First Look

Overview of the OpenStack Cloud

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 05:45:00 EDT

OpenStack is an Infrastructure as a Service offering. (see my prior post for an explanation of IaaS). OpenStack is an OpenSource project, founded by RackSpace, NASA and others. OpenStack can be deployed as a public or private cloud. Project NOVA, or OpenStack Compute, provisions and manages on-demand virtual machines and associated resources: CPU, Memory, Disk and Network. Virtual machines can be started, stopped, suspended, created and deleted, while network options for a virtual machine are static, DHCP, or IPv6.

Functional Testing of Flex RIA with FlexMonkey 4

Tue, 25 May 2010 12:49:00 EDT

There are three main types of testing of any application: Unit testing, where you test small pieces of functionality; Functional and user-acceptance testing where developers, QA engineers and the end user can ensure that the application does what it’s expected to do; and Load (or stress) testing, when you ensure that the server can process requests of the specified number of users. Rich Internet applications have are no different when it comes to testing. While the load testing software is not cheap, there affordable solutions for Flex applications that you need to know about. Flash Builder 4 nicely integrates FLexUnit4 and I highly encourage you not to ignore the unit testing. Just use it.

Cloud Expo Sponsor Amazon Web Services Introduces Amazon SNS

Wed, 07 Apr 2010 10:45:00 EDT

Amazon Web Services LLC, an Amazon.com company, on Wednesday announced the beta release of Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) – a new web service that makes it easy to set up, operate and send notifications from the cloud. Amazon SNS provides developers with a highly scalable, flexible, and cost-effective capability to publish messages from an application and immediately deliver them to subscribers or other applications. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers. As with all Amazon Web Services, there are no up-front investments and users pay only for the resources used. To sign up for Amazon SNS and other AWS services, visit http://aws.amazon.com. Amazon SNS provides a simple web services interface that can be used to create topics developers want to notify applications (or people) about, subscribe clients to these topics, publish messages, and have these messages delivered over clients’ protocol of choice (i.e. HTTP, email, etc.). Amazon SNS delivers notifications to clients using a “push” mechanism that eliminates the need to periodically check or “poll” for new information and updates. Amazon SNS can be leveraged to build highly reliable, event-driven workflows and messaging applications without the need for complex middleware and application management. The potential uses for Amazon SNS include monitoring applications, workflow systems, time-sensitive information updates, mobile applications, and many others.

Getting Started with OpenJPA

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 13:30:00 EST

If you have not been actively working with J2EE containers, open source or free databases, and obscure Java tools, then getting started with OpenJPA may prove to be more challenging than just learning the API. I am going to work through this from scratch and take you with me. OpenJPA is the open source implementation of the Java Persistence API (JPA).

WireframeSketcher: An Eclipse Plug-In

Wed, 30 Dec 2009 22:00:00 EST

This article will focus on a product called WireframeSketcher developed by Peter Severin. WireframeSketcher allows you to quickly create wireframes and mockups right within the Eclipse IDE. Wireframes are put together by laying out pre-drawn widgets using a familiar drag-and-drop interface. There are widgets to represent buttons, combos, trees, tables and many more. While dragging widgets conveniently snaps to nearby edges, which makes the layout task quick and efficient.

Building Private and Hybrid Clouds with Ubuntu 9.04

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 23:15:00 EST

Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) has been released today bringing highly interesting new features, specially in the Cloud Computing and Virtualization area. The new Ubuntu server distribution includes two complementary cloud tools, OpenNebula and Eucalyptus, so providing the technology required to build the three types of Cloud architectures, namely private, hybrid and public clouds.

Mozilla Thunderbird Connector for Open-Xchange Now Available

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 11:15:00 EST

Open-Xchange, which provides business-class open source collaboration software, has introduced a free connector for Mozilla Thunderbird, the cross-platform e-mail and news client developed by the Mozilla Foundation. The "Community OXtender for Thunderbird" software connector gives users full access to appointments and contacts stored in the Open-Xchange Server and enables them to use Thunderbird as a rich PIM (Personal Information Management) client to access data online and offline. The software packages and documentation are available at www.open-xchange.com/oxpedia#ThunderbirdOXtender.

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.

Open Source Mobile Cloud Sync and Push Email

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 09:00:00 EDT

Funambol, the leading provider of open source mobile cloud sync and push email for billions of phones, today announced that its new version 8 software is generally available. Funambol v8 makes it easy to keep the data and content on billions of mobile phones in sync with social networks, email systems and personal computers via the Internet cloud. Funambol v8 has a completely redesigned AJAX web portal. The portal's striking interface makes it simple for users to access mobile data and rich media in the cloud, using any modern browser

Who is REALLY on Twitter?

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 19:00:00 EDT

Social media has become an integral part of our PR campaigns at BLASTmedia, especially Twitter. Clients often ask us, "Who is using Twitter and why should it matter to us?" eMarketer recently published an article that answers both of those questions, and many more. Want to know the demographics and usage habits of the microblogging crowd? Read this article!

What Yahoo Exiting Hosting and SMB / SaaS Means to Hosters

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 19:30:00 EDT

Tier1's Phil Shih get's it right (as usual): "...Yahoo is also set to unload Zimbra, which Yahoo has had little success leveraging across its small business customer base, although it continues to grow. T1R does not agree that Zimbra had (or has) no hope within Yahoo because it is a solely enterprise-focused product, as some of the media commentary suggests. While Zimbra could be a bit up-market for the Yahoo Small Business base, there is no reason why the product could not have been tailored for the small business market. Or Yahoo could have at least leveraged some of Zimbra's technology and created a premium mid-market email product...".

Open Source Selenium Web Application Testing System

Fri, 07 Aug 2009 16:15:00 EDT

In my recent blog post – Get more out of functional web testing: How to correlate test reports with server side log information? – I discussed the problem that testing results are usually not linked to the log and diagnostics information captured by the application under test. The blog entry offered a way to link the two sides using HTTP Tagging via an HTTP Proxy. Tagging individual Web Requests allows linking each individual request executed by the testing tool with the transactions that are executed on the server side. Your logging framework or diagnostics solution can then take this tag and link the transaction to the originating web request. Tagging Web Requests with Selenium

Advance Reservation of Capacity in Virtualized and Cloud Infrastructures

Mon, 23 Feb 2009 09:15:00 EST

Haizea is an open source lease management architecture that OpenNebula can use as a scheduling backend. Haizea can also be run in simulation, providing a platform for experimenting with scheduling algorithms that depend on VM (Virtual Machine) deployment or on the leasing abstraction. Haizea uses leases as a fundamental resource provisioning abstraction, and implements those leases as virtual machines, taking into account the overhead of using virtual machines (e.g., deploying a disk image for a VM) when scheduling leases. Using OpenNebula with Haizea allows resource providers to lease their resources, using potentially complex lease terms, instead of only allowing users to request VMs that must start immediately.

Making Choices with Confidence

Sat, 11 Nov 2006 11:00:00 EST

When integrating various components of a Linux stack, ensuring that all components work together properly prior to set up will save your organization headaches, time and money. Many solution providers are stepping up to the plate to alleviate the stress of selecting and configuring a Linux stack by providing pre-tested, validated and supported architectures.

EOS First Look — Introducing the Malware Trend

Sun, 13 Aug 2006 14:00:00 EDT

Malware is a generalized term to describe a collection of viruses, worms, spyware, and Trojans. The Microsoft Windows community is familiar with malware since the Windows industry is based on many independent software vendors that develop vertical applications. The complexity of a mixed operating environment presents an ideal opportunity for malware since security vulnerabilities are everywhere, and it's difficult for IT management to distribute patches as needed.