Features

Asynchronous Logging Using Spring

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 10:45:00 EST

Each application developer faces the problem of logging usage information. On the one hand, the more logging that’s done the easier it is to detect and locate the source of problems. On the other hand, large volume logging might impair an application’s performance. This problem is typically solved by defining various log levels dependent on a program’s maturity. For example, a program in developmental stages would have a higher logging requirements; logging requirements would be relatively lower in the production phase. If an application requires a lot of logging for audit purposes, then special measures are required to protect performance. This article provides a possible solution for this problem by using Spring asynchronous support. Logging is used extensively to help find problems within applications. A developer who finds a problem can investigate it by enabling debug logging. He may then reproduce the problem, or create additional logging if needed. Programmers usually require extensive logging to locate problems.

Open Source ROI with Less Risk

Tue, 20 Sep 2011 14:00:00 EDT

It’s a scenario with which many Java developers are all too familiar – and one which many fear. You log on to the network or arrive at the office to discover your Chief Security or Compliance Officer, Application Manager or even a VP of Sales and Marketing in a state of panic. A commonly used open source component has a serious security vulnerability that may expose your client-facing applications to attack. Even worse, the flaw was identified a few weeks ago, but your organization has just heard about it. The questions and accusations fly: “Why are we using open source components for our critical business applications?!” “Why don’t we just rip out this component and replace it with something more secure?” “Do you have any idea what will happen if people discover that our applications have a security flaw?!” “This could negatively impact revenue and our reputation!” And, of course, “What are you going to do to fix this – and ensure it never happens again?!”

Open Source Software License Obligations in Cloud Applications

Mon, 29 Aug 2011 12:30:00 EDT

The latest technology buzz, after the Internet, telecom, and mobile, is cloud computing. Hype or not, in various names and forms, cloud computing providers – platforms and applications alike – are counting on more than $40 billion in revenue in 2011 alone, growing to more than $241 billion in 2020, according to a recent report on “Sizing the Cloud” by Forrester Research. Most software applications today incorporate some open source software directly or indirectly (dynamically linked). Developer’s resourcefulness, code reuse, and efficiencies of development make open source an attractive option for all technology organizations. Cloud applications are no exception and many applications deployed in clouds are either entirely open source (think OpenStack or OpenERP Server), or have a significant amount of open source in them. According to the “Future of Open Source Survey” released by Northbridge Venture Partners, there are now more than 470 open source projects targeting cloud computing.

Installing a Guest Operating System on a Virtual Machine

Mon, 20 Jun 2011 11:30:00 EDT

Virtualization has been widely accepted as a technique to conserve resources. Virtualization is the process of running a guest operating system on a virtual machine, which is created in a virtualizer running on the host operating system. Large companies do not have to install 100 different host computers for its employees as they may create 100 different virtual machines running different guest operating systems on a single host computer. VMware is one of the main vendors of Linux virtualization solutions. VMware Player may be used to run 32-bit and 64-bit Linux operating systems including openSUSE, RHEL 5, and Ubuntu. VMware also offers Virtual Appliances, which are prebuilt software solutions comprising of virtual machine/s. Virtual Appliances are available for Ubuntu, Red Hat and openSUSE, though an appliance for the latest versions may not be available. For the latest version of openSuse, 11.2, it is recommended to install the openSUSE directly onto the VMware Player. In this article we shall install Oracle database XE in openSuse 11.2 as a guest operating system running in a virtual machine (VM) on a Windows host operating system.

OSGi Application Testing with Tycho

Thu, 19 May 2011 11:00:00 EDT

The OSGi framework is a popular platform for developing multifunctional desktop systems, enterprise systems and complex applications. OSGi uses a modular approach where each bundle is regarded as a relatively independent and separate unit. The framework controls maintenance-based tasks such as managing interactions between bundles, resolving dependencies, and managing lifecycles. Therefore, programmers can reallocate their time with less routine work and concentrate solely on solution development. However, testing such applications is a real problem. It is more demanding than regular Java application testing: there is a need to test interactions between the bundles, and the tests must occur within a real environment. In this case, the test must run inside the OSGi platform; thereby creating the need for specialized test frameworks.

Seven Keys to Success with Linux

Tue, 26 Apr 2011 10:45:00 EDT

The Linux operating system materialized through the work of Linus Torvalds, a Finnish student who introduced the first release in 1991 as an open source version of UNIX for x86 PCs. Although it wasn’t the first open source version of UNIX, the unique advantages of Linux soon attracted a following, and it quickly emerged as a viable operating system alternative. The combination of x86-based virtualization and the widespread adoption of Linux eventually opened the door to a new era of business computing, fueling major changes to today’s business information technology landscape. Today almost every organization has open source technology somewhere in their IT environment, usually in the form of Linux. For example, Linux provides the underlying plumbing for much of the Internet and World Wide Web. In short, Linux has arrived as a mainstream operating system for organizations everywhere and it now plays an integral role in business computing.

zLAMP: Web's Most Popular Software Stack on IBM System z

Sun, 20 Mar 2011 17:00:00 EDT

In recent years, web development and deployment has become extremely fast and easy with the usage of open source software development tools and frameworks. The usage of open source software has reduced capital and operating expenses for web startups to a greater extend that there is a significant increase in the volume of new internet startups with applications developed using open source software. One of the widely used open source stack for web application development is LAMP. As the expansion implies, LAMP stack consists of a web server (Apache), a database server (MySQL) and a set of scripting languages (PHP/Perl/Python) that can run on any flavor of Linux. In general it is described as an open source operating system, open source web server, open source database server and open source programming languages. The Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP (LAMP) stack can provide an efficient and cost effective open source architecture to build and run web applications. This article introduces LAMP software stack on zLinux (Linux on IBM System z). Let's call it zLAMP. We will delve into configuring and starting up individual components of zLAMP and then downloading, installing and testing few LAMP based off the shelf open source applications.

An Open Source-Based Cloud Data Storage and Processing Solution

Thu, 13 Jan 2011 11:45:00 EST

Applications are increasingly being made available over the Internet. Several applications have a large user base that produces a huge volume of data, for example, content in a community portal, emails in a web-based email system, and call log files generated at call centers. Due to a large amount of data being added every minute and the need to keep historical data for various requirements such as legal, reference, data warehousing, and analytics, the systems’ data size keeps growing exponentially. This requires a huge storage and processing infrastructure, incurring a high cost of procuring and maintaining it for companies. Other typical challenges with such large data sets are how to store the data reliably and economically. How do you process the data efficiently? How do you provide search?

A Maturity Model for Measuring Data Virtualization Platforms

Thu, 26 Aug 2010 09:45:00 EDT

Data virtualization has become a hot topic as enterprises and government agencies add this maturing technology to their data integration toolkits in pursuit of greater IT agility and lower costs. Rising key performance indicators (KPIs) for both demand and supply clearly tell this story. With demand exploding fivefold[1], and ETL, ESB and BI vendors extending their existing data integration offerings and bringing new data virtualization wares to market, enterprises and government agencies are seeking a way to measure and compare the data virtualization platform offerings available, to determine which is the most appropriate for their information architectures.

Open Source Mentality for Science, Technology and Healthcare in Africa

Wed, 04 Aug 2010 07:30:00 EDT

The relevance of Open Source Mentality in software development and applications is reviewed. Applying this mentality to science, technology, agriculture, etc. will speed up development in Africa. Africans and their friends will have to adapt to this type of thinking for growth.

The Next Chapter in the Virtualization Story Begins

Mon, 31 May 2010 06:45:00 EDT

Cloud Computing Journal recently caught up with Pete Malcolm, CEO of cloud management innovators Abiquo - a major new player in the fast-emerging Cloud ecosystem and Platinum Plus Sponsor of 6th Cloud Expo being held in Prague, the Czech Republic, 21-22 June 2010. Malcolm is keynoting at the event. His theme will be "An Open Cloud Ecosystem - the Gathering Storm."

IWA for a Spring Desktop and Web Application

Sat, 20 Mar 2010 09:15:00 EDT

Integrated Windows Authentication (IWA) provides a user-friendly interface for single sign-on. IWA uses ‘Simple and Protected GSSAPI Negotiation Mechanism’ (SPNEGO) to allow the initiators and acceptors to negotiate the underlying protocol to be used for authentication. In this article, we will discuss how to enable SPENGO to support single sign-on for a two-tier web based application using the popular Spring framework. Even though we only focus on a two-tier application, there are multiple places in these two tiers that SPNEGO needs to be enabled. At the client side, we need the client code to require the use of the SPNEGO protocol; we need to enable the Spring HTTP Invoker to use the HTTP 4.0.1 client, which needs to be SPNEGO enabled. At the server side, we need to configure the application server to support SPNEGO and we need to secure the Spring web application using SPNEGO protocol.

Browsing Database Artifacts Using Data Source Explorer

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 09:45:00 EST

In Part 1 of this tutorial, I showed how to set up a web project and connect to a database. In this step, you will use the Data Source Explorer to browse database artifacts. You may need to re-open the JPA perspective. In the Data Source Explorer, expand the nodes inside the New Oracle Database Connection node. You can view the individual tables and columns. Observe that the Data Source Explorer denotes which columns have been designated as primary keys. Note that the tables shown below are stored in the JPATUTORIAL schema. While browsing database artifacts, simply expand the tree to view columns, constraints, dependencies, indexes, triggers, and other relevant properties of the selected component. While browsing database artifacts, navigate up the tree to view columns, constraints, dependencies, indexes, triggers, and other relevant properties of the selected component.

Reflections on Java Command Line Options

Sun, 07 Feb 2010 21:15:00 EST

Abstract

There are many different types of command line options that programs need to recognize. Many languages (e.g.: bash and perl) has built-in processing of command line options; Java does not. The Java Command Line Options (JCLO) package performs this task for a variety of option styles. It also uses Java's reflection capability to automatically assign values to variables in a specified class.

Six Enterprise Megatrends to Watch in 2010

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 06:45:00 EST

Most enterprise technologists should see a continued payoff of the hard work in planning, architecture, documentation, development and configuration work that has been occurring over the last several years. Enterprise technologists were building Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) long before SOA was over-hyped. And most enterprise technologists I know were investigating constructs of scalable, elastic Cloud [...] Related posts:

New CIO Playbook: Positioning IT as Strategic to the Business

Sat, 23 Jan 2010 18:00:00 EST

According to a Smart Enterprise Magazine CIO report, three-quarters of today's CIOs help their companies develop new products or services. Gartner Group's 2008 Worldwide Survey of CIOs, 85 percent of CIOs are now looking toward "IT to make the difference in their enterprise strategy." This move away from "keeping the lights on" to a focus on business strategy and external customer interaction is completely changing the day to day activities of today's CIO. The result of IT's executive leadership becoming a "part of" vs. a "supporter of" the business is forcing a shift of culture and mindset across the IT organization. If CIOs do not approach this change with a sound plan, inertia may set in due to passive/aggressive behavior and create operational risk.

Demystifying Open Source

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 13:30:00 EST

In 2008, the open source community saw the year end with a headline-catching lawsuit, the Free Software Foundation files suit against Cisco for General Public License (GPL) violations. Not to be outdone, 2009 also ended with a bang. Best Buy, Samsung, JVC and 11 other consumer electronics companies were named in a copyright infringement lawsuit filed on December 14, 2009, by the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) on behalf of the Software Freedom Conservancy. The scope of this lawsuit is unprecedented as it includes 14 defendants.

Open Source Compliance: Getting Started Guide

Sun, 10 Jan 2010 14:00:00 EST

This article discusses Open Source compliance and the challenges faced when establishing a compliance program, provides an overview of best practices, and offers recommendations on how to deal with compliance inquiries.

Hidden Cost of Open Source SOA Testing

Mon, 04 Jan 2010 12:30:00 EST

Adopting an open source tool for SOA testing seems the simplest, most cost effective choice for developers and testers early on. However, you should plan and consider the implications of a longer term strategy with an open source testing tool. There are many aspects of service testing that contribute to a comprehensive solution across the SOA life cycle. Adopting a specialized tool for service testing is essential and will provide value, but may prove limiting if the adoption of the testing tool becomes something that can not grow with the business and maturity of your SOA strategy. This article will discuss some topics to consider before jumping headlong into an open source free testing solution for your production services.

Completing the Virtual Revolution

Sun, 27 Dec 2009 04:00:00 EST

We are in the midst of the virtualization era. In fact, VMWare reports that all Fortune 100 companies are using their virtualized data network products, as well as more than 90 percent of Fortune 1000 companies, and Yankee Group’s 2008-2009 Global Virtualization Deployment and Usage Survey found that approximately 72 percent of businesses surveyed said they have already deployed or plan to deploy virtualization solutions.

Using Eclipse Memory Analyzers

Fri, 25 Dec 2009 14:45:00 EST

The garbage collector is primarily responsible as a collector to reclaim objects that are no longer used by the application. This is an automatic memory management invented by McCarthy. The garbage collector collects unreferenced objects, objects that are not reached by the reference chain. The starting point of the analysis is the Garbage Collection Root (GCR), which are objects that are reachable by the VM.

Understanding the Role Storage Plays in Virtual Environments

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 18:15:00 EST

In 1998, a little-known company called VMware had just opened the doors of its Palo Alto office. Ever since computing moved from the mainframe to the desktop, the push had been bigger, faster, and more – more CPUs, more servers, more power, more cooling – and ultimately more complexity, more cost, and more waste. In the early 2000s, studies found that average utilization of CPUs across both data center and desktop was a meager 15 percent.

A Light Java Runtime to Bundle with Applications

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 18:00:00 EST

Steve Jobs once said that Java is a big heavyweight ball and chain. Good news: the ball is now optional! In this article, I share results we achieved after implementing a component deployment model, also known as JRE modularity, for the core of J2SE 5.0 and Java SE 6. The technology's been in production use for more than two years and proved effective. This is not a mere "Java gets smaller" message. Given that Project Jigsaw is emerging in JDK 7, I also offer some insights on the challenges that any implementation of modularity for the Java SE core may face, all derived from our practical experience.

Using Ext JS, Servlets, JSON, MySQL and Tomcat on Fedora

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 16:15:00 EST

These days the popularity of Ext JS (a JavaScript library) is gaining momentum. One of the most popular widgets within Ext JS is the DataGrid. The reason – displaying data from a database is one of the most common tasks of a web application. “Out of the box” the DataGrid has functionality (for instance ascending or descending sorting and reordering of columns by dragging it) that otherwise would require some effort from developers.

Showcasing the Key Design Principles of SOA

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 09:30:00 EST

WS-BPEL 2.0 is the dominant specification to standardize orchestration logic and process automation between Web services. The BPEL model is used to assemble a set of discrete, essentially disparate, services into an end-to-end process flow to transform the existing stateless and uncorrelated Web service infrastructure into cohesive, process-centric applications based on a service-oriented architecture. Under this model, new applications are developed “on-the-fly” by wiring together external “partner” services that leverage existing enterprise assets.

Hybridfox: Cross of Elasticsfox and Imagination

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 13:00:00 EST

Now we have a Eucalyptus' Private Cloud installed and running on our premise, and it remained kinda of an artifact in our data-center for sometime. So I thought why has not someone written anything about how make to make Elasticfox work with Eucalyptus. But there were quite a few pointers to what version will be ideally suited to use for Eucalyptus, like this one, thanks Ajmf. I took the cue from there, I enabled debugging on elasticfox, and used firebug to dig deeper. And I came up with Hybridfox, yeah, and it works.

Plone and Drupal: Different Approaches, Different Results

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 15:15:00 EST

Plone and Drupal are two leading open source Content Management Systems (CMS). Both were recognized in the 2009 Open Source CMS awards, run by Packt Publishing. Both also have large installed bases and large developer communities. This is made evident by some quick searching on Google: A search for LinkedIn profiles that mention Plone (search for 'plone site:linkedin.com/pub/') turns up 1350 pages—a large increase from 500 results in 2006.

What Is an OpenCloud API?

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 19:30:00 EDT

When it comes to defining Cloud Computing I typically take the stance of "I know it when I see it". Although I'm half joking, being able to spot an Internet centric platform or infrastructure is fairly self evident for the most part. But when it comes to an "OpenCloud API" things get a little more difficult.

Testing Virtualization: What’s Really Going on in There?

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 05:30:00 EDT

It’s no secret what’s driving the move to virtualization in data centers. The demand for new and expanded software systems is growing, but the geographic and carbon footprint required for scaling underutilized dedicated servers is too costly on many levels. This issue has led to the maturation of the virtual server, where increased reliability and stability means reduced risk, making virtualization of the data center a viable solution. Virtualization makes it possible to replace physical servers running at 10 percent capacity with fewer, more powerful servers running at 60 percent capacity or more.

Using a Perl Debugger with Server Side Triggers

Sat, 01 Aug 2009 09:30:00 EDT

This article describes a method to use a perl debugger on trigger scripts without advanced interprocess debugging tools. Using a perl debugger with a V4.x server side trigger launched by the server is very difficult and encounters two known obstacles: The server will fire the trigger and the debugger will run in a thread of the detached server process; the debugger will start but will probably not communicate with you. However, if you manually started the server via a shell command then the perl debugger will start, accept input from the keyboard, then you will loose contact with the debugger; it does not have exclusive access to the keyboard because it is running in the context of the detached server process. The next command you type will go to the shell, not the debugger. It gets messy from there.

Making Cloud a Reality for Enterprises via SOA Governance

Tue, 21 Jul 2009 08:15:00 EDT

Cloud computing is slowly gaining credibility and traction in the enterprise world. As giants such as Google and Amazon productize their massive cloud infrastructures, moving enterprise applications to the public cloud seems a more realistic possibility. The advantages of an enterprise application leveraging the public cloud sound like utopia – lowered total cost of ownership and overhead costs, ease of maintenance, inherent high availability and scalability that is built into the infrastructure.

The Investment Virtues of "SOA in the Cloud"

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 15:45:00 EDT

In today’s economy, an enterprise must have strong financial motives for transitioning to SOA. SOA’s superior technical capabilities are a strong motive for information technology professionals to make that transition. However, enterprise stakeholders are motivated by solid investment opportunities. Software architects have learned how to express the technical virtues of SOA. What they need to learn next is how to express the investment virtues of SOA.

More SOA Transition Bang for Your IT Bucks

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 18:15:00 EDT

This article explains how an Open Source SOA Roadmap can use a typical Web application project’s funding as the basis for a successful SOA transition effort. It is the first of three articles that explains how open source technologies and techniques can be leveraged to successfully deliver SOA solutions given the current economic downturn.

New Features in PowerBuilder 11.5

Thu, 28 May 2009 12:45:00 EDT

I plan to make this the first of a series of articles that discuss the new features in PowerBuilder 11.5, which was released late last year. Of course, they won’t be the first articles we’ve run on the topic, as we ran an article on the new Code Access Security features back even before 11.5 was released and a more recent article on New DataWindow Features. This series of articles is intended to discuss the major hitters of the remaining features.

Java Kicks Ruby on Rails in the Butt

Sat, 16 May 2009 22:00:00 EDT

“What would you think if I told you that you can develop a web application at least ten times faster with Rails than you can with a typical Java framework?” Oops! Ten times faster! Well, after these comments I decided to learn Ruby on Rails. I need to know the true key of the productivity and programmer happiness.

SOA Pattern of the Week (#5): Service Decomposition

Tue, 07 Apr 2009 08:45:00 EDT

A service inventory is a living body of services that individually will need the freedom to evolve independently over time. What we learned when documenting the SOA design pattern catalog is that there are patterns that emerged not only at design-time but also during this post-implementation evolutionary stage in a service’s lifecycle.

Why People Like Open Source Software

Mon, 23 Mar 2009 17:15:00 EDT

Why developers want the software to be open sourced? I like quotes by great minds. Here's my favorite quote by Henry Ford: If you think you can do a thing or think you can't do a thing, you're right. Some of these chapters of our upcoming O'Reilly book "Enterprise Development with Flex" had opening software-related quotes. Our editor suggested that for consistency, it should be done in every chapter, which makes sense. Chapter 6 of the book is titled "Open Source Networking Solutions", which begs for a specific quote on open source software, but I'm not aware of any pundit who said something short and catchy in this field.

Which CMS? Don't Forget Content Modeling

Mon, 23 Mar 2009 13:00:00 EDT

A key task in the scope of Content Management, is Content Modeling - this is when you get raw content to fit into some common model of types and elements. Once defined, the types and their elements fit into a hierarchy (A.K.A - Taxonomy or "Content Tree"). To break this down a little further, let's first take a look a "types".

Stretching 2009 Budgets Using Open Source

Mon, 09 Mar 2009 10:30:00 EDT

With a global recession looming, software development managers are being asked to slash resource budgets in 2009 while maintaining schedules. When you need to deliver more features with fewer coding resources, there is only one answer: hybrid development. Hybrid software development involves the combination of internally developed code with external code from vendors, partners, and, especially, the open source community.

A Practitioner's Approach to IA-64 Linux Migration

Thu, 11 Dec 2008 11:30:00 EST

High-performance databases are optimized for transaction processing and used by several industries around the world, notably financial services and health care. They are more commonly available on 32-bit Unix platforms (Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, and Linux). The trend is to 64-bit-enable them and migrate them to the IA-64 architecture.