Starting with expert guidance on developing presentation layers with Web tier technologies, including JavaServer Faces and Facelets, it also covers building Web services with JAX-WS, RESTful Web Services with JAX-RS and Jersey, developing business logic with Enterprise Beans, accessing databases via the Java Persistence API, and Java EE Security, ...
www.topix.net | 7/29/10 7:50 PMWeb-Services News
| The Network Automation Hockey Stick The network industry could be entering yet another new stage of
innovation and growth, fueled by a flood of new demands and an
increasingly likely new tech refresh cycle driven by increasing network
infrastructure automation and control. At the core of this new cycle
is a flood of new devices being attached to the network, and at an
unprecedented pace. Connectivity, or the ability for a network to
recognize what is attached, becomes critical as technology users
accumulate IP addresses like children building Pokémon decks. soa.sys-con.com |
7/29/10 3:31 PM
The Popular Myth of Innovation and Big Companies Innovation is the cause of leadership, not size. There are plenty of
examples that would support many of these characteristics. Admittedly,
size does make it more challenging to be innovative and agile. But I
would also argue that conventional wisdom is fueled by the size of the
target itself. Having worked at a company of one to a company the size
of IBM, my observation is that being small is not the critical
determinant for excellence . I have seen innovation and speed come out
of large companies just like small companies. We shouldn't kid
ourselves. Smart risk-taking people work in big companies too.
Likewise, I have seen small companies paralyzed by a flat-footed CEO who
couldn't make up his mind or was in over his head. I have also seen
entrepreneurs spin out of large companies go on to create successful
companies of innovation based on something they learned at the large
company. soa.sys-con.com |
7/29/10 2:57 PM
Symplified Delivers Unified User Management Symplified, the Cloud security company, on Wednesday announced a new
provisioning fabric for its SinglePoint identity and access management
(IAM) solution. These new capabilities – Symplified Sync,
Symplified Identity Vault and the SinglePoint Virtual Directory –
provide centralized, one-to-many capabilities for managing and
synchronizing user identities regardless of whether they reside in
on-premises IT infrastructures or cloud applications. In addition, the
Symplified Identity Vault for Google and Salesforce.com transforms these
two cloud applications into a cloud directory service for managing user
accounts and serving as an authentication mechanism for other applications. soa.sys-con.com |
7/29/10 10:45 AM
CA Technologies Executes on Its Cloud Strategy CA Technologies on Wednesday announced new product, customer and partner
proof points of how its identity and access management (IAM) technology
supports use of cloud applications by enhancing security, helping to
ease compliance efforts, and automating processes for improved
operational efficiencies in managing the IT supply chain. The
announcement includes the availability of new CA Identity Manager
capabilities that extend identity management to cloud applications; it
highlights how a customer has leveraged the CA SiteMinder portfolio to
control access to its SaaS applications; and it features how CA
Technologies is providing IAM as a service from the cloud. It also
includes technology integration to streamline Identity Governance
processes, and help ensure security policies are followed, and access
and entitlements are appropriately granted and certified. soa.sys-con.com |
7/29/10 9:15 AM
IBM z-Enterprise First Take: Data Center in a Box or Cloud Computing The Post analyzes IBM's new Mainframe announcement and discuss the
reasons why IBM's Mainframe is still a viable platform I started my
career in the seventies, working as a programmer for a Governmental
Service Bureau providing service to most of the public sector
organizations in my country. We used IBM 360 Mainframes with
MVTOperating System. The V did not stand for Virtual (There was no
Virtual Storage support), but stood for Variable, because it was an
Operating System capable of managing Variable length partitions. MVT
predecessor was SVS (Single Virtual Storage) followed by MVS (Multiple
Virtual Storages). MVS is the basis for current Mainframe Operating
Systems. It was extended on 1995 and branded OS/390, which was replaced
by current Mainframe z/OS Operating System. soa.sys-con.com |
7/28/10 7:07 PM
A Case for Business Intelligence As organizations grow in scope and complexity, aggregating real-time
data from numerous systems and converting that data to decision-ready
information becomes increasingly challenging. When striving for Business
Performance Improvement (BPI), Business Intelligence technology provides
the necessary framework to gain the insight needed to lead to better
decisions. soa.sys-con.com |
7/28/10 6:56 PM
Why Would Anyone Choose IBM zEnterprise? In the wake of IBM’s zEnterprise announcement I’ve seen and
heard many different reactions from the “ho hum” to the
“why would anyone buy this” ends of the spectrum. Those
extremes miss the point, as extremes often do. From my perspective, the
point is a hardware platform that improves the competitive advantage
obtained from specific types of application services. The announcement
provides perspective on how vendors like IBM and HP are targeting their
server platforms to specific buyer needs. soa.sys-con.com |
7/28/10 6:05 PM
Old Approaches to Business Process Management Are Failing Companies We all know that companies of all sizes are facing tough economic
challenges at the moment. These challenges are coming from one of the
toughest directions possible: customers are not spending money, making
it more important than ever to convert the few available prospects into
profitable customers. Improving business processes is a powerful way for
companies to work better, but the old business process management (BPM)
approaches companies often rely on just don't fit the current challenges. soa.sys-con.com |
7/28/10 5:07 PM
The World Doesn't Care About APIs I heard it said the other day, regarding the OpenStack announcement,
that “the world does not care about APIs.” Unpossible! How
could the world not care about APIs? After all, it is APIs that make the
Web (2.0) go around. It is APIs that drive the automation of
infrastructure from static toward dynamic. It is APIs that drive
self-service and thin-provisioning of compute and storage in the cloud.
It is APIs that make cross-environment integration of SaaS possible. In
general, without APIs we’d be very unconnected, un-integrated,
un-collaborative, and in many cases, uninformed. soa.sys-con.com |
7/28/10 4:30 PM
Extreme Automation. Dynamic Control with or Without the Cloud In the data center of the future, you are going to need to be able to
bring up new instances of an application, have them fully functional
without any user intervention, and when they’re no longer needed
they should clean up after themselves and quietly go away. Five years
ago this was fantasy talk, two years ago it was coming to the fore, and
today we can see clearly that such adaptable infrastructure is going to
be mandatory for any installation/application that has a highly variable
rate of throughput. The drivers for this need for adaptability are
varied, but the core ones that we have all heard an earful of are cloud
– where you are charged for your usage, and leaving apps running
when not needed is tantamount to throwing money away – and a
highly virtualized environment where there are a lot of virtuals running
per physical server and keeping an instance running that you do not need
is tantamount to throwing CPU cycles away. Okay, the alliteration was
good, but it really IS throwing CPU cycles away, nothing tantamount
about it. soa.sys-con.com |
7/28/10 4:15 PM
Cloud Services with Windows Azure - Part 1 Microsoft’s Software-plus-Services strategy represents a view of
the world where the growing feature-set of devices and the increasing
ubiquity of the Web are combined to deliver more compelling solutions.
Software-plus-Services represents an evolutionary step that is based on
existing best practices in IT and extends the application potential of
core service-orientation design principles. The Windows Azure platform
represents one of the major components of the Software-plus-Services
strategy, as Microsoft’s cloud computing operating environment,
designed from the outset to holistically manage pools of computation,
storage and networking; all encapsulated by one or more services. soa.sys-con.com |
7/28/10 1:00 PM
EC Opens Two Antitrust Investigations of IBM The European Commission said Monday morning that it has opened not one
but two formal investigations of IBM and its mainframe business on the
suspicion that Big Blue has abused its dominant position. IBM is
already under investigation by the Justice Department for the same thing
and the EC’s move may inspire the DOJ to make its case.
IBM’s immediate reaction was to blame Microsoft and “its
satellite proxies” for its troubles but that “pretty to
think so” excuse doesn’t quite hold water. One of the twin
probes the EC currently has underway has nothing to do with any of the
recent complaints that would-be rivals have made against IBM. It is
solely the regulators’ idea. soa.sys-con.com |
7/27/10 10:30 PM
Clouded by a Convenient Illusion In a relatively short time, the phrase "in the cloud" has become a term of art when talking about the internet. A quick Google search shows nearly a million uses of the phrase in the past month, a 3x increase from the same period in 2009. But, what does it actually mean to have your web site, your software, your data, or anything else "in the cloud?" "In the cloud" is derived from "cloud computing," which in turn is just a new term for distributed computing, where data-crunching tasks are spread across a variety of different physical processing units. This was common in mainframes in the 1960s, and later the idea of distributing processing across cheap PCs running Linux became popular in the 1990s. The nineties also saw the advent of computation distributed across computers of different types, belonging to different people: SETI@home, uses volunteered computers to search for patterns in transmissions from space; Scott Draves' Electric Sheep has participating computers render complex, beautiful abstract animations, some of which have won awards. Where it seems to have changed is with the creation of what you might call "clouds for hire": Amazon Web Services offers both computing and storage platforms, as does Rackspace Cloud Computing and a handful of others. These have become popular ways to operate new web services and similar offerings, cheaper and easier (some say) than dealing with physical hardware yourself. The botnets used in nearly all forms of cybercrime today, which are made up of tens of thousands of virus-infected computers (unbeknownst to the computers' owners) are a less palatable example of distributed computing. These botnets in particular illustrate that the concept of the cloud as a magical place where data goes in and data comes out on demand, nothing to think about, nothing to worry about, with no responsibilities of your own...it's a convenient mental image, but in nearly all cases it's simply wrong. The Amazon cloud is actually a series of computers owned by Amazon, physically located in facilities they own or lease. The Rackspace cloud is similarly owned by Rackspace. These computers and facilities are subject to security breaches, backhoe attenuation—and legal jurisdiction.
Along with physical locations and ethernet cables, the various computers that make up those clouds also have IP addresses. When your cloud-based process communicates with the rest of the internet—to send email, perhaps—the remote server that it's talking to sees that IP address as the source of the transmission. But as Reddit and others have been discovering, that IP address is in most cases shared with everyone else who uses the cloud—possibly including spammers, or other bad guys. A virtual server "in the cloud" can even be infected by a virus and become part of a botnet. As the popularity of cloud-based services has grown, so has the apparent applicability of the phrase "in the cloud." It now appears to refer to any processing or storage which takes place outside of your own desktop, laptop, or mobile device. I've heard people talk about keeping their email and calendar and contacts "in the cloud" when all they're actually doing is letting Google Apps or Apple's .MAC service host it.
This use of the phrase seems to be predicated entirely on the concept of the cloud as a place where you have given up all responsibility for your data. These companies will take care of you (except when their Terms of Service say they don't have to.) Not everyone wants to operate their own mail server, or write their own calendar synchronization application; hosted email and other "software as a service" offerings absolutely can make sense, so long as you're aware and comfortable with the idea that you've given up a large measure of control. And that's the important thing to consider before relying on an Amazon-style distributed computing cloud, or using web services like Google Apps. How much control do you need over security, privacy, uptime? How can you be certain you're complying with all relevant laws when you don't know which jurisdiction your process is running in? Who else is sending email from that same IP address? What will happen when the federales show up with a subpoena? All of these things are well-understood for traditional computing, and even for colocation situations, but industry understanding and best practices around cloud computing are still emerging—hampered by the ever-widening, increasingly cloudy meaning of "in the cloud." When it comes to sending email, I'd have to strongly advise against using clouds. Even if it makes sense to host your web site and run your processes from the cloud, use an ESP or a reliable relay service to send the email. Above all else, don't be swayed by the illusion of the cloud. You can't touch it, but someone is still held responsible. You can't see it, but someone can still be subpoenaed. Someone can trip over a power cord, or go out of business, or get bought by your competitor. Whether you trust that someone is up to you.
Written by J.D. Falk, Director of Product Strategy at Return Path www.circleid.com | 7/27/10 8:04 PM NTT America Extends Enterprise Cloud Offering with New Storage Platform NTT America, Inc., a wholly owned U.S. subsidiary of NTT Communications
Corporation, on Monday announced the availability of Cloud Files, a
cloud storage solution offering enterprise-class security,
high-availability and control to enhance the company’s local
public cloud suite announced in May. By using Cloud Files, enterprises
can eliminate the capital investment and resources associated with
content storage, the purchase of SAN and NAS systems, and the management
of backup and archival information. In addition to a cost-effective
"pay as you go" subscription model, Cloud Files offers
features that enterprises expect when putting business-critical media
and data in the cloud, including SAS 70 Type II audit, in-flight and
at-rest encryption, and 24x7 customer support by engineers. The service
is immediately available for the U.S. enterprise customers of all sizes.
Cloud Files can be used on a standalone basis or as a shared storage
resource as part of the NTT America Cloud services. This means customers
are able to use Cloud Files as an efficient storage medium across all
their Web or IT properties, eliminating duplication of data and
additional hardware and simplifying storage management. soa.sys-con.com |
7/27/10 1:15 AM
Planet Eclipse: David Bosschaert: CXF Distributed OSGi 1.2 is out! I'm really excited to be able to say that the CXF Distributed OSGi subproject has done its 1.2 release. With this release it now also provides the Reference Implementation of the Remote Service Admin specification (chapter 122 of the OSGi Enterprise Specification ) in addition to being the Reference Implementation of the Remote Services specification (chapter 13 in the OSGi Enterprise Spec ). Together with the Apache ZooKeeper-based discovery implementation it provides all you need to do Distributed OSGi. A lot of work as gone into this release, which is a major refactoring from the previous code base. This was necessary to support the RSA specification which provides a standard API for the internal building blocks that constitute a Remote Services implementation. This provides a number of benefits:
You can find the CXF-DOSGi 1.2 release here: http://cxf.apache.org/distributed-osgi.html  Research Reveals Increased Budgets for IT “2010 has brought increased spending as we begin to see the light
at the end of the tunnel, however budgets will continue to remain tight,
spending the right money in the right places will make the
difference” states the conglomerate of leading CIOs who have
formed the CIO US action committee to create a focused spending strategy. soa.sys-con.com |
7/26/10 7:59 PM
The State of Enterprise Architecture The economy’s grip on IT budgets, and the fast changing sourcing
models like cloud computing, are pointing to a reckoning for EA -- of
now defining a vast new promise for IT business alignment improvement
or, conversely, a potentially costly lost opportunity. The need for EA
seems to be more pressing than ever, yet efforts to professionalize EA
do not necessarily lead to increased credibility and adoption, at least
not yet. We’ll examine the shift of IT from mysterious art to more
engineered science and how enterprise architects face the unique
opportunity to usher in the concept of business architecture and
increased business agility. soa.sys-con.com |
7/26/10 7:46 PM
Web Services DataWindows Since version 9, PowerBuilder has provided the ability to create
front-end clients functioning in a service-oriented architecture
application via Web service interface technology. Originally the ability
was based on the open source EasySOAP driver. In version 10.5 it was
expanded to use a .NET 2.0 compatible driver, and in version 12.0 .NET
SOA interfacing was made compatible with the latest MS WCF technology.
In addition, in version 11.0 it became possible to create a DataWindow
object from a Web service data source definition. Recently I used PB
12.0 to create four versions of a SOA client: Classic Win32, .NET
WebForm, .NET WinForm, and WPF .NET. All business logic and data access
was provided by a set of middle-tier services hosted in an MS server. In
this article I’ll focus on one aspect of that development effort
– a comparison of several techniques for joining values from
multiple Web service calls into one DataWindow result set. pbdj.sys-con.com |
7/26/10 6:03 PM
Swiss Post Tries Skirting RPost Patents The government-owned Swiss Post, forced out of the American registered
e-mail market when RPost sued it for patent and trademark infringement,
says it’s going to try to re-architect its IncaMail service so it
doesn’t step on RPost’s toes anymore. Basically it’s
the only way the post can salvage its European IncaMail business because
RPost has European patents that it hasn’t played yet. Swiss Post
is hoping to have the remade IncaMail 3.0 ready this fall. In the
meantime, it continues to talk to RPost about the European market but
it’s unclear if they’ll come to an amicable settlement.
RPost could sue for infringement in Europe based merely on the fact that
Swiss Post continues to service existing IncaMail customers like the
Federal Court of Switzerland although it has ceased to sign new
customers anywhere. soa.sys-con.com |
7/26/10 2:56 PM
Unisys to Offer Price Fixe Cloud In what is believed to be a cloud first, Unisys is going to offer its
upscale enterprise-class ClearPath users a fixed-priced PaaS cloud, a
model that flies in the face of the nickel and dime’ing that goes
on in commodity cloud land. Unisys already has x86-based commodity
clouds on offer but now it’s drawn its proprietary mainframe-style
ClearPath widgetry, based on its MCP and OS/2000 operating systems, into
the new meme beginning with a managed development and testing solution
that will go for $13,000 for three months use of a soup-to-nuts
environment that includes 25MIPS, eight megs of memory and 75GB of
storage. soa.sys-con.com |
7/25/10 4:45 PM
IBM Unveils its ‘System of Systems’ zEnterprise it is then. That’s the name of the new hybridized
cross-platform IBM mainframe system that arrived like we said it would
on Thursday to be described as the most significant change in the
mainframe platform in 20 years. It’s supposed to the fastest,
most powerful, scalable, power-efficient mainframe ever, capable of
managing 100,000 virtualized servers as a single system. And, like we
said, that single virtualized system can be the box core zEnterprise 196
mainframe and ancillary Power7 and System x servers sharing resources
complements of IBM’s newfangled zEnterprise BladeCenter Extension
and Unified Resource Manager, which reduces hypervisors (except the
z/VM) to firmware. soa.sys-con.com |
7/25/10 3:30 PM
WS-I to Disappear into OASIS The eight-year-old Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I) is
going to fold its assets, operations and mission into a special Member
Section of OASIS, the Organization for the Advancement of Structured
Information Standards. The move is expected to take a few months. In the
name of best practices WS-I developed a set of Web Services Profiles,
Sample Applications and Testing Tools. OASIS is supposed to assume
ownership and maintenance responsibility for these Profiles and continue
to make them available. It’s also supposed to be responsible for
any maintenance that the published Profiles and other materials may
require. OASIS Technical Committees will be formed to maintain the three
profiles and do the testing activity. java.sys-con.com |
7/24/10 7:15 PM
WS-I to Disappear into OASIS The eight-year-old Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I) is
going to fold its assets, operations and mission into a special Member
Section of OASIS, the Organization for the Advancement of Structured
Information Standards. The move is expected to take a few months. In the
name of best practices WS-I developed a set of Web Services Profiles,
Sample Applications and Testing Tools. OASIS is supposed to assume
ownership and maintenance responsibility for these Profiles and continue
to make them available. It’s also supposed to be responsible for
any maintenance that the published Profiles and other materials may
require. OASIS Technical Committees will be formed to maintain the three
profiles and do the testing activity. soa.sys-con.com |
7/23/10 9:49 PM
Dell Buys DeDup Start-up Dell, on one of its still rare acquisition outings, bought Ocarina
Networks, a storage optimization start-up launched three years ago by a
couple of guys from Citrix whose patented hardware and software
technology, including compression and deduplication, reduces the data
footprint and the cost of disk capacity, network bandwidth, power and
cooling, data center space and management. It’s positioned as a
solution for the rising heaps of unstructured data coming from the
Internet, e-mail and images while retention requirements increase. soa.sys-con.com |
7/23/10 8:12 PM
Intel Antitrust Settlement Waits on FTC Commissioners Intel has come to a preliminary antitrust settlement with the Federal
Trade Commission’s lawyers. It arrived there a few days ahead of a
July 22 deadline, but there’s no deal until it’s approved by
the agency’s five commissioners and apparently it didn’t
look like they were going to say yea or nay by the 22nd so Intel has
gotten a deadline extension until August 1. The deadline puts the
FTC’s litigation against the company on hold. Anyway, the deal
would reportedly regulate the giant’s use of discounts on both
processors and graphics chips, but what that means exactly nobody is
saying. soa.sys-con.com |
7/23/10 7:19 PM
The Dells, Both Company & CEO, Pay the Piper Dell said Thursday that it would pay $100 million to settle with the SEC
over its accounting sins in 2001–2006. CEO Michael Dell will pay a
separate $4 million for not talking straight about Intel. The AP remarks
that the fine isn’t that large but “the decision to charge a
sitting chief executive of a major company and reach a seven-figure
settlement with him is rare.” The director of the SEC’s
Enforcement Division Robert Khuzami issued a statement saying,
“Accuracy and completeness are the touchstones of public company
disclosure under the federal securities laws. Michael Dell and other
senior Dell executives fell short of that standard repeatedly over many
years, and today they are held accountable.” soa.sys-con.com |
7/23/10 3:51 PM
PaaS Elasticity Is Harder to Achieve Than You Think As the ideas and concepts behind PaaS platforms continue to evolve, it
is becoming quite clear that they those platforms will consist of many
facets. These systems will consist of application runtime services (both
shared and dedicated), application modeling capabilities, and runtime
monitoring to name but a very few. While all of these will be necessary
to deliver a truly effective PaaS platform, if you ask the casual cloud
follower what they identify as the key characteristic for PaaS, and I
would be willing to wager that 9 out of 10 say runtime elasticity. soa.sys-con.com |
7/23/10 1:00 PM
Amazon profit soars but stock price sinks
(AFP) us.rd.yahoo.com | 7/22/10 10:53 PM CA Technologies to Provide Same-Day Support for IBM zEnterprise System CA Technologies, an IBM development partner, on Thursday announced that
it is working closely with IBM with the intent of providing same-day
support across its mainframe software portfolio for the upcoming release
of the IBM zEnterprise System including the new IBM zEnterprise 196
mainframe. As part of this commitment, CA Technologies is designing its
innovative new CA Mainframe Software Manager (CA MSM) and CA Mainframe
Chorus products to operate in the zNext environment. The new zEnterprise
196 hardware and supporting operating systems are perfectly aligned with
CA Technologies Mainframe 2.0 strategy because they are ideal for
helping customers simplify management and improve quality of service to
users. Additionally, CA Technologies intends to support the
newly-announced zEnterprise System, a new systems architecture in which
workloads on mainframe, POWER7 and System x systems will share resources
and be managed as a single, virtualized system. This new system offers
industry leading levels of energy efficiency, systems management,
virtualization, service assurance and cloud computing across the enterprise. soa.sys-con.com |
7/22/10 4:24 PM
OSCON: Open Source Lazy About Social Web Services While open-source coders have done a remarkable job of providing a complete open-source software stack, they haven't kept up with the emergence of Web services, charges an executive from a prominent open-source foundation. www.topix.net | 7/22/10 9:37 AM New Wave Of Web Services Brings Customization To Commerce  For a long time, CafePress was the major player in customized product
creation on the Internet. Slowly other sites sprang up, like Zazzle,
Skreened, StickerGiant, Lulu, and many more. Many of these options are
novelty one-offs, though, and you're paying for the customization, not
the craftsmanship, of the product. But the success of these somewhat
kitschy sites have revealed a real hunger in consumers for customized, personalized products, and a new wave of entrepreneur is capitalizing on this trend
to bring customization to chocolate , men's dress shirts , and a whole lot more. I've been exchanging emails with a number of
these entrepreneurs about their products, asking them all the same
questions: how and why? All of them are building something that someone
wants: not a one of these folks is trying to create a market where no
demand exists. Many of them are also trying hard to democratize the
entire purchasing process, and working to undo the homogenization of
mass-produced products. techcrunch.com |
7/22/10 2:38 AM
Cloud Expo Sponsor Compuware Named a “Value Leader” by EMA Compuware Corporation on Wednesday announced that Enterprise Management
Associates (EMA) has named Compuware a “Value Leader” and
recognized as the industry’s best Business Service Management
(BSM) solution in the “EMA BSM Service Impact Radar Report.”
The report evaluated 14 BSM vendors on vendor strength (architecture,
integration functionality), cost efficiency (ease of administration,
deployment, customer support, cost advantage) and product strength. A
complimentary copy of the report can be viewed at: http://bit.ly/c1hTMK . Value leaders are among the BSM Service Impact elite who have achieved
the highest product scores around cost, deployability, architecture and
functionality. They also have relatively quick time-to-value with strong
contributive BSM Service Impact benefits. According to the report:
“Compuware’s strengths in overall Service Impact monitoring
are industry leading—in part because of its native strengths in
flow-based views of complex applications/infrastructures, its leadership
in User Experience Management and its recent acquisition of Gomez for
superior support of mobile environments and transaction performance from
outside the firewall.” soa.sys-con.com |
7/22/10 1:30 AM
Color Hollywood’s Cloud UltraViolet The Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE), a cross-industry
consortium that everybody, darling, except Apple and Disney, where Steve
Jobs is the largest stockholder, seems to belong to, is promising that
digital movies and TV shows will be streamed from the cloud to multiple
consumer devices like connected TVs, PCs, smartphones and tablets maybe
by next year. E-books, music and games are to come. DECE may not have
all the authenticating cloud widgetry quite worked out yet but it now
has a consumer brand and logo: UltraViolet. The technical
specifications and licensing details – in negotiation for a while
– are expected late this year. There’s talk of a beta test
this fall. soa.sys-con.com |
7/22/10 12:00 AM
AppSumo Offers Web Software On The Cheap, Targets Latest Deal At Entrepreneurs  Over the last few years, the web has shown a thirst for time-sensitive
deals that offer premium goods at steep discounts. Woot's one-a-day model has proven immensely popular (Amazon just acquired the company last month), and Groupon has quickly grown into a phenomenal hit. Now AppSumo is looking to tap into the success of these models, but with a twist:
it offers deals on premium software and web services. The company
launched last month with its first deal, offering a set of applications
focused on productivity. Cofounder Noah Kagan says that AppSumo sold 500
of those bundles at $55 a pop. That money is distributed among the
application developers (in that deal, Evernote, RescueTime, and a
handful of others), and AppSumo takes a cut as well. In some cases
developers only get paid if the customer actually uses the activation
code they're sent; other developers get paid regardless of if a customer
ever actually uses their service. techcrunch.com |
7/21/10 9:00 PM
OSCON: Open Source Lazy About Social Web Services
(PC World) PC World - While open-source coders have done a remarkable job of
providing a complete open-source software stack, they haven't kept up
with the emergence of Web services, charges an executive from a
prominent open-source foundation.
us.rd.yahoo.com |
7/21/10 8:50 PM
Oracle Announces Advances in App Security with Identity Management 11g To help organizations simplify application security, Oracle announced
Oracle Identity Management 11g -- an integrated and open set of
best-of-breed components built on a common platform and engineered to
deliver unparalleled integration both within and across the suite
through a series of common components. As the industry's first
Service-Oriented Security architecture, Oracle Identity Management 11g
provides developers with shared services for identity administration and
password management, strong authentication and authorization, workflow
and auditing, thus radically simplifying application security. This
services based architecture is also designed to naturally extend to
cloud computing environments, providing a single point of control for
on-premise and off-premise applications and systems. soa.sys-con.com |
7/21/10 5:55 PM
Hands On with Flipboard
(PC Magazine) PC Magazine - Most Web services and content aggregators that have
developed apps for the iPad look great, but none of them really capture
the magazine-like feel of Flipboard, a new iPad app that aggregates
social media in a unique and attractive way.
us.rd.yahoo.com |
7/21/10 5:52 PM
Enabling Enterprise Cloud Models In moving to the cloud, Enterprise IT needs to get their arms around the
cause/effect and limitations that existing datacenter infrastructure
design has on their agility to adopt and exploit cloud-computing models.
Previous datacenter design choices have resulted in not meeting the
needs of the business. In particular, these design choices have
resulted in complexity, waste, performance barriers, and cost models
that don't work for the business. Lack of understanding and transparency
of what has been done in the past will continue to create misalignment
with business needs if not addressed. Moving to an enterprise cloud
model without understanding the datacenter infrastructure mistakes is
like automating and extending an already bad process. soa.sys-con.com |
7/21/10 1:45 PM
Let's Face It: PaaS Is Just SOA for Platforms Without the Baggage At some point in the past few years SOA apparently became a four-letter
word (as opposed to just a TLA that leaves a bad taste in your mouth) or
folks are simply unwilling – or unable – to recognize the
parallels between SOA and cloud computing . This is mildly amusing given
the heavy emphasis of services in all things now under the “cloud
computing” moniker. Simeon Simeonov was compelled to pen an
article for GigaOM on the evolution/migration of cloud computing toward
PaaS after an experience playing around with some data from CrunchBase.
He came to the conclusion that if only there were REST-based web
services (note the use of the term “web services” here for
later in the discussion) for both MongoDB and CrunchBase his life would
have been a whole lot easier. soa.sys-con.com |
7/21/10 12:36 PM
SoftLayer Opens New Corporate Headquarters SoftLayer Technologies, an on-demand data center services provider,
opened its new corporate headquarters on Monday, July 12, 2010. The
company is now the sole occupant of a three-building complex located in
North Dallas. Three new data center pods spanning the ground floor of
the complex will be completed and brought on line in the coming weeks.
The facility was redeveloped for and leased to SoftLayer by Digital
Realty Trust, Inc., a wholesale data center provider. Digital Realty
Trust develops and owns data center properties around the world,
creating state of the art environments that have the abundance of power
and fiber connectivity necessary for comprehensive information
technology infrastructures. soa.sys-con.com |
7/21/10 2:45 AM
Google pulls plug on two Chinese Web services Google Inc said on Tuesday it will shut down two unpopular Chinese
online services and end technical support for a Chinese-language forum
website. The online giant made the announcement in a posting on its
Chinese-language site on Tuesday. The reshuffle at the US search
engine comes just 10 days after it won government approval to continue
running its Chinese website. The Google plan encompasses closure of
a self-developed website ranking page and a lifestyle site in China. The
decisi ...
english.people.com.cn |
7/21/10 2:02 AM
Small Businesses Embrace Cloud Services to Grow Their Business Cloud enablement provider, Parallels, on Tuesday responded to the
demands of small businesses by adding seven Cloud services to the
Application Packaging Standard (APS) catalog. Parallels estimates that
the small business need for Cloud services will grow to nearly $19
billion by 2013 and service providers must develop a full service
offering to meet this considerable opportunity and “Profit from
the Cloud”. With the recent incorporation of licensing
capabilities in the APS 1.2 specification, service providers can now
quickly and easily license, manage and offer applications that small
businesses need and demand. soa.sys-con.com |
7/21/10 12:45 AM
Exploring Persistence Settings - Part 5 In Part 4 I discussed the Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse and how it
allows you to view, create, and manage JPA entity relationships. The
Entity Editor provides a centralized view of all entity relationships,
allows you to modify entity properties, and allows you to navigate
between the object model, mapping associations, and database schema
layers. In Part 5, I will explore persistence settings. The
persistence.xml file defines the context for JPA persistence. In this
step, you will use the JPA Persistence Configuration Editor to explore
the persistence.xml file for your JPA web project. soa.sys-con.com |
7/20/10 4:15 PM
IBM Blows It IBM came in Monday with Q2 earnings seven cents ahead of expectations at
$2.65 or $3.39 billion, up 9.1%, but its $23.72 billion in revenues, up
2%, were $450 million short of the $24.17 billion analysts supposed it
would do, adding to Wall Street jitters about spending and the recovery
and causing its stock to drop more than 4% after-hours. The company put
the onus on a euro-based ~$500 million currency hit that it claimed Wall
Street didn’t factor in but it also seems signed service contracts
dropped 12% year-over-year to $12.3 billion although 15 deals exceed
$100 million. Software was up a slim 2% to $5.3 billion. soa.sys-con.com |
7/20/10 3:07 PM
Cloud Expo Sponsor Mellanox Enables University to Broaden Research Mellanox Technologies, Ltd., a supplier of high-performance, end-to-end
connectivity solutions for data center servers and storage systems, on
Monday announced that its end-to-end 40Gb/s InfiniBand connectivity
products, including ConnectX-2 adapters with FlexBoot technology, IS5025
and IS5600 switches with FabricIT fabric management software, and active
copper cables, provide the high-performance server and storage
networking for the new University of Colorado at Boulder Dell-based
1,368-node cluster. The new cluster ranks #31 on the June 2010 TOP500
list of supercomputers with peak performance of 152Tflops and an
efficiency rating of 86 percent. Scientist and researchers from the
University of Colorado at Boulder, the University of Colorado at Denver
and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) will work
together on research topics in biotech life sciences and earth sciences
such as atmospheric chemistry, climate, cloud physics and storms,
weather hazards to aviation, and interactions between the sun and Earth.
Scientists are looking closely in all of these areas at the role of
humans in both creating climate change and responding to severe weather
occurrences – all of which require highly-efficient,
high-performance computing resources. soa.sys-con.com |
7/20/10 11:00 AM
Oracle Announces Update to Oracle SOA Suite 11g Extending the performance and scalability leadership of Oracle SOA Suite
11g, Oracle announced Oracle Service Bus 11g. Part of the Oracle Fusion
Middleware product family, and a component of Oracle SOA Suite 11g,
Oracle Service Bus 11g transforms complex and brittle application
architectures into flexible application networks that are easily and
rapidly modified. It does so by mediating and managing services and
applications in a consistent, standards-based methodology. Oracle
Service Bus 11g delivers low-cost, standards-based integration for SOA
environments where extreme performance and scalability are key
requirements. soa.sys-con.com |
7/19/10 8:30 PM
5GL Software Empowers Continuous Improvement There are a lot of things people do in the course of a work day that can
only ever be done by a human. Human tasks often seem too complicated to
automate in a piece of software. As a result, businesses are forced to
run inefficiently when compared with, for example, an assembly line. But
businesses that can operate more like an assembly line have a clear and
sizeable competitive advantage. Just look at your typical fast-food
chain, or a high-volume call center. The problem is not that the rules
humans follow to make decisions can’t be automated. The problem is
that identifying those rules requires repeated trial and error. And for
less mature industries, those rules are constantly in flux. soa.sys-con.com |
7/19/10 6:20 PM
DevOps, ITIL and Enterprise Adoption Getting any large enterprise to change any of their processes (even
their IT ones) is not for the faint-of-heart. Most enterprises are
using some version of ITIL processes for managing and auditing their
infrastructure and applications. This means that enterprises would have
to change those processes to adopt a DevOps approach. I read two
interesting articles last week. No operations team left behind where
John Vincent wants folks to realize that enterprise IT organizations can
only take baby steps on their way to adopting DevOps. He is right,
getting any large enterprise to change any of their processes is not for
the faint-of-heart. Most enterprises are using some version of ITIL
processes for managing and auditing their infrastructure and
applications. This means that enterprises would have to change those
processes to adopt a DevOps approach -- which is the reason I thought it
was interesting that John Sorofman ending his Is DevOps Subversive?
commentary by speculating whether ITIL and DevOps thought leaders could collaborate. soa.sys-con.com |
7/19/10 5:11 PM
SmartBear Software, AutomatedQA and Pragmatic Software Merge The combined company, SmartBear Software, was created to make
enterprise-class software development and testing tools easily
accessible to small and large development teams at a fraction of the
cost of other software solutions. SmartBear unites a community of more
than 75,000 developers and testers across three popular, like-minded
tools vendors. After 10 years of innovation they have joined forces to
better meet the market’s need with complementary tools that are
very affordable, and easy to try, buy, fast to deploy and use: soa.sys-con.com |
7/19/10 3:00 PM
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