Development Tool

Drupal, Joomla and Wordpress - What Will You Choose?

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 07:08:00 EST

Some questions can never be answered; they can only be debated but we never get the solution to it. The same is the case for CMSs; people for years have been trying to find out which one is best for them and which is good to manage a website. Open source CMSs have had great success and demand for many years because they're easy to work with and are also flexible. But open source development offers you multiple choices when it comes to a CMS. So there is the age-old confusion of which one to choose. Even though you can't decide which one is the best, you can definitely pick the one that suits your needs the best. There is no Content Management Solution that is the best so you settle with what you are comfortable using. However, I am writing this so you will choose WordPress and you should choose WordPress as your CMS. It provides loads of extensions, add-ons and plug-ins, themes and templates, etc., that are easily customizable and easy to use. Scalability is amazing; help and support are top class; there's a strong user community; integration and other systems all make WordPress a formidable choice to be used as a CMS. It powers many great websites all over the world and this CMS is totally customizable and can be tweaked according to your needs.

More Use Cases for Big Data Analytics

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 09:00:00 EST

With the initial start in research work and in social network sites Hadoop is now becoming a big part of enterprise IT landscape. Recent announcement from Microsoft about embracing Hadoop as part of its Windows Azure High Performance Computing initiative and Oracle also announced support for Hadoop with new options like, Oracle Loader support for Hadoop processed Data. There are more situations like Hadoop can be utilized for measuring the development productivity for large development teams as explained in this article.

Tutorial: OpenSSL Command

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 07:30:00 EDT

The OpenSSL is based on SSLeay library developed by Eric A. Young and Tim J. Hudson and licensed under an Apache-style license. OpenSSL has lots of features but I will cover encoding, checksums, encryption, passwords and pass phrases. Many Linux distributions have OpenSSL as part of the bundled packages and is most likely located in /usr/bin. Versions may vary and currently openssl-1.0.0d Feb 8 is the current version. Most of the examples that are found in this document should work on most versions.

Android Security Issues - A By-Product of Using Open Source?

Tue, 31 May 2011 07:15:00 EDT

A lot of talk has been circulating lately about security issues in Android. Should anyone really be surprised to discover that an open source system is not only open to legitimate developers but also to hackers? Is it reasonable to expect that a system developed and maintained by thousands of heterogeneous developers can be relied upon to behave reasonably well under all circumstances? The concept of Open-Source is very appealing. Highly talented developers have created tremendous products and generously shared them with the rest of us. Individual developers are not at issue here. The issue is with the concept of building critical systems on an unsupported framework such as Android.

OSGi: An Overview of Its Impact on the Software Lifecycle

Fri, 25 Mar 2011 13:45:00 EDT

OSGi technology brings a number of much needed benefits to the Java enterprise application market, and is disruptive in that it impacts the software development, deployment, and management practices of many organizations. OSGi impacts deployment given the shared, modular nature of OSGi, meaning application code must be written differently to capitalize on the benefits of OSGi. Equally important, application management processes need to be adjusted, given the highly shared nature of OSGi modules across many applications. This article provides a high-level overview of OSGi, and the impact this framework is having on the software lifecycle.

Research Challenges in Cloud Computing for 2011

Mon, 07 Feb 2011 08:15:00 EST

The Internet of Services is a vision of the Internet of the Future where not only the software applications are available as a service on the Internet, such as the software itself, but also the tools to develop the software and the platform (servers, storage and communication) to run the software. In this scenario, SaaS cloud computing would represent the software applications that are available as a service in the Internet, while PaaS and IaaS would represent the enablers for the Internet of Services providing the tool services to develop applications and the infrastructure services to run the applications. Cloud Computing research addresses the challenges of meeting the requirements of next generation private, public and hybrid cloud computing architectures; and the challenges of allowing applications and development platforms to take advantage of the benefits of cloud computing. We are at the beginning of the road, there are still many technology challenges to be researched and adoption barriers to be overcome. Fortunately because cloud solution architectures include technology components from different fields, many research challenges in Cloud Computing have been already addressed to a certain degree by different research communities, mostly virtualization, Grid and autonomic computing.

Seemingly Slow Adoption of Cloud

Tue, 07 Dec 2010 15:00:00 EST

So what do I mean by this? Well if we take a brief look at history we have seen good ideas and new technology provided by the industry that has taken a number of years to really take a hold in the market space. I think the most recent example of this is the slow adoption of USB. USB was first introduced in the mid to late 1990s with the 1.0 release touting faster I/O over regular serial and able to chain multiple devices. At that time we saw a small number of devices, mainly early webcams and mice keyboard combos. But really it did not take off until the iterations through versions 1.1 to 2.0 did it really take hold with a flurry of USB-ready hardware. This took nearly five years after its initial release. Is Cloud adoption in the current economic climate and uncertainty likely to suffer the same?

SSP Failure to Cloud Storage Success

Tue, 07 Dec 2010 11:00:00 EST

Storability 10 year Reunion

Years ago, a few buddies and I started one of the first cloud storage providers. Of course, we didn’t call it cloud storage back then, but we merry band of brithers (and sisters), we first generation Storage Service Providers (1gSSPs) were cloud storage way before the cloud was cool.

All the 1gSSPs – StorageNetworks, ScaleEight, StorageWay, Sanrise, and others – failed. The core problem was and still is that renting raw capacity over the network is a lousy business model.

1gSSPs couldn’t sustainably buy their storage cheaper than their retail customers (although over a beer I can share some great stories of how the early 1gSSP robber-barron’s ‘negotiated’ with the storage vendors during the boom).
SSPs couldn’t sustainably offer broad enough management efficiencies to generate profits.
SSPs couldn’t overcome a host of logistic and cultural issues (network performance/cost, stigma/liability of releasing core data, etc).

After the bust, and the 911 attacks, the entire business simply collapsed. Some of us – my company, Storability and others like Arsenal Digital - managed to flip over to providing managed storage services – running NOCs, and doing backups and restores for our customers. Wasn’t a great business, but we survived long enough to eventually be sold off.

For those interested in an unbiased history of the 1gSSP market, there is a thorough and thoughtful analysis from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) posted here.

Ten years later, things look different, and the same.

A whole host of storage service providers – nee’ cloud storage providers – has arisen, not so much from the ashes of the 1gSSPs, but certainly with their dust in the new CSP DNA. These folks have it a little easier than we did back then, and I think more than a few of them are going to make an honest living this time.

In addition to the obvious improvements in network connectivity, bandwidth, and reliability, I see three critical changes that I believe will mark the difference between the past failure of 1gSSPs and the future success of today’s Cloud Storage Providers – file systems, file virtualization, and file storage gateways.

File Systems

Data used to be stored as long strings of 1’s and 0’s, actually millions and billions of 1’s and 0’s we called megabytes, gigabytes, petabytes, etc. Back in the 1gSSP days, applications like database management systems untangled those 1’s and 0’s and formed them into useful information like bank account records and social security numbers.

Today, data is still made up of 1's and 0's, but the fastest growing forms of data, from the pictures you upload with your cell phone, to the books you download to your Kindle, come packaged in a convenient format called a file.

Files matter – files have digital labels that convey information about the file package itself. Raw strings of 1’s and 0’s don’t. More importantly, files have business and human context - 1's and 0's not so much.

Context matters - with it, we can make decisions about how to treat data. With files, we can look at the metadata (the data about the data contained in the label or header attached to the file itself) and learn who created the file, how old it is, and even gain hints about its actual content (does the file contain a song or a spreadsheet?). With this information, we can make intelligent decisions about where to put the file, how many copies we should make, how often we should back it up for safekeeping, etc.

With raw megabytes – no context - we have no way of discerning what’s what, so we have to treat the entire string of 1’s and 0’s the same – in most cases that means treating it all as if it’s all vitally important.

1gSSPs got sort of a raw deal trying to build a business storing all that raw data.

They had to treat it all the same – backing it all up every night, for instance.
They had to connect it directly to live applications. The banking app needs instant anytime access to the entire database – no telling when you might make an ATM withdrawal – and apps don’t like to wait for data, so the connection has to be very high speed (laws of physics and economics apply here).
They had to have it all – because they couldn’t discern one cluster of 1’s and 0’s from another, customers had to trust the SSP with all their raw data.

Files make life easier for today's wannabe Cloud Storage Provider.

Customers can decide and control what files go to the cloud
CSPs can offer differentiated services for files based on metadata
Applications are not as dependent on instant and constant access to files - they've learned to be patient waiting for downloads, just like the rest of us.
Files can be uploaded and downloaded between users and CSPs with ease, so variability in persistence and performance of the connection is better tolerated

File Virtualization

So, the ability to decide and control file location is critical for the success of cloud storage, but it's not enough.

If we know that Sally’s MP3 file of Andrea Boccelli’s “Silent Night” is non-business-critical (albeit absolutely amazing and worth downloading today), we can decide to push Sally’s file to a cheap storage device, and not back it up, saving us money and effort. We might even decide to upload Sally's file to a Cloud Service Provider that offers essentially free storage capacity, and really save the company some dough.

BUT…how will Sally know where it is when she goes to download it next Christmastime? Whoops.

Important point - moving files and treating them differently based on metadata is great, but users and applications cannot be expected to keep track of constantly changing file locations. So cloud storage won’t fly as a business model if Sally or her apps need to keep track of what’s where in the cloud.

Enter file virtualization, a technology which masks the file's physical location.

File virtualization matters – with a virtualized file structure, regardless of where it physically resides, Sally and Sally’s applications are tricked into thinking Sally’s file is on her network drive at G:/Sally/Music/SilentNight.MP3. She never realizes, and does not need to know, that it’s been moved, thus the Cloud Storage business model becomes viable.

File Storage Gateways

OK, so now we can decide, move, and eliminate the disruption of moving. So far so good, but the Cloud Storage Business needs one more piece of connecting tissue to reach the tipping point.

If all we care about is Sally and her music, the cloud storage business is pretty simple and in fact a bunch of free or almost free services abound that do just that. Though I admit it is obviously possible (duh, Facebook) I don’t know how to make money off ‘free’ so I am leaving that model alone.

In order to have a successful enterprise oriented (paying customer) cloud storage business, CSPs need the rough equivalent of a set-top box they can provide to the customer. Today, most CSPs offer a programmatic interface to upload and download files, which is kludgy at best, and isn’t going to scale in a commercial environment.

No customer is going to want to be locked into a single CSP, or be forced to adapt their infrastructure or modify their applications to support one vendor's cloud model.
Latency is an issue - no matter what we do to reduce the performance imperative, we are eventually going to have to accept the logic that some subset of cloud resident files must reside at least temporarily at the customer premises (sort of like the difference between downloading and streaming movies).

File storage gateways matter – with a gateway in place the customer can treat the cloud just like another storage device. Sure, the vast majority of spinning disks are now located at the CSP, but to the customer the CSP (through the File Storage Gateway) appears to be just another NAS box - albeit a cheap one, that never fills up, and never needs to be backed up.

Up until recently, there have been a few FSG startups poking about, which has been useful for vetting and growing the concept. Fortunately, for commercial CSPs, serious and trusted vendors are now releasing FSGs.

So now, I believe we finally have the necessary infrastructure and technology for Cloud Storage success. It's now possible to decide what data can, and control what data will, be safely stored in the cloud. Once separated and moved, it's possible to decide and control how data is treated when it gets to the cloud. It's now possible to do all this without disrupting users and applications. Moving from one CSP to another is now simple and non-disruptive. The performance and persistence issues that plagued 1gSSPs are under control. Modifications to the files, user behavior, and application intelligence are no longer necessary to achieve the benefits of cloud storage.

To my mind, the combination of these three major changes in the storage landscape – massive reliance on file systems, commercialization of file virtualization, and emergence of viable file storage gateways have now combined to eliminate the barriers and challenges we faced in the 1gSSP days, and together provide the technical and process infrastructure necessary for cloud storage to finally reach its full potential.

With the technical and logistical hurdles out of the way, it will be up to the skill of the players to decide who wins.

All best wishes go out to the next generation of cloud storage entrepreneurs – as we brithers say, ladies and gentlemen, the ice is yours. Good curling!

OpenXava 4.0: Rapid Java Web Development

Mon, 29 Nov 2010 05:00:00 EST

OpenXava is a framework for Rapid Development of business applications using Java. The OpenXava 4.0 has been released recently, with many User Interface improvements (RIA), and more possibilities for developers (Groovy, JPA 2.0, DI). OpenXava is a framework for rapid development of business applications using Java. It is easy to learn and one can have an application up in no time. At the same time, OpenXava is extensible, customizable and the application code is structured in a very pure object oriented way, allowing you to develop arbitrarily complex applications. The OpenXava approach for rapid development differs from those that use visual environments (like Visual Basic or Delphi) or scripting (like PHP). Instead, OpenXava uses a model-driven development approach, where the core of your application are Java classes that model your problem. This means you can stay productive while still maintaining a high level of encapsulation.

Hybrid Clouds: Private vs. Public, Revisited

Fri, 22 Oct 2010 08:00:00 EDT

It’s also interesting to see the importance of the hybrid model taking hold among industry insiders with many different perspectives. We saw this at VMworld 2010, where there was tremendous interest in hybrid clouds, from Paul Maritz’s keynote predicting a hybrid cloud future through many sessions and product announcements. Veteran cloud watcher James Urquhart points out that the hybrid approach lets you hedge your bets in cloud computing, using technology that allows you to decouple the application from the underlying infrastructure and move it to the right environment so you don’t get locked in. And even private cloud advocates acknowledge that hybrid has an essential role, where public cloud platforms serve as extensions of private cloud deployments.

Hadoop and Realtime Cloud Computing

Fri, 15 Oct 2010 16:45:00 EDT

Architectures such as MapReduce and Hadoop are good for batch processing of big data, but bad for realtime processing. Big data is creating a massive disruption for the IT industry. Faced with exponentially growing data volumes in every area of business and the web, companies around the world are looking beyond their current databases and data warehouses for new ways to handle this data deluge. Taking a lead from Google, a number of organizations have been exploring the potential of MapReduce, and its open source clone Hadoop, for big data processing. The MapReduce/Hadoop approach is based around the idea that what's needed is not database processing with SQL queries, but rather dataflow computing with simple parallel programming primitives such as map and reduce. As Google and others have shown, this kind of basic dataflow programming model can be implemented as a coarse-grain set of parallel tasks that can be run across hundreds or thousands of machines, to carry out large-scale batch processing on massive data sets.

Agile Testing Solution for Java

Wed, 29 Sep 2010 08:45:00 EDT

Enterprises today are implementing agile development methodologies, to ensure that their software reaches the user as quickly as possible. Getting this application tested thoroughly is a very important. Frameworks and newer IDE's have made the task of the programmer easier and have tremendously increased the speed to the testing phase. A lack of agile testing methods and frameworks, is hurting this speeds. Many applications stagnate for too long in the testing phase, costing the company time, money and resources. Enterprise Test Manager is an effort to address this niche, with a enterprise based tool, that is scalable, platform independent and machine independent.

Release of RESERVOIR Cloud Stack

Tue, 28 Sep 2010 03:00:00 EDT

RESERVOIR, flagship of European projects in cloud computing technology coordinated by IBM, has just announced the release of its cloud stack featuring Claudia Service Manager (Telefonica’s tool for automatic management of service scalability), OpenNebula Cloud Toolkit and security services for cloud federation. The RESERVOIR Cloud Stack supports the delivery of services on an on-demand basis, across countries, at competitive costs and without requiring a large capital investment in infrastructure. RESERVOIR enables the migration of resources across distributed administrative domains, maximizing resource exploitation, and minimizing costs to the end-user with guaranteed quality of service. RESERVOIR defines an open federated infrastructure cloud architecture and delivers a framework of open source components you can download from the RESERVOIR website and integrate to build your own open source cloud infrastructure.

WebSphere App Server Feature Pack Open Beta Is Here

Mon, 15 Feb 2010 15:15:00 EST

IBM WebSphere started its Open Beta (Managed Betas are so 'last-year') for the WebSphere Application Server Feature Pack for OSGi Applications and JPA 2.0 today. The Open Beta site is HERE. I'll list some of the highlights from the Beta site as a teaser. The implementations in this feature pack are based on the Apache Project offerings of OpenJPA (JPA 2.0) and Aries (OSGi) and demonstrate how IBM is committed to supporting open source software, the open source community, and open standards.

Subclipse: A Subversion Client

Wed, 30 Dec 2009 14:00:00 EST

Subversion is a stellar open source version control system initiated by CollabNet Inc. It is used in maintaining source code. There are many clients that support subversion, of which I want to introduce a simple Eclipse plugin, Subclipse. Subclipse (http://subversion.tigris.org/)is an Eclipse plugin that was released under Eclipse Public License 1.0 open source license. Subclipse provides an easy and clear technique to perform subversion repository operations. This article illustrates different features supported by Subclipse.

WebSphere CloudBurst in Test Organizations

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 07:15:00 EDT

The WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance can bring speed and agility to test organizations by drastically increasing the pace and ease with which users interact with WebSphere Application Server environments. I recently got a chance to catch up with IBM's Robbie Minshall. Robbie is a WebSphere Test Architect, and he is responsible for a team of testers that harness a lab of over 2,000 physical machines to put our WebSphere Application Server product through some pretty rigorous testing. Toward the beginning of 2009 Robbie’s team started to leverage the WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance in order to create the WebSphere Application Server environments needed for their testing.

Widget Wars: OpenSocial vs. OpenAjax vs. W3C Widgets

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 13:15:00 EDT

The popularity of widgets these days has brought to attention the need for interoperability, i.e. for widgets developed for one site or platform to be able to run in other sites and widgets developed by different people to be able to work with each other. So much so that I know of at least 3 somewhat competing specifications for widgets. There's the gadget portion of the OpenSocial specs which was adopted from the Google Gadgets work. Then there's OpenAjax which is more broadly focused on Ajax interoperability but has a lot of pieces geared towards widget interoperability.

Is Monitoring Cloud Computing Assets Easy?

Mon, 02 Feb 2009 15:06:00 EST

up.time makes it easy, right out-of-the-box: Deep Virtual Server Monitoring: CPU ready, Memory Balloon, Memory Zero, and many more granular Metrics; monitor Physical, Virtual, and Cloud: Services, applications, servers and more. Onsite/remote datacenters, hybrid environments, outsourced infrastructure; real World Cost Savings: Per-Physical-Server Licensing. Reduce costs up to 90%.

Twelve Things You Didn't Know About Jetty

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 19:15:00 EDT

In the past couple of years, interest in Jetty has surged. Jetty is an open source Java-based web and application server and servlet container, but what else do you know about it? To commemorate the 12th anniversary of Jetty, here are 12 things that might surprise you

Rating JRuby, Jython, and Groovy on the Java Platform

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 17:15:00 EDT

Open source software, while not synonymous with Java, may often be seamlessly integrated with Java code to produce a versatile synthesis that makes developers' lives much easier. In recent years, developers have taken some open source dynamic languages, commonly referred to as 'scripting languages,' and adapted them to the more mainstream Java platform.

Automating Website Testing Using Open Source Tools

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 16:30:00 EDT

In today's competitive world, the most important presence for a corporation is their website. It not only acts as a face for the company but also as an interface enabling its clients, users, and prospects to communicate with the company. As websites are accessible to users via thin clients such as web browsers, the quality and reliability of a website are paramount to its success.

JavaOne 2008: Uncommon Java Bugs

Fri, 16 May 2008 11:45:00 EDT

Any large Java source base can have insidious and subtle bugs. Every experienced Java programmer knows that finding and fixing these bugs can be difficult and costly. Fortunately, there are a large number of free open source Java tools available that can be used to find and fix defects early in the development life cycle. In this article, we'll look at a few examples of specific uncommon[1] or unusual defects that can happen in code and see how different Java static analysis tools detect them.

Debugging Both Flex and Tomcat Java Programs in Eclipse

Wed, 14 Nov 2007 08:15:00 EST

If you use Adobe Flex Web applications that connect to Plain Old Java Objects on the server side, chances are you use a popular, robust, and freely available server called Apache Tomcat. If you use Eclipse-based Flex Builder, you can smoothly debug both Flex and Java code without leaving Eclipse. Flex Builder debugger does not need any special configuration. But we need to add a couple of parameters to the startup routine of Tomcat so it'll engage the Java Platform Debugger Architecture (JPDA), which will allow other applications attach to JVM that runs Tomcat and debug deployed Java classes remotely.

The Best of Both Worlds

Mon, 23 Oct 2006 17:00:00 EDT

These days the size of almost all the resources available to a programmer (memory volume, CPU speed, etc.) are on the rise except for one: the time required to complete a project, which is shrinking. So it's important to work with tools that are convenient and make you productive. It's also important to keep the cost of software development in check by keeping as much as possible of the investments that were already made.

Getting the Most Out of Eclipse CDT 3.0

Mon, 07 Aug 2006 15:30:00 EDT

Eclipse has emerged as the platform that finally integrates development tools from multiple vendors into a common, extensible, and widely supported framework. The Eclipse CDT development environment brings this rich offering of integrated tools to the world of C and C++ programming, enabling C/C++ developers to improve their productivity and enhance the quality of the software they produce.