Links for November 16th through November 21st

Posted on November 21, 2012 by Vinny

The Web engineer’s online toolbox – I wanted to compile a list of online, Web-based tools that Web engineers can use for their work in development, testing, debugging and documentation
Windows 8 — Disappointing Usability for Both Novice & Power Users (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox) – Hidden features, reduced discoverability, cognitive overhead from dual environments, and reduced power from a single-window UI and low information density. Too bad.
Continuuity’s SDK makes building Big Data apps blazing fast – Continuuity’s SDK makes building Big Data apps blazing fast. You build apps in your IDE, then run, test and debug them locally on a fully featured single-node version of the Continuuity AppFabric
Therapist-free therapy – Cognitive-bias modification may put the psychiatrist’s couch out of business | The Economist – A new kind of treatment may, though, mean he does not have to. Cognitive-bias modification (CBM) appears to be effective after only a few 15-minute sessions, and involves neither drugs nor the discussion of feelings. It does not even need a therapist. All it requires is sitting in front of a computer and using a program that subtly alters harmful thought patterns.
US patent chief to software patent critics: “Give it a rest already” | Ars Technica – David Kappos, the head of the United States Patent and Trademark Office, offered a strong defense of software patents in a Tuesday address at the Center for American Progress. Kappos touted several provisions of the America Invents Act (AIA), which he argued would allow the patent office to weed out low-quality software and business method patents.
Brian LeRoux on Mobile Web vs. Native, PhoneGap Build, Firefox OS – Brian LeRoux talks about the PhoneGap Build service, mobile web apps vs native, Facebook's switch to a native iOS app, PhoneGap adoption in emerging markets, Firefox OS, Adobe's web tools and more.
ModelMapper – Simple, Intelligent, Object Mapping. – ModelMapper is an intelligent object mapping library that automatically maps objects to each other. It uses a convention based approach while providing a simple refactoring safe API for handling specific use cases.
Keynote: SOA, Cloud Computing and the Semantic Web at NASA – Hook Hua discusses how semantic Web technologies are being leveraged by cloud-based SOA to improve interoperability within NASA enterprise boundaries and between NASA and external organizations.
Infrastructure as Code – Puppet, Chef and CloudFormation – helpful for automating every infrastructure operations. – Gareth Rushgrove offers advice, code samples, and introduces tools – Puppet, Chef and CloudFormation – helpful for automating every infrastructure operations.

Links for April 30th through May 4th

Posted on May 4, 2012 by Vinny

Magic Quadrant for Mobile Application Development Platforms – Mobile application development is a very important and strategic IT topic. In 2012, Gartner is making major updates to this research to reflect market convergence. We analyze platforms that allow enterprises to build, support and manage mobile applications for both customers and employees.
Momentum for Sencha Builds as Company Expands Globally, Adding New Staff and Locations to Serve its Growing Application Developer Ecosystem – Sencha was recently identified as a Visionary in the Gartner "Magic Quadrant for Mobile Application Development Platforms"
Full Samsung Galaxy S III launch event now online | The Verge – If you weren't around for our live coverage of yesterday's Galaxy S III event, it's fair to say that you missed quite a lot. Luckily, Samsung has uploaded the entire event, along with some close-ups, additional hands-on videos, and interviews that you wouldn't have seen yesterday
RubyMotion – Ruby for iOS – RubyMotion is a revolutionary toolchain for iOS that lets you quickly develop and test native iOS applications for iPhone or iPad, all using the awesome Ruby language you know and love.
A Relevant Tale: How Google Killed Inktomi – Diego Basch’s Blog – In the end, Inktomi was acquired by Yahoo for 250M. What happened? Among other things, Google. Grab some popcorn and enjoy this story
LinkedIn For iPad: using local storage for snappy mobile apps | LinkedIn Engineering – We've found HTML 5 local storage to be an effective way to improve an application's performance, both in terms of time and space requirements
You’ll never believe how LinkedIn built its new iPad app (exclusive) | VentureBeat – Yes, only one screen in the entire LinkedIn iPad app is actually native. The rest is good ol’ HTML5-based mobile web technology, running in the browser and leaning heavily on Node.js.
InfoQ: Architecting in the Gaps – Eoin Woods suggests creating the architecture of a system by discovering the interactions between the components and focusing on the boundaries, helping with defining the interfaces and interactions.
Real world feedback from a Java dev using Scala | Cape Coder – Since I fall squarely within the target audience for Scala I’ve decided to share my experiences and impressions using Scala from a Java programmer’s perspective. Overall I’m very impressed by Scala and plan to use it more, but do have plenty of constructive criticism which I provide at the end of this blog pos
GitHub Enterprise 11.10.260 Release · GitHub – We're excited to announce the latest release of GitHub Enterprise. The response to the product since its launch last November has blown us away and we'd like to tell you about a few of the great things we've been working on to make it even better.
The Vision for "QlikView.next" – Donald Farmer presented the themes for “QlikView.next,” the code name for the next generation of the QlikView Business Discovery platform.
Here’s Why Google and Facebook Might Completely Disappear in the Next 5 Years – Forbes – With the rate that the tech world is moving these days, there are good reasons to think Google & Facebook might be gone completely in 5 – 8 years. Not bankrupt gone, but MySpace gone. And there’s some academic theory to back up that view, along with casual observations from recent history
Java creator James Gosling: ‘Google totally slimed Sun’ – Gosling said that Sun was "wronged" by Google and that Oracle is right to sue Google for the way it used Java code in Android.
Why Postgres – Very often recently I find myself explaining why Postgres is so great. In an effort to save myself a bit of time in repeating this, I though it best to consolidate why Postgres is so great and dispel some of the historical arguments against it.

Links for April 21st through April 26th

Posted on April 26, 2012 by Vinny

MongoDB and Spring Data » Mathew’s Thoughts! – This blog will give the reader a decent start with writing a Spring-based application that writes to MongoDB, retrieves data via queries and finally runs a simple MapReduce query. All this using Spring Data MongoDB support.
Former Sun CEO says Google’s Android didn’t need license for Java APIs | Mobile – CNET News – Jonathan Schwartz testifies that Java APIs were not considered proprietary or protected by Sun, as long as Google didn't use the Java name, countering Oracle's claims that Google infringed on its intellectual property.
Twitter CLI – A command-line power tool for Twitter. – The CLI attempts to mimic the Twitter SMS commands wherever possible, however it offers many more commands than are available via SMS.
Why Tablets Will Become Our Primary Computing Device | Forrester Blogs – All these reasons add up to our prediction that tablets will become the preferred, primary device for millions of people around the world, which is in the just-published report "Tablets Will Rule The Future Personal Computing Landscape."
VMware buys big data startup Cetas — Cloud Computing News – Cetas is the logical next step, a big data application that’s designed to run on virtual resources – specifically Amazon Web Services and VMware’s vSphere
Git vs Mercurial: Why Git? | Atlassian Blogs – Hopefully this article and the previous one exploring the advantages of Mercurial over Git will illuminate some of the strengths and weaknesses of both systems. Our next blog post in this series will provide a “cheat sheet” for users moving from the centralized version control system Subversion to Git or Mercurial.
Unforgiven: The consequences of profit failure in mobile phones | asymco – Until and unless these endangered companies solve the dilemma of having the wrong business model at the wrong time, the chances are that they will not be forgiven for market failure.
CRaSH a shell to extend the Java Platform – The Common Reusable SHell (CRaSH) deploys in a Java runtime and provides interactions with the JVM. Commands are written in Groovy and can be developped at runtime making the extension of the shell very easy with fast development cycle.
Raising Software Architecture. 9 Troubles and 3 Answers – One cannot embrace the unembraceable and deeply focus on all architectural dimensions at the same time. However, you can tailor your approach to your current situation and most pressing challenges.
Modern Web Development Part 1 – The Webkit Inspector – The blog post is the first in a series of posts that attempts to outline what a modern web development toolchain looks like and how to use the best-of-breed tools for efficient, effective development.
DON’T READ this Less CSS tutorial – must read from @verekia’s blog – We’ve seen a lot of amazing features in this tutorial, and I hope it made you want to start using Less. I personally think Less is a real game changer for web development, and I cannot even consider going back to pure CSS. Less is like CSS5 in 2011!
Kalendae – A framework agnostic javascript date picker – Kalendae is an attempt to do something that nobody has yet been able to do: make a date picker that doesn't suck. Kalendae provides the following features:

Links for April 16th through April 21st

Posted on April 21, 2012 by Vinny

iTextEditors – iPhone and iPad text/code editors and writing tools compared – Comprehensive comparison of iOS text-editing apps out there. Via @daringfireball
Android, Java, and the tech behind Oracle v. Google (FAQ) | Business Tech – CNET News – In essence, Google sidestepped Sun — and by the way managed to build its Java knock-off into the stunningly successful foundation for smartphone programs that Sun only dreamed of.
InfoQ: Building Offline Access to Websites Using HTML5 – Israel Hilerio presents how to cache data locally with HTML5 technologies: IndexedDB, App Cache, DOM Storage and File API.
Java IAQ: Infrequently Answered Questions – A question is infrequently answered either because few people know the answer or because it is about an obscure, subtle point (but a point that may be crucial to you). I thought I had invented the term, but it also shows up at the very informative About.com Urban Legends site. There are lots of Java FAQs around, but this is the only Java IAQ.
TodoMVC – A common learning application for popular JavaScript MV* frameworks – To help solve this problem, we created TodoMVC – a project which offers the same Todo application implemented using MV* concepts in most of the popular JavaScript MV* frameworks of today.
Cloud Server and Virtual Server Hosting powered by Openstack – The next generation Rackspace Cloud powered by OpenStack, backed by Fanatical Support
Modern Web Architecture: The HTML5 Web Storage | Technical Advices – The Web Storage increases the scalability of the web applications on the server level and on the network level. In this article, I will show you how to work with the HTML5 Web Storage feature.
JRockit jrcmd tutorial – Java Code Geeks – I hope this article has helped you understand you can leverage the JRockit jrcmd tool for quick Java Heap analysis

Links for February 17th through February 19th

Posted on February 19, 2012 by Vinny

Groklaw – Oracle Drops Final Claim in Patent ‘476 and Google Moves to Strike Portions of 3rd Oracle Damages Report ~pj – I feel very much the same about Oracle's patents, and I have from the start wondered if any of them are valid, let alone worth millions in damages. So, to me, the risk has been very much on Oracle's side, that it might lose all its patents in this case.
The Great Web Framework Shootout | Curia – Welcome to the great web framework shootout. On this page you will find benchmark results comparing the performance of a few of the most popular F/OSS web frameworks in use today.
Online Text to Speech | ReadSpeaker – Get a spoken version of your online content so that your users can listen to what you have to say.
The NoSQL movement – How to think about choosing a database. – For years, the relational default has kept developers from understanding their real back-end requirements. The NoSQL movement has given us the opportunity to explore what we really require from our databases, and to find out what we already knew: there is no one-size-fits-all solution.
Agile Succeeds Three Times More Often | Mike Cohn’s Blog – The agile process is the universal remedy for software development project failure. Software applications developed through the agile process have three times the success rate of the traditional waterfall method and a much lower percentage of time and cost overruns
How to Analyze Java Thread Dumps | CUBRID Blog – Here I will explain what threads are in Java, their types, how they are created, how to manage them, how you can dump threads from a running application, and finally how you can analyze them and determine the bottleneck or blocking threads. This article is a result of long experience in Java application debugging.
MIT OpenCourseWare | Economics – Principles of Microeconomics – Principles of Microeconomics is an introductory undergraduate course that teaches the fundamentals of microeconomics. This course introduces microeconomic concepts and analysis, supply and demand analysis, theories of the firm and individual behavior, competition and monopoly, and welfare economics
Jease – The Java CMS with Ease – Jease is an Open Source Content-Management-System which is driven by the power of Java. Jease means "Java with Ease", so Jease promises to keep simple things simple and the hard things (j)easy.
GroupBy in MongoDB – Operations in the New Aggregation Framework – In version 2.1, MongoDB is introducing a new aggregation framework that will make it much easier to obtain the kind of results SQL group-by is used for, without having to write custom JavaScript.
InfoQ: Mobile HTML5 Design and Development, with David Kaneda – David talks about the unique challenges facing developers building mobile HTML5 apps, especially on WebKit. He also outlines the recent developments on this field and how they empower a whole new genre of applications.
Xcode, GCC, and Homebrew – This is an incredible day for the Homebrew community. You can now setup a complete OS X develop environment with a single 171.7 MB package download. It's official. It's legal. It'll be maintained.

Links for August 15th through August 16th

Posted on August 16, 2011 by Vinny

How You Should Go About Learning NoSQL – NoSQL is a big world, and solutions vary in complexity and differentness. That's why I think MongoDB, which isn't very different, and Redis, which is different but very simple, are a great place to start.
Warrick – Recover Your Lost Website – Warrick is a free utility for reconstructing (or recovering) a website when a back-up is not available. Warrick will search the following web repositories for missing resources: Internet Archive, Google, Bing (formerly Live Search), and Yahoo.
Addressing Misconceptions about Google Web Toolkit – It appears that many people, including decision makers, are not fully aware of important GWT abilities and limitations. Many features in recent releases of GWT and related projects can be real game changers for the developers and for the end users. Here I am going to address common misconceptions and provide solutions to common issues.
How Linux mastered Wall Street | ITworld – Linux has become a dominant player in finance due to the OS kernel's ability to pass messages very quickly
Suck on it, AppleSoft — Google pulls a rope-a-dope | Real Dan Lyons Web Site – Does anyone really believe this $12.5 billion acquisition just got thrown together in the last few weeks as a response to the AppleSoft patent grabs? Doesn’t it seem likely that Google and Motorola started talking long before the Nortel auction?
mike.mainguy: Heroku is a bus, Engineyard is a car – Overall, I'd say Heroku is like taking the bus: if enough people want to go the same place at the same time, it's more economical. Engineyard is like buying a car: it's going to be a bit more expensive and you're going to need to know how to drive, but it is a much more flexible solution.
Stop Coddling the Super-Rich – NYTimes.com – While the poor and middle class fight for us in Afghanistan, and while most Americans struggle to make ends meet, we mega-rich continue to get our extraordinary tax breaks
Steven Poole: Goodbye, cruel Word – I weep at all the innocent electrons I wastefully killed over the years, sending those massive, lumbering Word documents through the internet. I apologise for my particle profligacy. I have learned my lesson. Goodbye, cruel Word.
Create unique websites without writing code | Muse (code name) – Create websites as easily as you create layouts for print. You can design and publish original HTML pages to the latest web standards without writing code. Now in beta, Muse makes it a snap to produce unique, professional websites.

Links for August 1st through August 5th

Posted on August 5, 2011 by Vinny

Martin Fowler on Software Patents – At a time when our future affluence depends so heavily on innovation, we have drifted toward a patent regime that not only fails to fulfil its justifying function, to incentivise innovation, but actively impedes innovation
Microsoft to focus on HTML5 and JavaScript for Office 15 extensions | ZDNet – Microsoft is guiding developers toward HTML5 and JavaScript for Windows 8 app development. It turns out he company also is pushing these Web technologies as key to extending Office 15 and Office 365.
JMS Browser – Browser JMS Queues and Topics – Send, view and browse your Messages in Queues and Topics easily from a Eclipse based user interface
Screenscraping from Java using jsoup – effective data gathering from websites « AMIS Technology blog – I came across a tool for screenscraping from Java, called jsoup – http://jsoup.org/. It turned out to be so incredibly easy to use – that I thouht I should share it.
jscep – Java implementation of the Simple Certificate Enrollment Protocol (SCEP) – Google Project Hosting – Java implementation of the Simple Certificate Enrollment Protocol (SCEP)
The President Surrenders on Debt Ceiling – NYTimes.com – How can American democracy work if whichever party is most prepared to be ruthless, to threaten the nation's economic security, gets to dictate policy? And the answer is, maybe it can't.
Nick Farina – An iOS Developer Takes on Android – Recently, we released the Android version of Meridian, our platform for building location-based apps. We didn't use one of these "Cross Platform!" tools like Titanium. We wrote it, from scratch, in Java, like you do in Android.
Idiomatic Layouts with Sencha Touch | Learn | Sencha – In this two-part series, we show how, with a single code-base, we can create an app which responds to these conventions, and which, through the use of the Sencha Touch 'application profiles' mechanism, delivers familiar user interfaces to both phone and tablet users.

Links for July 25th through July 29th

Posted on July 29, 2011 by Vinny

When Patents Attack! | This American Life – We take you inside this war, and tell the fascinating story of how an idea enshrined in the US constitution to promote progress and innovation, is now being used to do the opposite
InfoQ: Kanban System Design – Karl Scotland on Kanban as a way of creating a model improving a business’ capability to meet its purpose based on systems thinking, workflow, visualization, work in process, cadence, and learning.
InfoQ: NoSQL @ Netflix – Siddharth “Sid” Anand explains the technical details behind the move from Oracle used inside their data center to SimpleDB and S3 in the cloud, and from there to Cassandra.
InfoQ: Craft and Software Engineering – Glenn Vanderburg believes that software engineering and craftsmanship are not mutually exclusive, and there is synergy between them, explaining how to combine them in the software development process.
InfoQ: The Diary of a REST “Convert” – The conversation about SOA is a conversation about architecture – everything that we’ve talked about over the past decade applies just as equally when the Services are implemented using REST or Web Services on top of any protocol, infrastructure, or data schema.
GWT Mobile is a cross-platform mobile development tool using Google Web Toolkit – GWT Mobile is a cross-platform mobile development tool using Google Web Toolkit technology. It provides a set of UI widgets optimized for mobile devices, a ORM module to persist objects to the browser database, and a wrapper to access PhoneGap functions from GWT
GWT Mobile PhoneGap Showcase for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad on the iTunes App Store – GWT Mobile PhoneGap is a GWT wrapper of the PhoneGap Javascript library. It implements all the PhoneGap functions, and provides links to the PhoneGap API documentation. It is an indispensable app for PhoneGap programmers.
TeleHash / JSON + UDP + DHT = Freedom – A new wire protocol enabling applications to connect directly in a real-time and fully distributed manner, freeing them from relying on centralized datacenters
nowjs for Node – Directly call remote functions in Javascript – NowJS creates a magic namespace "now", accessible by server and client where functions and variables added to now are automatically synced, in real-time. Also allows you to call client functions from the server and server functions from client
NoSQL is What? | Jeremy Zawodny’s blog – I found myself reading NoSQL is a Premature Optimization a few minutes ago and threw up in my mouth a little. That article is so far off base that I’m not even sure where to start, so I guess I’ll go in order.

Daily del.icio.us for November 9th through November 22nd

Posted on November 22, 2010 by Vinny

Sencha offers HTML5 framework for mobile apps | Developer World – InfoWorld – Sencha began offering on Monday Sencha Touch, an HTML5-based mobile application development framework for touch-based devices. The company also detailed plans for an upgrade to its Ext JS JavaScript framework.
GWTCanvas – Provides cross Browser Vector Graphics support in the spirit of the Javascript canvas element API. – Provides cross Browser Vector Graphics support in the spirit of the Javascript canvas element API.
Supporting multi-touch events with GWT on mobile Safari | Just enough code to be dangerous – The goal is to be able to handle the touchstart, touchmove, touchend and touchcancel events provided by mobile Safari by writing standard GWT code
500 Internal Server Error – 500 Internal Server Error
Google Voice for iPhone – Official Google Mobile Blog – Today we’re taking the Google Voice experience on the iPhone to a whole new level with the launch of the official Google Voice for iPhone app.
ThinkUp: Social Media Insights Engine – ThinkUp captures your posts, replies, retweets, friends, followers, and links on social networks like Twitter and Facebook. We'll be adding more networks in the future. ThinkUp stores your social data in a database you control, and makes it easy to search, sort, filter, export, and visualize in useful ways.
InfoQ: Burton Says SOA Is Rising From Ashes – Nearly two years after proclaiming that SOA was dead, the Burton group has changed their mind and now writes that SOA is set for a comeback.
Google Refine, a power tool for working with messy data (formerly Freebase Gridworks) – Google Refine is a power tool for working with messy data, cleaning it up, transforming it from one format into another, extending it with web services, and linking it to databases like Freebase.
Apache declares war on Oracle over Java – Charging that Oracle has willfully disregarded the licensing terms for its own Java technology, the Apache Software Foundation has called upon [1] other members of the JCP (Java Community Process) to vote against the next proposed version of the language, should Oracle continue to impose restrictions on open-source Java use
Google improves App Engine SDK | Developer World – InfoWorld – Google on Thursday began offering an offering an upgrade to its Google App Engine SDK with features for improved performance, monitoring, and maintenance.

Daily del.icio.us for October 25th through October 29th

Posted on October 29, 2010 by Vinny

Multiverse : Software Transactional Memory for Java – Multiverse is a Software Transansactional Memory implementation and meant as an alternative to traditional lock based concurrency
John Nack on Adobe : Adobe demos Flash-to-HTML5 conversion tool – Adobe lives or dies by its ability to help customers solve real problems. That means putting pragmatism ahead of ideology
Sencha – Sencha Animator – Create CSS3 Animations with Ease – Introducing Sencha Animator, a powerful desktop application to create awesome CSS3 animations for WebKit browsers and touchscreen mobile devices.
15 Killer Google Chrome Features You Might Not Know About – Chrome has a lot of obscure features which could immensely enhance one’s browsing productivity if he were to know about them. This post intends to do reveal exactly those features.
InfoQ: Functional Design Patterns – Aino Vonge Corry reviews a number of well known design patterns showing that their implementation is simpler in functional languages because such languages have pattern-based constructs.
Hadoop + HBase + Cygwin + Windows 7 x64 « alan said – In this post I will describe how to get a Hadoop environment with HBase running in Cygwin on Windows 7 x64. Having spent the better part of a week reading through blog posts and documentation, I found that none of them covered the process in full detail, at least not for the software versions I intended to use.
Tutorial: Creating a Stock Watcher with GWT Designer (UPDATED) « Giant Flying Saucer – Obviously with a powerful tool like the GWT Designer I cannot show off all the bells and whistles in one tutorial but hopefully this grabs your attention enough to see what is possible and to experiment further.
Babylon 5 & the Great War of Java – Stephen Colebourne’s Weblog – We all have to look to ourselves – developers, community members, vendors, Oracle – and decide "Who we Are" and "What we Want". And then find a way to bring all the different answers to those questions together for a common purpose.
Jetty Continuations: Push Your Java Server Beyond Its Scalability Limits — Developer.com – Jetty Continuations suspend an HTTP request and releases the thread to the thread pool. When an event or timeout occurs, it resumes the suspended request. This approach avoids the thread-per-connection limitation of Web servers, allowing the server to scale for heavy loads
Apple joins Google in counterattack against Paul Allen lawsuit – Computerworld – Apple last week joined forces with Google, Facebook, Yahoo and others in an effort to dismiss patent infringement charges brought by billionaire Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen

Vinny Carpenter’s blog

{ “passion”: “software development” }

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