a cloud-based version of its popular analytics software. Called Tableau Online, it’s essentially the company’s server-based version delivered as a service.
Puppet Labs acquires Cloudsmith to ease devops’ automation burden – Puppet Labs is acquiring Cloudworks to make it easier for devops people to roll out software updates on servers configured exactly the way they should be, on premise or in the cloud.
Review: Puppet Enterprise 3.0 pulls more strings – Version 3.0 of Puppet Labs' configuration automation tool shines with speed boosts, orchestration improvements, and deeper support for Windows servers
The future of Linux: Evolving everywhere | Open Source Software – InfoWorld – Cemented as a cornerstone of IT, the open source OS presses on in the face of challenges to its ethos and technical prowess
Why Microsoft’s reorganization is a bad idea – In my (very-biased) opinion, I believe collaboration is fundamentally broken at Microsoft. It is all about politics, not great outcomes, and that is absolute death in a functional organization, which has nothing but collaboration to hold together cross-fun
The Great Gatsby Curve: Inequality and the End of Upward Mobility – Is the American economic system fundamentally unequal, perpetuating income inequality and stymieing upward economic mobility? Or do families — by virtue of their differing genes and values — reproduce income inequality?
Using Information About Our Network to Remove Monitoring Noise – In cases like this we need to make our monitoring system more aware of the dependencies exist between these checks so that we can eliminate the noise. To do so we use a number of open source technologies:
Do Things that Don’t Scale – Actually startups take off because the founders make them take off. There may be a handful that just grew by themselves, but usually it takes some sort of push to get them going. A good metaphor would be the cranks that car engines had before they got elec
Why mobile web apps are slow | Sealed Abstract – this is the most complete and comprehensive treatment of the idea that many iOS developers have–that mobile web apps are slow and will continue to be slow for the forseeable future.
One big threat to cybersecurity: IT geeks can’t talk to management – Quartz – A new report on the state of risk-based cybersecurity management helps explain why IT employees and their corporate bosses don’t see eye to eye about hacking and other computer-based threats.
The report, titled “Are Security Metrics Too Complicated for Management?” is the latest installment of an ongoing series by Tripwire and the Ponemon Institute.
Minified.js – A Truly Lightweight JavaScript Library – Minified.js is a client-side JavaScript library, comparable to jQuery and MooTools in scope. Its features include DOM manipulation, animation, events, cookies and HTTP requests.
Hibernate adds OSGi Support – Hibernate, the popular Java ORM implementation, has recently added OSGi support, enabling Hibernate to be used both as a standalone Jar and also in an OSGi runtime
Why is nobody using SSL client certificates? – In the current state, this excellent idea is rendered completely useless by the awful usability and the completely detached nature: This is a browser feature. It's browser dependent without a way for the sites to control it – to guide users through steps.
Do the right thing, Wait to get fired – But greatness rarely happens by following rules, process and structure. That is why companies also want to find employees ready to take risks, make decisions, try new things, move fast and even break things.
Three big takeaways from the Microsoft reorg | CITEworld – Our new strategy will put us right at the intersection of the consumerization of IT and the evolving needs of the enterprise customer, delivering the devices that employees want and the productivity, security and control that IT managers need.
Top 10 Ext JS Development Practices to Avoid | Blog | Sencha – Based on a review of our work over the last few years, we came up with this list of the top 10 development practices we recommend you avoid in your Ext JS apps.

Links for May 27th through May 30th

Posted on May 30, 2013 by Vinny

Javascript Framework Popularity | Caliper Blog – Interest in Javascript MV* frameworks has been taking off. Meteor, Ember, Angular, and Backbone are all really popular projects on Github. Measuring popularity is pretty tricky but a good indicator might be the number of Github followers
Server Sales Are Down As Cloud Apps Abound At The Expense Of IBM, Enterprise Giants | TechCrunch – Gartner Research reports worldwide server sales are down 5 percent for the first quarter of the year, with IBM, HP and other members of the top five taking the biggest hit. Server shipments declined 0.7 percent.
The Elm Programming Language – Elm is a functional reactive programming (FRP) language that compiles to HTML, CSS, and JS. FRP is a concise and elegant way to create highly interactive applications and avoid callbacks.
Elm at Prezi: Functional Reactive Programming for The Web – Engineering at Prezi – The goal is to provide a viable, open-source language that’s both an alternative and complement to JavaScript for front-end development. Here’s why we think Elm is that language.
Mary Meeker’s 2013 Internet Trends – The latest edition of the annual Internet Trends report finds continued robust online growth. There are now 2.4 billion Internet users around the world, and the total continues to grow apace
My takeaways from “Clean Code” — On Coding — Medium – There are many more principles, patterns, and practices in the book. This list summarizes what stood out for me most. I think any serious programmer will pick up something useful from reading this book. Highly recommended!
Global Tablet Shipments to Outpace PCs by 2015, IDC Says – Bloomberg – Tablet shipments are expected to surge 59 percent to 229.3 million units this year, from 144.5 million in 2012, Framingham, Massachusetts-based IDC said in a statement today. PC sales will decline 7.8 percent this year, IDC said in a separate statement, wo
NetSuite and Workday Rivalry Carries On an Old Tech Feud – NYTimes.com – If the Hatfields and McCoys lived in Silicon Valley, they’d be fighting with piles of cash and lines of software code instead of knives and shotguns. And the fight would be over who wins the most customers in the computer industry’s growing “cloud” of soft
Wintersmith – Flexible, minimalistic, multi-platform static site generator built on top of node.js. – Flexible, minimalistic, multi-platform static site generator built on top of node.js.
Google Annotations Gallery – A rich set of annotations for developers to express themselves – The Google Annotations Gallery is an exciting new Java open source library that provides a rich set of annotations for developers to express themselves. Do you find the standard Java annotations dry and lackluster? Have you ever resorted to leaving message

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 December 29th through January 3rd

Posted on January 3, 2012 by Vinny

InfoQ: Graeme Rocher on Grails 2.0 and Polyglot Persistence – In this interview recorded at JavaOne 2011 Conference, Srini Penchikala talks to Grails project lead Graeme Rocher about Grails 2.0 features, polyglot persistence paradigm and how Grails supports it. Graeme also talks about the tool support and the upcoming features in Grails 3.0 release.
Spring / GWT Software Architecture for scalable applications – Part 2 « Fancy UI – During this article you will learn how to build efficiently and quickly the backend (based upon the solution described on part one) that is going to be used later by any kind of clients (GWT, Android,…). My aim is to guide step by step on building an example application and gives you all the best practices on each step to achieve high quality code.
InfoQ: Keynote: Predictability and Measurement with Kanban – David J. Anderson explains how to use predictability, measurement and change management to balance the factors of observed capability, staffing, and delivery targets to achieve predictable outcomes.
InfoQ: SOA and Cloud: What is in store for 2012? – Traditionally on the brink of a new year, independent analysts and experts share their predictions and this time around we are sharing some relevant ones in the SOA and Cloud space for 2012. This year the common themes underpinning all SOA and Cloud predictions are the rapid changes occuring in Big Data and the consumerization of IT through mobile and open APIs.
InfoQ: Things I Wish I’d Known – Rod Johnson shares some of the lessons he learned as an entrepreneur – Things I Wish I'd Known – Rod Johnson shares some of the lessons he learned as an entrepreneur
davidsalter.com: VMware Introduces vFabric 5, an Integrated Application Platform for Virtual and Cloud Environments – vFabric reportedly allows developers to build cloud applications up to 50% faster with Spring that can be run on premise or in the cloud.
InfoQ: Navigating the Maze of EA Certifications – There are over a dozen Enterprise Architecture certifications available and they are becoming increasingly critical when hiring and evaluating architects. Microsoft’s Mike Walker categorized these certifications into a Reference Guide that can help architects better understand which certification(s) to pursue.
Mike’s Site: Unit Testing Named Queues: Spring 3+maven2+Google App Engine – Problem, you have a task that you know can take more than 30 seconds to complete, what do you do? What if this task needs to be triggered every day at a specific time? Google provides several mechanisms to to solve just this problem, queues and scheduled task, respectively.
Just a little Python: MongoDB’s Write Lock – I was curious about the performance impact of the write lock and the improvement of lock-with-yield, so I decided to do a little benchmark, MongoDB 1.8 versus MongoDB 2.0
Dropbox Automator Is Like IFTTT For Dropbox | TechCrunch – Like IFTTT, Dropbox Automator is capable of triggering a similar series of actions, based on what kind of files have been added to your Dropbox folders.
Dropbox: the new file system of the web | Collaborable – The Dropbox REST API is going to forever change the way people interact with web apps for business. It allows your web app to put and pull data from any user’s desktop or mobile device.

Links for December 27th through December 28th

Posted on December 28, 2011 by Vinny

Transaction configuration with JPA and Spring 3.1 – This is the fifth of a series of articles about Persistence with Spring. This article will focus on the configuration of transactions with Spring 3.1 and JPA.
Java 7: Understanding the Phaser, a flexible thread synchronization mechanism – Java 7 introduces a flexible thread synchronization mechanism called Phaser. If you need to wait for threads to arrive before you can continue or start another set of tasks, then Phaser is a good choice.
CloudTMP » How to deploy a neo4j instance in Amazon EC2 in 10 minutes – Neo4j is a high-performance, NOSQL graph database with all the features of a mature and robust database. In this post I will explain how to deploy a neo4j instance in Amazon EC2 web service.
Significant Software Development Developments of 2011 | Javalobby – 2011 was yet another year that saw significant developments and advances in the software development industry. The lists compiled in this post indicate how broadly spread these advances were, affecting different programming languages, different deployment environments, and different stakeholders.
Groovy, the Python of Java – Groovy is respectful of and cooperative with Java itself. One of its primary design goals is to live alongside existing Java code, even while Groovy’s syntax far surpasses that of Java. In this respect, Groovy plays a very similar role in the Java ecosystem that Python plays in the C ecosystem
InfoQ: Apache Tika 1.0 Allows Easy Text Extraction for Java – The Apache Tika project aims to provide a single API for extracting data and detecting language from arbitrary input formats, such as text documents, spreadsheets, PDFs or images. Even audio or video input formats are supported to a certain degree.
InfoQ: Concurrent Caching at Google – Charles Fry presents MapMaker, an in-memory caching solution on the JVM, discussing its API and implementation evolution along with internal details.
5 Reasons why the technical debt in Java EE projects is much higher than in COBOL projects – The CodeBrickie – While the basic notion of higher technical debt in Java projects compared to COBOL may be certainly true at the time the snapshot was taken for some good reasons, I doubt the reliability of an almighty automatic code analysis tool which is able to produce such testimonies about overall quality of projects with very different technical and organizational backgrounds.
Jodd | Jerry – The Unbearable Lightness of Java – Jerry is a jQuery in Java. Jerry is a fast and concise Java Library that simplifies HTML document parsing, traversing and manipulating. Jerry is designed to change the way that you parse HTML content
Facebook Poised to Lead Biggest U.S. Internet IPO Year Since 1999 Bubble – Bloomberg – With Facebook considering the largest Internet IPO on record and regulatory filings showing that at least 14 other Web-related companies are planning sales, the industry may raise $11 billion next year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. That would be the most since $18.5 billion of IPOs in 1999, just before the dot-com bubble burst.
URI.js – URLs in Javascript – URI.js is a javascript library for working with URLs. It offers a "jQuery-style" API (Fluent Interface, Method Chaining) to read and write all regular components and a number of convenience methods like .directory() and .authority().
Microsoft in a better place than many people think, concludes Bernstein report – GeekWire – A recent Bernstein Research report says that Microsoft is actually in a good position to manage threats such as tablets and cloud computing and avoid a "doomsday" situation
Coming to Terms with the Consumerization of IT – R “Ray” Wang – Harvard Business Review – IT and business leaders need to work together and operate in parallel. If IT slows down the business capability to innovate, the company will suffer as new business models emerge and infrastructure will fail to keep up. If business moves ahead of IT in technology, then the company fails because IT will spend years cleaning up technology messes
Oh, Charlie, you should have been here for Christmas — Scobleizer – It shows why Charlie is so wrong: apps do matter and matter big time and TODAY matter more than carriers.

Vinny Carpenter’s blog

{ “passion”: “software development” }

Tag Archives: consumerization