Latest News from Open Source Magazine

COMMCO Switches From SAP R/3 Cloud to NetSuite OneWorld

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 13:00:00 EST

In an effort to modernize its business operations and eliminate the high cost of maintaining and upgrading SAP's complex, on-premise software, COMMCO transitioned to NetSuite and now relies on NetSuite's cloud computing platform for its core operational needs, including Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) functionality such as inventory management, ordering, fulfillment, EDI communications, corporate financials, and reporting; and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) functionality such as sales and customer service management.

Funambol Acquires Zapatec

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 07:01:00 EST

Funambol, a provider of open source mobile cloud sync and push email for billions of phones, today announced it has acquired Zapatec, Inc., a leader of AJAX web 2.0 frameworks. The acquisition enables Funambol to uniquely address the industry pervasive device fragmentation challenge that plagues developers and requires building native apps for too many platforms. The combination of Funambol's open source mobile sync and push server, with Zapatec's AJAX web 2.0 technology, will foster a new generation of open, rich mobile browser native apps for billions of smart- and feature phones. This provides the best of both worlds -- rich mobile web native apps that 'sync and push' and that work on all devices.

Richard Marcello, Unisys: Cloud Computing is Going to Change Everything

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 23:00:00 EST

"Like our public cloud offering, Unisys SPCS goes a long way towards allaying the security concerns of enterprises and their customers," said Marcello during the company's formal strategy announcement. "Unisys SPCS presents chief information officers with a way to realise the full operational and economic advantages of public cloud computing on their own terms, in their own datacentres, and with extra measures of security for their organisations' and their customers' sensitive information."

Cloud Computing Expo 2010 East Will Take Place April 19-21 at Jacob Javits Convention Center in New York City

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 08:15:00 EDT

The International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo series is the world's leading Cloud-focused event and is held three times a year, in New York, Silicon Valley and in Europe. Over 200 corporate sponsors and 10,000 industry professionals have participated in Cloud Computing Expo since its inception, more than all other Cloud-related events put together. The three-day event will offer a rich array of sessions led by exceptional speakers about the business and technical value of cloud computing with more than 80 sponsors and exhibitors on the 70,000 sq. ft. show floor and over 5,000 estimated delegates from well over 48 different countries.

Bringing Cloud Computing Down to Earth with Ultra Low-Cost Endpoints

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 12:00:00 EDT

Cloud-based computing infrastructures deliver broad-based functionality to end users in far-flung locales but too often the destination device remains a PC. Developments in virtual desktop technology are creating a new generation of ultra low-cost endpoints such as network monitors, set-top boxes, next-generation netbooks, and kiosks.

Moving to the Cloud: Key Considerations for Cloud Storage

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 10:30:00 EDT

This post is part of a series examining the issues involved when moving applications between internal data centers and public clouds.

The true challenges in storage and data management in the cloud result from the diverse and often unfamiliar processes and infrastructures offered by the cloud providers, including: new provisioning methods, storage properties, data population and transfer, and systems for data management (snapshots, clones, replication, backup). The cloud providers define the relationship between servers and storage and often impose constraints on everything from allocation size limits to the ways in which storage is managed. These are just some of the things you’ll want to consider as you start to think about integrating cloud computing into your existing IT environments.

I’d like to focus in detail on the complexity and variability of cloud provisioning and storage properties. There are different models for storage in existing compute clouds, with the most common being an “inclusive” storage model. In this model, each server comes with a certain amount of storage attached to it. The storage is a fixed capacity that is provisioned when you create the server from the pre-existing templates.

For example, Rackspace gives you disk space that is proportional to the memory (RAM) size you select. The smallest memory/disk combination is 256MB of memory with 10GB of disk. With each doubling of memory, the disk space is also doubled until you get to roughly 16GB of memory and 640GB of disk. With the new Terremark vCloud Express, you get a system disk that is predefined for each “template” server you select. For a standard Linux distribution, you get a 10GB system disk, for Windows 2K3 you get a 20GB disk and for W2K8, you get a 40GB disk. Terremark’s vCloud Express allows you to add additional storage as new disks, while others (like Rackspace) allow to “resize” your servers and storage to create a new server with a larger disk and copy your data into it.

Amazon offers several distinct types of storage within EC2. The default storage you get with each server you create in the cloud is called “ephemeral” storage. You then have the option of allocating and attaching Elastic Block Storage (EBS), and there is also an object store system called Simple Storage Service (S3). Ephemeral and EBS are standard “block storage” devices – meaning they are viewed and used as disks attached to your server (/dev/sdg in Linux, D: in Windows) while S3 requires an API or other tools to integrate with your systems. The good part about the EC2 storage offerings is that you have some powerful options as you build for the cloud; the hard part is mapping the proper resources to your applications and integrating this with your existing processes. Specifically, the base storage is ephemeral, which means that if you power-off the server, or it has a hard fault, all the data on that storage is lost. This means that everything on these drives (boot parameters, application updates, user data, logs, etc.) is subject to loss when you power off the machine. There are several methods of handling this situation: 1) Build your servers every time you start them from a formula or other sources such that you don’t depend on the base storage being persistent; 2) Use Amazon or third party tool sets to periodically “bundle” your servers into S3 (effectively taking a snapshot of the server); or 3) Attach EBS storage to your image and store your important data on persistent storage.

Turning to granularity, we find a wide range in the units or increments of available storage in the various cloud providers. There is the “included” storage mentioned above that is often based on the size of the server and the requested OS type. To add storage, we find cloud providers (such as Amazon) allowing 1GB increments up to 1TB, and others (like Flexiscale) allowing only fixed increments of 50GB/100GB/250GB. For Rackspace, you can resize both the server and storage according to the defined fixed ratios, but these are bound to memory and CPU so there is no independent scaling of storage. The bare-metal cloud provider NewServers allows iSCSI storage to be attached to your servers in 250GB increments. In the cloud these varied increments really matter, because you are paying by the GB/month and if you need just a little more storage, you could end up having to purchase 10x more storage than you need, or having to pay for more memory and compute than you need.

The conclusion we can draw is that there are numerous storage configuration options in the cloud, and these options become linked to the server “flavors” defined by individual cloud providers. Because you don’t have the same control or even mechanisms in the cloud as you do in the local data center, the manner in which you allocate, populate and manage data in the cloud will be different. The work you do to understand and map your applications’ requirements into cloud-based storage requires changing your processes to match those of the cloud, and often this work is cloud-specific.

Beyond configuration issues, of course, there are many other concerns. For example, with data management, you have to determine how you will get your data into the system, how to grow your systems and how to protect your data. Right now most clouds use template servers that you have to build up from a pre-installed base operating system using update mechanisms and then re-installing the application components. As for protecting your data, there are also many cloud-specific options available – from RAID-protected EBS in Amazon, to data snapshots and cloning, to backup services offered by companies like Rackspace.

The bottom line is that cloud storage can be simultaneously simple and complex – just like cloud computing in general. It’s simple to use if you just want to try something new; complex if you want to integrate cloud storage into your existing processes and infrastructures.

Next: Networking in the Cloud

Podcast: Load Testing Flex Applications

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 08:30:00 EDT

One might think that a school district software is an easy case when it comes to performance and scalability. Now think of the end of a marking period when everyone is working with progress reports? From this interview you can learn how Neoload, one of the popular stress testing software was used to identify the bottlenecks of this Flex-based RIA.

SproutCore Release Candidate 1 Hits the Streets

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 03:00:00 EDT

Last night I merged the final set of changes for the first release candidate of SproutCore 1.0. I also published a new gem (build 1.0.1008) so you can get the official release quite easily. Just open your terminal [on Mac or Linux] and type:

sudo gem install sproutcore

Then enjoy!

If you just want a taste of what the release candidate can do, check out the demos at:

http://demo.sproutcore.com

Especially try the SampleControls app, where you can see an example of over 300 views rendered on a single page (in the Controls tab).

What’s In the Box?

In case you haven’t heard, SproutCore 1.0 is a major revision of the entire SproutCore platform. New build tools, new data store, new view layer, massively upgraded bindings and property observing and more. Our primary goals for this release were performance and stability. I’m happy to report we achieved both in spades.

Fast, Fast, Fast! Make it fast!

I created SproutCore in the first place was because I wanted to build fast applications on the web. I believe the web is the ultimate application platform, but it will only be so when we can build apps that are just as fast and fluid as their native cousins.

While the 0.9 code I think proved this concept; we hadn’t really achieved parity yet. Our goal with 1.0 was to make sure SproutCore apps could load on any desktop browser in under 3 seconds, even if the app is big and complex and has a large data set.

We passed this goal actually; by 50%. Most SproutCore apps can load in under 1.5 second with the proper deployment. You results may vary; but if they do it is unlikely SproutCore will be the bottleneck.

Here are just a few of the big enhancements we added to make this possible:

The build tools can now automatically combine your JavaScript and CSS to minimize the number of assets you have to download. Usually, you’ll only need to get 2 scripts and 2 stylesheets that’s it.
Output apps are also designed for caching. If you follow our deployment guide, your app will be able to essentially “live” in your user’s browser cache; eliminating network latency issues for the SproutCore part entirely [after first load].
We also made it possible to break your application into loadable bundles that can be deferred until you actually need them. This means if you have a large app you an write portions of it so they only load when they are actually needed; keeping your initial page weight down to a minimum.
On the framework level, our view layer was rewritten specifically around the major performance bottlenecks in IE. Our new layer can render 300 views client side in IE in about 100msec (on my Mac Book Air). It’s even faster in the other browsers.
Once rendered, all views on the page are now displayed using absolute positioning. This not only virtually eliminates cross browser issues for display - it also makes the browser actually render your content faster.
We also rewrote the datastore layer to “lazy evaluate” queries and data changes. This means you can easily shove a large number of records into the data store - some people have been using 50,000 or more records each time their app loads - and we’ll handle it just fine. You can load those records often in just a few hundred msec.
Finally, the code property observing and bindings layer that underpins all of SproutCore was massively optimized. Notifications are sent less often, use less memory, and they are generally 3x faster than the 0.9 code.

All of these improvements essentially mean you can make just about any SproutCore app load and run in just a few seconds. The only piece of your infrastructure we can’t control is the part of your server that delivers actual data. If you can make that component blazing fast as well, your web app will knock the socks off of a native app any day.

If you want an example of this performance, just visit the Tasks app (running 1.0 Beta code on top of Google App Engine) and login as “guest”. You can also checkout the new SproutCore demos linked below.

No More Changes!

SproutCore is a large framework. It has over 25,000 lines of code. We wanted to make SproutCore stable - meaning both the API we published would not change underneath you (or at least it would change in a controlled way) and that features we added would continue to work; even as we introduced new code.

We started on this goal by adding nearly 5,500 unit tests across the entire platform. It’s a lot of unit tests. Currently, on Safari 4 and Firefox at least, every single one of these unit tests pass green. IE7 and IE8 each file 18 tests due to issues with the tests themselves rather than the code they test; we aim to have these tests fixed by the time 1.0 is final as well.

We also massively reworked the entire API, scrubbing it for consistency and cleaning up areas that were confusing or made it too easy to do things wrong or too hard to do things right.

This API review led to a lot of church and instability, ironically, during development which was an endless source of frustration for those few brave souls who were building on 1.0 before it was finished. It was worth the pain, however. The new API is easy to use and generally works well.

We will always want to polish bits of the API here and there, but I’m convinced that we have a clear path to evolve our code now without breaking your existing code in major ways again.

What’s Next?

The release candidate is out. This means we are “done” with the development of SproutCore 1.0. Please test it out if you can and send us feedback. If you find a bug or want a change in, please still submit it. We can take changes up till just before we release thanks to our unit tests.

The core team will be working on finishing documentation on the wiki, validating example applications, and updating the website for our final release. We would also like to have a party in San Francisco for the release.

When these things are ready, SproutCore 1.0 will be fast, stable, and easy to learn (thanks to the new docs and tutorials). Then, finally - after a year of effort - we will be done.

Thanks!

Finally, I want to say a word of thanks to all of those who have contributed to the development of SproutCore over the last year. I went back through the commit logs and its actually a pretty big list. I can name 30 contributors and that doesn’t include the folks who send me patches now and then via email.

But I just want to call out those I can. If I missed you, please forgive me. But your contribution is really appreciated:

Billy Kakes
Brian Cully
Charles Jolley
Chris Hyle
Colin Campbell
Cortlan Klien
Erich Ocean
Evin Grano
Geoffrey Donaldson
James Austin
Jason Ketterman
Jonathan Lewis
Joshua Dickens
Juan Pinzon
Majd Taby
Martin Ottenwaelter
Maurits Lamers
Mike Ball
Mike Subelsky
Mohammed Ashik
Onar Vikingstad
Peter Bergstrom
Peter Wagenet
Ray Bodenhorn
Santosh Shanboque
Sudarshan Bhat
Tanner Donovan
Teresa Tsui
Thomas Langemann
Tom Dale
Trek Glowacki

Most of us get into the software industry to try to build something that is really, truly, great. Like-magic kind of great. It turns out it is really hard to do this. We can turn out good software, but the really great stuff doesn’t come easy or often.

SproutCore 1.0 is really truly great. It’s the best piece of code I’ve never been involved with and it’s thanks to the contributions of the folks above, as well as those who’ve been testing, providing feedback, and brave enough to try to build actual products on our code while it was still in development.

So thank you! I can’t say it enough.

What’s Next Next?

Finally, I can’t leave this post on 1.0 without pointing you who are interested to some of the cool things we are already starting work on for SproutCore 1.1 (code named Quilmes). Now that 1.0 is looking really solid, we get to spend some time on really fun things including:

An awesome new animation layer (already working in alpha form).
A FormView that can automatically generate an editor or browser UI from model objects
A UI builder - like Interface Builder or Atlas. The engine is already finished; we’re just putting together the editor UI.
A new JS loader based on CommonJS SecurableModules. This will make SproutCore usable in server-side code as well as making it easier to suck in external libraries for your own use.

Development is being tracked on the wiki so head on over to take a look.

The Tasks app I linked to earlier is also coming along nicely. The team there has a few more changes lined up, but we will soon be able to use it as our default bug tracker and planning tool for SproutCore.

Last of all, I want to give a shout out to the team at Kiva.org who has been working with us on a new Kiva Loan Browser. Kiva, you might know, is a non-profit that makes microloans to entrepreneurs in developing countries. Microloans are one of the most effective ways to address poverty and Kiva is one of the best.

SproutCore needs a good end-to-end example application and so we’ve partnered with them to build a new Loan Browser - and perhaps more in the long run. I hope that once SproutCore 1.0, you will help us build this app into a really great way for Kiva to find and share loans.

Help others while you learn!

—

So this post has turned into a minor book. Sorry for the length. 1.0 is a big milestone. I can’t wait to see what you build with it.

-Charles

Fit for Purpose Datacenters to Enable Clouds

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 10:45:00 EDT

The trigger for this post is a conversation I've had far too often with an IT executive who has an ambitious plan to leverage hypervisor virtualization to create a new data center infrastructure upon which his entire business would run. The goals are laudable; dramatic cost reductions, increased availability, decreased time to market (as measured by how long it takes to provision a VM)...all things any sensible business or IT executive wants, right? But when I asked about their plans for business applications that didn't fit his deployment options (literally small, medium, and large) I got an answer that made me cringe: "they'll have to".

EMC Reports Third-Quarter 2009 Financial Results

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 08:45:00 EDT

Joe Tucci, EMC Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, said, "I am very pleased with EMC's solid financial performance in a challenging economic climate. While remaining closer than ever to customers, we made additional progress optimizing our cost structure, expanded our product portfolio, strengthened our partner ecosystem and positioned EMC to capitalize on four of the higher-growth, multi-billion-dollar market opportunities around fully virtualized data centers, cloud computing, virtualized desktops and clients, and next-generation backup and recovery. I am extremely proud of the EMC and VMware people around the world who achieved these results."

LynuxWorks Releases Latest LynxOS-178 Support for AppliedMicro Boards

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 11:00:00 EDT

LynuxWorks(TM), Inc., a world leader in embedded software, today announced the availability of its board support package (BSP) for two additional motherboards from Applied Micro Circuits Corp. (AMCC), a global leader in embedded processing solutions.

IBM Hardware Chief, Intel VC Exec Arrested in Insider Trading Scam

Sun, 18 Oct 2009 09:30:00 EDT

IBM senior VP Robert Moffat, the head of IBM's Systems and Technology Group - in other words the guy who runs all of its hardware as well its microelectronics unit - and Intel Capital's director of strategic investment Rajiv Goel, one of its VC people, were arrested Friday morning on insider trading charges. They were alleged tipsters. The $20 million scam, involving AMD, Intel, IBM, Akamai, Clearwire and Google stock as well as Polycom's and Hilton Hotels', is said to be the biggest ever pulled off by a hedge fund and had the US Attorney, the FBI and the SEC doing a televised press conference on CNBC this afternoon.

DataSync and SugarCRM Form Strategic Partnership

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 11:45:00 EDT

DataSync, a provider of integrated small business software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions, and SugarCRM, the world’s leading provider of commercial open source customer relationship management (CRM) software, have announced a strategic partnership to deliver an integrated suite of small business applications to small businesses.

Likewise Authentication Software Supports Mac OS X Snow Leopard

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 14:00:00 EDT

Likewise announced today availability of both Likewise Open 5.3 and Likewise Enterprise 5.3 software that supports Apple's new Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, enabling those systems to be integrated with Microsoft Active Directory. Likewise Open allows computers running Mac OS X Snow Leopard to authenticate with an organization's existing Active Directory. Likewise Enterprise builds on the authentication engine of Likewise Open, making it easy for IT managers to authenticate users, control access to applications and data, centrally manage settings with group policies and create reports for regulatory audits. In addition, Likewise Enterprise is the only solution to provide 100 percent native support for Apple's Workgroup Manager application.

What Separates a Cloud From (Water) Vapor?

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 09:00:00 EDT

I spoke this morning with the cloud evangelist for a hardware manufacturer. Not surprisingly, they come at cloud from the iron up, so for them cloud is mostly about virtualization with a little more buzz.

While I can understand this viewpoint, if today's cloud is just yesterday's server consolidation in new clothes, then Larry Ellison's latest "a cloud is just water vapor" rant is probably appropriate.

So what exactly is the dividing line between virtualization and true cloud goodness? I think the key lies in bringing together a fuller solution with a cloud platform than with a virtualization platform.

Cloud computing gets interesting when the platform includes not just deployment (infrastructure as a service or IaaS) but also development (platform as a service or PaaS). Linking these two capabilities opens up fundamentally new markets as well as compelling economics.

Virtualization is about abstracting application deployment so that one box can run many apps, with each app pretending that it is lord and master of it's virtual computer. The value of virtualization is to reduce the amount of hardware needed to run a set of apps and correspondingly reducing the amount of systems administration time needed to manage the overall data center.

Cloud computing is about abstracting application development and deployment so that anyone can develop and manage applications without needing specialized expertise. The value of cloud computing is to reduce all IT costs while increasing organizational flexibility. More people can build the apps they need and fewer expert developers, DBAs and systems administrators are needed.

At its core, virtualization improves IT efficiency - doing traditional computing with fewer resources. On the other hand, cloud computing improves IT effectiveness - empowering more people to build applications with more flexibility and fewer experts. For example, this is the core value prop behind IBM's Cloud Quickstart Program, which includes IBM, Amazon EC2, WaveMaker and RightScale.

Our view at WaveMaker is that the big private cloud payoff comes only when you make both development and deployment of web apps radically easier (cloud-ready computing). If you will, virtualization and private cloud management (IaaS) both reduce the administration costs - the cost transformation comes when you slash not just administration but also development and maintenance costs (IaaS + PaaS).

ERP on Ulitzer - Has the Time for Open Source ERP Come?

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 13:45:00 EDT

For some time now I have been tracking the change in popularity of the top open source platform and I noticed a curious trend. At the beginning of the year ADempiere ERP was the top open source project. Looking down the list you would have found PostBooks at 8, Openbravo ERP at 9, webERP at 17 and OrangeHRM at 21. At that time it was mostly on my unconscious mind and had not “realized” it. But slowly the trend became more pronounced. Five of the top 7 open source projects are ERP. This is how it stands –order in which it is ranked in Source Forge:

Open Source Start-up Poses Mainframe Dilemma for IBM

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 12:30:00 EDT

IBM’s paranoid defense of its mainframe monopoly is going to be tested again but this time if it blows the start-up out of the water, or denies it clearance to compete, it’ll be messing with an open source operation, and a European open source start-up to boot. The European Commission, an admitted open source advocate, is already entertaining at least one known complaint about IBM’s allegedly anti-competitive behavior in the mainframe market.

Ellen Degeneres Should Go Open Source

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 22:30:00 EDT

By the way, if Ellen Degeneres wants to respond in a reasonable and constructive way to the lawsuits over her use of song snippets to dance to, she could always start using Creative Commons-licensed music, with a nice plug for the open-hearted musicians making our lives more tuney.

My Top Seven Wishes From Adobe MAX 2009

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 15:00:00 EDT

In ten days I’ll be sitting at the general session at Adobe MAX 09 in LA. People from Adobe will come up on stage one after another delivering the latest news on the products we all use daily. Here’s my short wish list of the news I’d like to hear. I’m sure people who are using Creative Studio 4 see some room for improvement too, but this is not my cup of tea and I can’t come up with additional items for my wish list that would please the graphic and Web designers. But if my seven wishes become a reality, I’ll openly admit that Flash platform is a killer.

Positive Word of Mouth and Your Brand - Part 2

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 17:30:00 EDT

I hope you were able to connect with your personal fan club and ask the questions posted in the first part of this process, Personal Brand and Word of Mouth – Part 1. It’s important that we research where we are in our personal brand and word of mouth in order to effectively move forward. Remember, we are not really focusing on what each individual says as much as we are focusing on the common traits or brand attributes mentioned. If you haven’t done it yet, for any reason (either fear, lack of time or lack of focus) you still can find out. I utilize the 360 Reach Personal Brand Assessment and you can, too.

The Planet Named “Bronze Sponsor” of Cloud Computing Expo

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 13:45:00 EDT

SYS-CON Events announced today that The Planet, the global IT hosting leader, was named "Bronze Sponsor" of SYS-CON's 4th International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo (www.CloudComputingExpo.com), which will take place on November 2 - 4, 2009, Santa Clara Convention Center, in Santa Clara, California. The event is expected to attract over 1,500 developers, engineers, architects, IT managers, and hardware and software professionals of every stripe.

Jigsaw Releases Its APIs

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 15:30:00 EDT

Jigsaw, the data-as-a-service (DaaS) pioneer with the user-generated global business directory that means to have D&B watching its back, has released a suite of APIs and a toolkit so developers can deliver company profiles and detailed, up-to-date contact data from inside their web, desktop or mobile applications.

Microsoft Starts Open Source Foundation

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 12:15:00 EDT

Microsoft has started a 501.c6 non-profit open source foundation, a bipolar strategy greeted by suspicion, hoots, catcalls, defamation and virtual mooning by the open source set. It’s called the CodePlex Foundation, which is not to be confused with Codeplex com, Microsoft’s version of Sourceforge hosting a reported 10,000 projects. Microsoft is kicking in a million dollars to meet the organization’s first-year expenses.

eBay Sued by Skype Inventors for Infringement

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 23:00:00 EDT

The Internet’s terrible twosome, Skype and Kazaa inventors Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, have thrown a monkey wrench into eBay’s plans to sell off 65% of Skype to an investor group led by Silver Lake and involving Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen for around $2 billion. Zenstrom and Friis were clever enough to keep the P2P Global Index IP underneath Skype so they could reuse it for other ventures.

Virtualization and Fault Tolerance

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 06:45:00 EDT

Virtualization and fault-tolerant technology are like the would-be ideal couple, a match made in heaven, but who never meet, even though they’re constantly in the same place at the same time. That can be a funny conundrum in romantic comedies, but in the real IT world, virtualization and fault tolerance need to get together quickly and often. IT organizations that are virtualizing their server infrastructures need both technologies if they’re going to succeed in building platforms that have virtualization’s efficiency but also provide the continuous availability they need to support enterprise applications.

Is Microsoft as Free as Open Source?

Sat, 12 Sep 2009 13:30:00 EDT

Jon has a point; Microsoft’s restricted (i.e., Express) editions are as free as the open source alternatives. This is undeniably true, since the purpose of many software vendor’s “Express” edition is to compete against open source on price. However, the difference is that with open source you get the full-powered editions. For example, Linux (e.g., CentOs), Xen (for virtualization), PostgreSQL/MySQL, Apache, Java, Tomcat, AspectJ, Lucene, Hibernate, and Eclipse are all robust, full-featured, and powerful technologies available for free to developers. The variety and the quality of product available from the open source community are just astonishing.

White Paper: Open Source Middleware Reference Architecture

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 17:30:00 EDT

As open source development expands and deepens its innovative capabilities, JBoss Enterprise Middleware, by Red Hat, continues to deliver enterprise-class alternatives to expensive, cumbersome proprietary solutions at additional levels of the software stack. These go beyond the application server, to middleware for application integration, data integration, development tools, business rules management, even management and monitoring tools.

Novell Releases SecureLogin 7

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 13:15:00 EDT

Novell has released SecureLogin 7, the latest take on its enterprise single sign-on (SSO) solution, said to cut the time required to SSO-enable an organization’s applications from weeks to days. Password proliferation is supposed to cause significant losses in IT and end-user productivity. A recent Novell survey found that at least 30% of IT help desk time is spent dealing with password-related issues.

Deploying Azure Hosted Services Should Be as Easy as Deploying a Heroku Application

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 09:30:00 EDT

Recently a friend of mine showed me Heroku, an "instant Ruby platform". Basically what you can do with Heroku is build your Ruby application and the deployment to the remote Heroku site is not only brainless, painless, and simple, but it can be done entirely from the command line (which means it can be automated even further than it already is). But don't take my word for it, check out this screencast showing exactly how simple it is to build Ruby applications in the cloud using Heroku.

Open vSwitch Project Launches

Mon, 07 Sep 2009 11:00:00 EDT

Last week a new Open vSwitch project was launched with little fan fare and even less insight into who is behind the project. The project aims to create a multilayer virtual switch licensed under the open source Apache 2 license. At first glance the project looks very promising as the basis for creating distributed VLan and Virtual Private Clouds (VPC).

Astaro Offers VMware Users a Free Firewall

Thu, 03 Sep 2009 03:15:00 EDT

Astaro Corporation, a 150-man German network security vendor started by a college dropout infected with the viral get-rich-quick fever that was pandemic at the turn of the century, is going to give away an open source-based business firewall for VMware. The object of the game is to get noticed in an increasing crowded market although Astaro’s low profile doesn’t seem to have done it much harm. VCs have stuffed $12 million in its jeans and it’s reportedly been profitable for the last three years. It says the recession hasn’t hurt.

Preparing for the Cloud: Is Your Team Strategic or Tactical?

Thu, 03 Sep 2009 02:45:00 EDT

During a lunch with Peter Coffee last May at Interop Peter made a comment that really stuck with me. He said that tech marketers are essentially anthropologists. Our conversation wandered around a bit, from our upcoming Interop panel on cloud computing to the advantages of various approaches to cloud; yet his comment really stuck as I navigated through Interop briefings and single malts before heading to San Diego for the Future in Review Infrastructure 2.0 panel. How true. Tech marketers are indeed like anthropologists. Well said, Peter. Then James Watters at Silicon Angle said the equivalent of the same thing last week during an upcoming video podcast on infrastructure 2.0. He observed that cloud computing could have a bigger cultural impact on IT than it ever has from a technology standpoint. Well said James. In many ways the evolution of technology parallels the evolution of culture. Some cultures stress continuity and tradition as a survival or success strategy while others emphasize innovation and risk taking. Individuals with different capabilities are often rewarded differently based on culture and incentive.

IT Events Audit Standard Emerges

Wed, 02 Sep 2009 07:30:00 EDT

This is an emerging standard that’s being orchestrated through The Open Group, but it’s an open-source standard that is hopefully going to help in compliance and regulatory issues and in improving automation of events across heterogeneous environments. This could be increasingly important, as we get deeper into virtualization and cloud computing.

Gmail is Down Again

Tue, 01 Sep 2009 19:00:00 EDT

At the risk of being redundant, Gmail has come a cropper again. It’s been down this time for hours and hours with no explanation given other than a “service outage” note. At around 4pm Eastern time Google’s Apps Status page finally said, “Google Mail service has already been restored for some users, and we expect a resolution for all users within the next 1.2 hours. Please note this time frame is an estimate and may change.” Tech Crunch says it was acting funny this morning, “but it appears now that it has completely crashed and disappeared.” Apps for Domains was down too.

Novell Revenues Unexpectedly Down 12%

Fri, 28 Aug 2009 14:45:00 EDT

Novell, which contrary to public opinion took a serious hit the other day when a federal appeals court threw its ownership of Unix – and its ability to silence SCO – back to a jury to decide, earned five cents a share or $16.7 million on revenues down 12% to $216.1 million in the July quarter. Thanks to cost cuts its earning picture, as expected, improved over last year when the company lost $15 million, or four cents a share, but its revenue performance was another matter. Wall Street expected it to do $216.6 million.

Benefits from Web 2.0: Open Source

Fri, 28 Aug 2009 06:00:00 EDT

Though Linux started about 15 years ago, the open source movement has only started to gain momentum.

Let's consider what has happened recently in Netherlands. The government has set out a task group ‘NOIV’, to stimulate open source and open standards within the Dutch government. With the amount of open source solutions available on sourceforge and more packages that are launched every day, it seems an unstoppable development. Even ERP solutions, which have been one of the major cash cows of the software industry in the past decades, can be downloaded from the Internet.

Transition a C-Level SOA Skeptic into a SOA Backer

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 11:00:00 EDT

SOA C-level skeptics come in all shapes and sizes. They can be in any industry or any government agency. They can be close friends who “really like you” and no matter what, will invite you to their backyard barbeques. However, despite their differences or that fact that they may be you friends – C-level executives must have confidence the enterprise architect can deliver on what he proposes.

Roadmap to Create Profitable Cloud Computing Industry

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 23:00:00 EDT

SYS-CON Events announced today that Steve Lesem, President and CEO of Mezeo Software, will be presenting at SYS-CON’s 4th International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo in Santa Clara, CA, this coming November 2 – 4, 2009. His session is entitled “The Profit Model for Cloud Computing.” The Cloud storage segment can provide a roadmap for how to create a viable, profitable cloud computing industry.

Cenzic CTO to Present at 4th International Cloud Computing Expo

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 21:00:00 EDT

SYS-CON Events announced today that Lars Ewe, CTO and VP of Engineering at Cenzic, will be presenting at SYS-CON’s 4th International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo in Santa Clara, CA, this coming November 2 – 4, 2009. His session is entitled “Security in the Cloud: Protecting Your Cloud Apps.” Securing data and applications that run on the web and in the cloud are among the most pressing information technology challenges for organizations today.

Event Handling in SproutCore 1.0 - Part 2 - Dragging a View

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 14:30:00 EDT

In my last post I introduced event delegation in SproutCore and the basics of how to handle events. In this post I’m going to build on this foundation to show you how you can add event handlers to drag a view around the window.*

Introducing the Mouse Events

As I noted in the first post, SproutCore recognizes several different types of mouse events. Most of these events are essentially the same events sent by most browsers, though some differ significantly in order to give you tighter control.

Remember that to listen for events, you just need to add a method to your view with the same name. Here is a quick rundown of the different methods you can add to your view:

mouseDown() - Called when the mouse button is pressed while over your view. You must return YES (i.e. true) from this method for mouseDragged() or mouseUp() to be called.
mouseDragged() - Called when the mouse is moved while the button is pressed. This is only called if you returned YES from mouseDown().
mouseUp() - Called when the mouse button is released. Only called if you returned YES from mouseDown().
mouseOver() - Called when the mouse enters the view’s visible area.
mouseOut() - Called when the mouse leaves the view’s visible area.
mouseMoved() - Called whenever the mouse is moved while over the view.

It’s important to note that all of these events, except for mouseDragged() and mouseUp() are sent first to the view that is directly under the mouse pointer at the time of the event. mouseDragged() and mouseUp() only happen after a mouseDown() event. They are always sent first to the view that implemented mouseDown() AND returned YES (or true) from that method.

Events do bubble up your view hierarchy using something called a Responder Chain, but that will be the subject for another post.

Event handler methods are always passed an SC.Event object describing the event. This class provides a consistent cross-platform API for accessing event info. In general, it follows the API conventions for the built-in Event object on Firefox.

Listening For Dragging

So, let’s say we want to create a view that can be dragged around the screen. To do this, we need to implement three of the above event handlers: mouseDown(), mouseDragged() and mouseUp().

Let’s start with mouseDown(). The primary purpose of this method is to setup any information we need to save to handle dragging and, of course, to return YES so that we get our other calls. Here’s some good starter code:

MyApp.MyDragView = SC.View.extend({

  mouseDown: function(evt) {
    var layout = this.get('layout');
    this._mouseDownInfo = {
      pageX: evt.pageX, // save mouse pointer loc for later use
      pageY: evt.pageY,
      left:  layout.left, // save layout info 
      top: layout.top
    };
    return YES; // so we get other events
  }

});

The mouseUp() handler is also pretty simple. It just needs to do some cleanup. Basically delete the mouseDownInfo hash and return YES to indicate that the event has been handled:

  mouseUp: function(evt) {
    // apply one more time to set final position
    this.mouseDragged(evt); 
    this._mouseDownInfo = null; // cleanup info
    return YES; // handled!
  }

Note that this method also calls mouseDragged(). This is the same method that will be called whenever the mouse is moved with the button pressed. The reason you want to call this method again here is to give the view one last chance to position itself with the position mouse location. Otherwise you might find your view will occasionally “miss” your last drag just before you release the mouse.

So with mouseDown() and mouseUp() handled, we just need to add the dragging support. This is where the magic happens. All we do in this method is compare the current location of the mouse against the original location of the mouse at mouseDown(). We then adjust the location by this same delta from the original position. Here’s how this looks in code:

  mouseDragged: function(evt) {
    var info = this._mouseDownInfo,
        loc;
 
    // handle X direction
    loc = info.left + (evt.pageX - info.pageX);
    this.adjust('left', loc);

    // handle Y direction
    loc = info.top + (evt.pageY - info.pageY) ;
    this.adjust('top', loc);

    return YES ; // event was handled!
  }

One interesting thing to pay attention to here is the way we calculate the new location of the view. Most developers write dragging code for the first time by examining the current mouse location against the last time mouseDragged() was called. Then they adjust the top/left by the delta. This code instead saves the mouse and view location at mouseDown() and compares against that.

Note also the use of adjust(). This method is an easy way to adjust one or more layout parameters on your view without having to generate a whole new layout object. It is very efficient for rendering.

The reason we take this approach here is because you want the offset of the mouse, relative to the view, to always remain fixed while you drag around. Sometimes when you just look at the delta between events, this won’t happen. It is usually always better to write UI code using this kind of “instantaneous point” approach - where calling a method with the same params will always have the same results, regardless of how it was called in the past.

Putting It All Together

So that’s all there is to it. Three methods and you’ve added nice professional draggable views to your UI. To help finish this example out, I’m going to add a property called “isDragging” and update the render() method of the view to add/remove a class name when that changes. This will allow you to draw the view highlighted. Here’s how the view looks when you put it together:

MyApp.MyDragView = SC.View.extend({

  // ..........................................................
  // DISPLAY
  // 

  // class name is added to the output HTML  
  classNames: 'my-drag-view',
  
  // becomes YES when a drag becomes.
  isDragging: NO,
  
  // make sure view will auto-rerender.
  displayProperties: 'isDragging'.w(),
  
  render: function(context, firstTime) {
    // add/remove class name.  Use CSS rule like this to style:
    // .sc-view.my-drag-view.dragging 
    //
    context.setClass('dragging', this.get('isDragging'));
  },

  // ..........................................................
  // EVENT HANDLING
  // 
  
  mouseDown: function(evt) {
  
    // indicate dragging - rerenders view
    this.set('isDraggin', YES);
    
    var layout = this.get('layout');
    this._mouseDownInfo = {
      pageX: evt.pageX, // save mouse pointer loc for later use
      pageY: evt.pageY,
      left:  layout.left, // save layout info 
      top: layout.top
    };
    return YES; // so we get other events
  },
  
  mouseUp: function(evt) {
  
    // no longer dragging - will rerender
    this.set('isDragging', NO);
    
    // apply one more time to set final position
    this.mouseDragged(evt); 
    this._mouseDownInfo = null; // cleanup info
    return YES; // handled!
  },
  
  mouseDragged: function(evt) {
    var info = this._mouseDownInfo,
        loc;
 
    // handle X direction
    loc = info.left + (evt.pageX - info.pageX);
    this.adjust('left', loc);

    // handle Y direction
    loc = info.top + (evt.pageY - info.pageY) ;
    this.adjust('top', loc);

    return YES ; // event was handled!
  }
  

});

Now you know how to do basic mouse event handling. Next we’re going to head into keyboard land. Before that, however, you’ll need to learn another key concept with events: the Responder Chain

—

* Note that SproutCore also has a generic facility for drag and drop called SC.Drag. SC.Drag is better for complex operations and will eventually integrate with the browser-based drag/drop events in HTML5. But that is a topic for another day.

Opportunity for ERP Enthusiasts with Open Source ERPs

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 12:30:00 EDT

Open ERP has released its new service offer - Odoo, the Ondemand ERP solution with minimal costs involved for end user. Its a SaaS (Software As A Service) offer from Open ERP, which provides access to end user without any investments or any infrastructural costs.

SpringSource Adds Grease to Java Cloud Skids

Sat, 22 Aug 2009 21:00:00 EDT

This is the clear path for open source and Java developers to the cloud. Microsoft will have its hands full just keeping the .NET developers and operators on the farm, so to speak. SpringSource made headlines last week when VMware scooped up the Java infrastructure and management firm for $420 million in a move to breed easier cloud migration. Now, the spotlight is on the San Mateo, Calif. company once again as it leverages one of its own recent cloud industry acquisitions.

Moonlight 2 Beta Out

Fri, 21 Aug 2009 17:30:00 EDT

The open source Mono Project sponsored by Novell has put out a beta release Moonlight 2, the Linux equivalent of Microsoft’s Silverlight 2, which gives users a platform to view and use Silverlight and Windows Media content on Linux. The beta offers improved functionality compared to Moonlight 1, including support for adaptive video streaming and audio playback, which means better streaming of multimedia content based on the quality of the user’s connections.

Summary of Finnish High-Tech Company Capital Raising Activity - H109

Thu, 20 Aug 2009 11:00:00 EDT

Technopolis Online Reports: Finnish high-tech growth companies raised almost €51 million in the first half of 2009—a 17% decrease from the first half of 2008. In addition, Q2 2009 decreased more than 50% compared to the prior year. The following are the findings of the Quarterly Survey, conducted by Technopolis Online, which is at the forefront of high-tech venture capital research in Finland. This survey reviews capital raised by private Finnish high-tech companies from venture capital funds and from angel investors, both Finnish and foreign. The Survey is based on both publicly-reported and proprietary information regarding 140 Finnish and foreign investors, and 1,500 Finnish high-tech firms.

JavaFX Server-Side Push Demo

Thu, 20 Aug 2009 05:30:00 EDT

Check out this cool screen shot of our JavaFX server-side push demo. The back-end is Seam. Server-side push is implemented with Flamingo. You can drag and drop servers into the rectangles to get live updates. We will be showing this demo at JBoss World 2009 in Chicago in September. I’ll try to record [...]

PowerBuilder and .NET: Development Strategy

Wed, 19 Aug 2009 09:30:00 EDT

Nowadays .NET has become a mainstream programming platform. To be inline with PowerBuilder’s .NET deployment and .NET development strategy, the PowerScript language will be enhanced to be a true CLS-compliant .NET language in PowerBuilder 12. Users will be able to consume and extend any CLS-compliant .NET resource, thereby saving them a lot of development time.

Innovation with Open Source

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 17:57:00 EDT

Companies deploy open source software on the grounds of quality and flexibility, not only because it is cheaper than proprietary products.

Rushing To Cloud Computing Can Be Bad

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 07:00:00 EDT

Business managers know that in spite of the benefits of every new technology/business model, there are also risks and issues like trust, loss of privacy, regulatory violation, data replication, coherency and erosion of integrity, application sprawl, and dependencies, among others.

Therefore they realize that rushing things when it comes to Cloud Computing can be a very bad decision. However, ignoring Cloud Computing all together, because of a belief in your ability to secure your own environment better than a service provider ever could, or jumping rapidly into it because the many claims made about Cloud Computing have led you to the point of "irrational exuberance" and unrealistic expectations, isn't smart either.

This following articles will contain useful information even if your company (either private company or public organization) has already decided not to use Cloud Computing in the near future. It is likely that unbeknownst to you, some of your departments are already using Cloud Computing, and you will need to define a Cloud Governance Program and make it available to all your internal customers.

For instance, if your company has an IT department, one must agree that it is very tempting for software developers, pressed to demonstrate a proof of concept, to use a Cloud Computing service provider and configure the servers there (in minutes or hours), instead of waiting days or months for new server acquisitions to be approved, delivered, set up by IT, have the network configured, and so on.

Or maybe it is your sales department that decides to go to a Cloud Computing service provider and start using their Cloud Computing CRM immediately, instead of waiting months to have an onpremise CRM program, and you will only become aware of this initiative when they ask to integrate it with the billing and finance programs.

After all, all they need is a credit card (if the cost is low it may well be within the discretionary budget of the department, and in some situations not even a credit card is required because some Cloud offerings are free), to start using any Cloud Computing service immediately, and in true agile fashion, instead of asking permission to use it, they may be asking you for forgiveness after they have already done so...

Also, a relatively young company, without a huge IT infrastructure, will tend to move more quickly to the Cloud, be able to enter and build new "markets" more rapidly, and thus achieve competitive advantages over more traditional businesses.

In the nexts articles, I will try to explain the followings points:
- Cloud Computing Equals to SaaS, Grid, Utility Computing, Hosting?
- What Exactly is Cloud Computing?
- Why Large Public and Private Sector Organizations (not just SMB's) Are Seriously Considering Cloud Computing?
- What are the Cloud Computing Challenges and Risks?
- Real-World Cloud Computing Applications
- Cloud Computing Enterprise Implementation Road-Map

Thanks, and please let me know how can I help you.
Maria Spínola
http://www.twitter.com/MariaSpinola

P.S. Also see http://blog.mariaspinola.com/2009/08/cloud-computing-in-plain-english-to-it.html

Why Storytelling is Vital to Effective Business Presentations

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 05:15:00 EDT

Whatever audience you must persuade, you need to engage them with compelling content in the form of stories. That’s easy to say, but hard to do. As Jerry Weissman, author of Presenting to Win: The Art of Telling Your Story, puts it, "The problem is that no one knows how to tell a story and no one knows that they don't know how to tell a story." Fortunately, you’ll come away from reading this book armed with the necessary tools to tell those all-important stories brilliantly. Presenting to Win, in its new expanded edition, teaches you to communicate with a purpose--whether you are convincing employees of the need to change, persuading prospects that you have the best solution to a problem or leading skeptical community groups to support your cause.

i4i Fallout Could Be Widespread

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 16:30:00 EDT

Concerns have been raised that Tuesday’s Great Word Injunction could beget a bunch of nasty children. i4i chairman Loudon Owen told Redmond Magazine, which got a more detailed audience with him than most – we got as far as the idea that Microsoft might get a stay, he went into a snit about “It’s our technology and we’re going to get paid for it,” then found something else to do promising to call back and never did – anyway, he suggested to Redmond Magazine that there might be other offenders out and that Microsoft’s broader Office Open XML (OOXML) document format technology – you know, the controversial ISO/IEC standard 29500 – might be implicated.