Vinny Carpenter
Updates
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High Scalability - High Scalability - Startups are Creating a New System of the World for IT http://t.co/Mdc0t5JZ
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Check out what Pentaho is doing with BI http://t.co/uteCyltz via @pentaho
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NIH Study: Coffee Really Does Make You Live Longer, After All - The Atlantic http://t.co/YcbkkJrB
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Looks like @kickstarter is down.26 hours ago from web | Reply, Retweet, Favorite
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Video: How to Combine Neo4j with GWT and Eclipse | Architects Zone: http://t.co/lrQAG2jV
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Spring MVC is the most popular web fwk, followed by JSF, Struts & GWT. See more stats in @jrebel's http://t.co/l5mKK46Z http://t.co/HX7TbrS1
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LastPass : The last password you'll have to remember: Introducing LastPass Wallet: Backup Your Billfold,... http://t.co/MUzCIeTE
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Facebook will make $441.69 off my data when they IPO on Friday. How much will they make off yours? http://t.co/rIHI0YNs
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@tonywkim Agreed. Hoping the acquisition of Penultimate will improve the overall editor.
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Goodbye MongoDB http://t.co/BzQcgqTo
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VMware's Vision For Next-Generation Applications http://t.co/6fgVuYmp
Profile
Senior Software Engineer at Artisan Partners
Investment Management | Greater Milwaukee Area, US
Summary
I am Technical Developer/Architect/Geek with more than 15 years of experience in the field of software development, engineering, architecture and technical leadership. I have worked in Education, Manufacturing, Financial Services and Investments Management industries with large global multi-national companies to small entrepreneurial companies. Passionate about software development using agile methodologies that deliver nimble solutions that allow the business to be nimble. Love designing systems that are massively scalable, distributed, highly-available systems that meet the needs of the business.
Specialties: Java and Web development in the Financial Services, Manufacturing and Education industries.
Experience
- Dec 2006 - PresentSenior Software Architect / Artisan PartnersI spend most of my time at work in the areas of software development, architecture and strategy. The goal is to always create value for the business and that is what I try to do every single day. Plus have a ton of fun, but that goes without saying. :)
- Jan 2005 - PresentLead Architect / Wells Fargo Advantage FundsI spend most of my time dealing with architectural and security issues with plenty of work and personal play-time going into discovering the latest tool, framework, etc that will allow us to work faster, smarter and deliver better results. A lot of my time is also spent fire-fighting issues and coming up with solutions to interesting problems :)
- Aug 1999 - PresentEnterprise Architect / Strong
- 1997 - PresentWebmster / Quad/Graphics
- 1993 - PresentWebmaster / Marquette University
Education
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1987 - 1992Marquette UniversityBS in Biomedical Engineering
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Posts
July 08, 07:49 PM
July 28, 10:10 PM
February 28, 03:32 PM
February 11, 07:25 PM
February 10, 11:27 AM
There is nothing simple about speech, and there is nothing simple about speech delay — starting with the challenge of diagnos
via nytimes.com
February 09, 11:14 PM
February 09, 08:28 PM
Nasuni's virtual NAS file server runs on VMware and connects to cloud platforms, adding encryption and several features to improve performance
via infoworld.com
February 09, 08:27 PM
By many measures, Microsoft is simply too big. The bigness is in the gut, like a middle-aged man who drinks too much beer and eats too many classic potato chips. In computing years, Microsoft most certainly is a middle-aged company. So is Apple, which by comparison is leaner and healthier. What's up with Microsoft's gut?
Based on communications with current and former employees, Microsoft's midriff problem is one of middling middle management. The number of middle mangers swelled over the last decade, and they also are the employees making key management decisions, which includes who gets laid off or fired and where the remaining people work. What manager will fire himself or herself? (Before continuing, let me be clear that only former Microsoft employees will be quoted, and anonymously at that. Current employees would only communicate with me on background, for concern of risking their jobs).
One former employee, whom I'll call Boris, had this to say about how last year's layoffs affected him and his former team: "Out of a starting staff of nearly 20, four remained, all managers. I'm not sure what they manage." Who made the decisions about whom to layoff? Another former Microsoft employee whom I'll refer to as Fred said that a "dramatic increase in middle management, and the fat cutting the muscle, is right on target."
I don't have figures on how many middle managers Microsoft now employs. But various former, and even some current, employees say that their number of "reports" -- meaning people they report to -- has increased by five to seven managers above them during 2000. Typically that works out to double or more the layers of middle management over the decade.
"When I started at MSFT in 1996, there were six people between me and [Microsoft cofounder] Bill Gates," Boris said. "In 2009, there were 13 people between me and [Microsoft CEO] Steve Ballmer." Fred said, "the number of managers between me and the CEO went from six to 10," during the last decade. Another long-time Microsoftie, whom I'll call Barry, saw his reports go from six to 12.
Microsoft's swelling workforce gives some hint of the midriff, middle management problem. In June 2000, at the end of fiscal 2001, Microsoft employed 39,100. At the end of fiscal 2010, even after 5,000 layoffs, Microsoft employed 93,000.
'All Praise the Holy Reorg'
Microsoft manages middle management by way of seemingly perennial reorganizations. Every former or existing Microsoft employee I communicated with for this post and the accompanying "Microsoft Confession" series harshly criticized the reorganizations.
"How many reorgs have ever benefited anyone except the folks on top?" asked a former employee I'll call Jack. "The people that need to be cut at MS are the managers that don't support their teams and only support their own careers. I've watched countless super visionary managers get bogged in politics and leave."
Another former employee, whom I'll call Amanda quipped: "All praise the holy reorg, which is an approximately annual religious festival in certain sects, I mean divisions, of Microsoft." Recent reorganizations -- those publicly disclosed or uncovered over the last 12 months -- include desktop operating system, developer tool, entertainment, mobile device, search and server organizations, among others. This year's reorg affecting Microsoft's TV products came with the departure of Enrique Rodriguez, a corporate vice president.
Bill Veghte is one of Microsoft's highest-profile executive departures steaming from reorganization. Microsoft announced Veghte's departure on January 14, after he failed to find a new position following the summer 2009 reorg that put Steven Sinfosky in charge of the Windows & Windows Live group. Weeks later, Microsoft acknowledged the departure of Mike Nash, like Veghte a 19-plus year veteran. At the end of 2009, Microsoft also lost Chris Liddell, as chief financial officer. The point: Microsoft is shedding top-level managers all while middle-manager ranks add bulge to the organizational structure.
The reorganizations can be looked at another way -- as reflecting ineffective management processes that Microsoft tries to resolve by changing which groups report to which groups or to whom. In theory, Microsoft's five business groups -- Business, Entertainment & Devices, Online Services, Server & Tools and Windows & Windows Live -- should be small enough to be nimbler than a company employing more than 90,000. But there are mitigating factors, such as reporting hierarchies that cut across different groups and supporting organizations, like marketing and services, that have responsibilities affecting all five Microsoft divisions. In many ways, Microsoft's organizational structure is best described as a middle schooler's messy room (also a Windows Plus! Pack for Kids theme).
Incentives that Discourage Risk, Innovation
Related to gut-bulging middle management: some HR review and compensation processes discourage many employees from taking the kinds of risks necessary for Microsoft to regain its competitive edge and, quite frankly, to innovate in truly meaningful ways. Microsoft's definition of innovation, for most of its product groups, is anything that preserves the status quo -- meaning extending Office and Windows and increasingly server software like SharePoint and Windows Server. Risk is a dirty word for many employees looking to advance at Microsoft.
A former employee whom I'll call Rodriguez said of the HR review process: "Microsoft has become too 'scorecard' heavy and highly litigated to the point it kills an employee's spirit of free thinking and creativity, since everything a person does is closely judged by management." Among the former Microsofties I communicated with over the last couple of months, Rodriguez was the harshest critic of Microsoft's review process, which he observed is going on right now; fiscal year ends on June 30 and reviews occur midway.
Several former and existing employees tried to explain Microsoft's seemingly complicated review and compensation process. People are hired at a certain level and can advance up levels, which have corresponding salary ranges. During reviews process, employees are graded with such designations as 'exceed,' 'achieved' and 'underperformed' commitment ratings. These are based on numerous criteria, which include management assessment of performance and achieving goals set during the previous review process. Other criteria include "contribution rankings." Problem: These criteria sometimes work cross-purposes to performance. Fred explained:
Processes became more bureaucratic and individuals were less empowered to take action. In fact, oftentimes the incentive structure encouraged individual contributors not to do the right thing, but just to do what they committed to in their review the year prior. In other words, if you committed to include Feature A in Windows, and halfway through the year you realized that was a bad thing for Windows and Microsoft customers, the incentive structure actively discouraged you from trying to kill the feature, because then you wouldn't have achieved your commitments.Barry also made similar complaints about the "decentives" to doing a good job. "The metrics are too complex," he said. "We were evaluated also on a client's satisfaction with our work." The client could range from a reporter for Microsofties working in PR to developers for employees doing product development or for anyone to other groups within Microsoft.
Several current and former employees wanting to do better or escape from stifling management situations would request transfers. However, many managers wanted to keep their staff in part "because it would reflect badly on them," Barry said.
"I was put in 'performance detention' due to wanting to expand to another part of the company and ended up in the 'crapper' list," said another former employee, whom I'll call Mickey.
What About those 5,800 Layoffs?
Last year's layoffs surprised many Microsoft employees. There are looming questions about whether or not Microsoft dismissed the right employees. From Friday through Monday, I posted four stories from former employees laid off in 2009. Each story reveals something about the layoff process and the middling middle management problems. Posted as Microsoft Confessions:
These four stories and others I received but didn't publish raise questions about whether Microsoft laid off the right people, whether certain groups were targeted and whether more middle managers should have been axed. Perhaps the most visible of the surprising layoffs: Don Dodge, who within two weeks of being let go was hired by Google.
Based on former and current Microsoft employee stories, five trends can be seen in Microsoft's layoff of 5,800 employees during 2009. Laid-off employees tended to be:
- High salaried
- With the company eight or more years
- Older -- many in their late 30s or early 40s
- At a status of what Microsoft calls "long at level"
- In positions later refilled by younger, lower-salaried people
- In positions the former Microsoftie resumed as a non-employee contractor
Several former employees proactively contacted me about these six similarities, but not all people used all six. Mickey said he was:
1. Over 402. Worked at MS for almost 11 years, industry almost 28
3. Pretty high salary
4. Senior guy but brought in underleveled
Barry, who had worked as a manager, clearly understood employee evaluations and he concurred about the six similarities. I should point out that in fairness to Microsoft, I've seen this pattern elsewhere, including journalism. Older and/or higher-salaried employees are laid off and either replaced by someone younger who is paid much less or the original employee returns on a freelance basis. For Microsoft, the returnee would a contractor. Barry is someone whom Microsoft laid off and took back as contractor doing essentially the same job as before.
Barry insinuated there was some age discrimination in the layoffs, but other former Microsoftie's disagreed. Former employee Randolph (not his real name, of course) noted that four of the people he was laid off with were ages 36 to 59, with two of them being 50 or over. "Suspicious, perhaps, but just as likely a consequence of the team demographics," he said. Two of the people remaining on the team were 48 and 51. The ages were provided with Randolph's severance package. However, "the fact that they gave me the paper in the first place suggests they are sensitive to the implication of age discrimination."
Then there is "long at level," which refers to employees who have stayed in the same position or designated organizational and pay level for a long time. Presumably a long-and-level employee lacks ambition to outperform. But for a smaller product or services group, where an employee shows expertise, there may be nowhere to go but out. Other employees stay in organizations where moving up or out is discouraged or even penalized by the manager. I know of current Microsoft employees who change positions every few years simply to avoid being perceived as long at level.
In conclusion, no company's organizational structure is perfect, because too many people put their personal ambitions before the company they work for. But companies can encourage mismanagement by the organizational structure, corporate culture and review and compensation processes. Based on my communications with dozens of former and current Microsoft employees over the last couple months, Microsoft needs to streamline its management processes, empower small groups to act like startups, reward risk-taking innovation and sharply reduce the number of middle managers.
Update: Mini-Microsoft's blog and especially the comments can offer broader perspective on this post's topic. While I purposely didn't read Mini's blog when researching and writing this post (I typically avoid outside influences when writing), several of my sources sent some of the comments they had posted to the blog. Mini has an active following of current Microsoft employees. I'll resume reading now that I've finished here.
via betanews.com
Posts
May 16, 10:41 PM
- Goodbye MongoDB – Over the last two or three years we have been using MongoDB in some mid-size projects. Now it is time to say goodbye to MongoDB for a variety of technical reasons:
- VMware’s Vision For Next-Generation Applications – The moves are aimed at Java developers, particularly those who already use VMware's Spring Framework for lightweight Java development. Enterprise Java applications frequently end up in the virtualized part of the data center. By making it easier to produce them, VMware is also making it more likely they'll be deployed on its virtual machines
- Brunch – A lightweight approach to building HTML5 applications with emphasis on elegance and simplicity – Brunch is an assembler for HTML5 applications. It's agnostic to frameworks, libraries, programming, stylesheet & templating languages and backend technology.
- Choosing a Web Development Framework: Options and Criteria | Javalobby – In this post I’ll present you with our candidates and the criteria we are evaluating each framework with. Over the next weeks I’ll post the actual evaluation of each framework and finally what our choice is and why.
- gwt-twilio – GWT Wrapper for the Twilio Client – Google Project Hosting – A GWT library that wraps the existing Twilio Client javascript library. Now GWT developers can add voice/phone features to their GWT application in Java.
- The Big Three – Scala, Clojure and Groovy | The Code General – The most encouraging outcome of the last few years has been the flourishing ecosystem around new JVM languages. A decade ago the CLR was being proclaimed as *the* runtime to support multiples languages. Thanks to the community the JVM is looking more and more like the preferred target for new languages, innovation and research.
- MongoDB Overview | Channel 9 – Jared Rosoff covers the basics of Mongo and then explains the purpose and architecture of MongoDB replica sets (for scalable read operations) as well as MongoDB's approach to sharding (for scalable write operations).
- AppJS – Build Desktop Applications for Linux, Mac and Windows using HTML, CSS and Javascript – Build Desktop Applications for Linux, Mac and Windows using HTML, CSS and Javascript
- JSONP – Enables cross-domain requests to any JSON API – JSONP – Enables cross-domain requests to any JSON API
- The Toolbox: a directory of useful single-page sites and apps – A collection of the best time-saving apps, tools, and widgets from around the web.
- This Is What Developing For Android Looks Like | TechCrunch – Animoca, a Hong Kong mobile app developer that has seen more than 70 million downloads, says it does quality assurance testing with about 400 Android devices. Again, that’s testing with four hundred different phones and tablets for every app they ship!
May 10, 08:52 PM
- Netik Launches vMobile for Data Management – Wall Street & Technology – Emphasizing security and entitlement, vMobile positions Netik to extend the reach of its data management solutions to iPads, Androids and Blackberry Playbook devices.
- F5 Announces SPDY Support for BigIP – Blogging Techstacks – Today, F5 announced that support for SPDY was going to be available in version 11.2 of the BigIP OS, when it ships later this year although I don't know if this will be built into the base system or if it will ship as an add-on module.
- InfoQ: New Rules for Good UI Design: Rules, Tips and Tricks for Designing an Enjoyable Software Experience – Joe Nuxoll provides rules, tips and tricks for creating a great user interface that can improve the user experience.
- Gmvault Gmail Backup: Backup and restore your gmail account at will. Liberate your emails and never lose that part of your life. – Gmvault Gmail Backup: Backup and restore your gmail account at will. Liberate your emails and never lose that part of your life.
- New Git Homepage with easy link to download, documents, free hosted version of Pro Git book plus goodies – New Git Homepage with easy link to download, documents, free hosted version of Pro Git book plus goodies
- Evernote acquires iPad app Penultimate @tonywkim – Evernote has acquired Penultimate, and I’ll be joining Evernote to help bring their significant resources to bear on making Penultimate better, faster. You’ll also start seeing Penultimate (finally!) on other devices, and we’ll be bringing great handwriting into other parts of Evernote.
- Spring MVC 3.2 Preview: Introducing Servlet 3, Async Support | SpringSource Team Blog – Spring MVC 3.2 M1 will introduce asynchronous request processing support based on Servlet 3.0. This is the first of several blog posts covering the new feature, providing along the way sufficient background and context to understand how and why you might want to take advantage of it.
- The frequent fliers who flew too much – latimes.com – Many years after selling lifetime passes for unlimited first-class travel, American Airlines began scrutinizing the costs — and the customers.
- Sencha GXT 2.x to 3.0 Migration Guide – Sencha GXT 3.0 is the next generation of the components and tools that, in conjunction with the GWT compiler and runtime, make it possible to build large scale maintainable browser-based web applications. As part of this new release, we've made a number of changes from GXT 2.x, with several main goals in mind:
- REST API Tutorial and Best Practices – Presently, there aren't a lot of REST API guides to help the lonely developer. RestApiTutorial.com is dedicated to tracking REST API best practices and making resources available to enable quick reference and self education for the development crafts-person. We'll discuss both the art and science of creating REST Web services.
May 04, 08:53 PM
- Magic Quadrant for Mobile Application Development Platforms – Mobile application development is a very important and strategic IT topic. In 2012, Gartner is making major updates to this research to reflect market convergence. We analyze platforms that allow enterprises to build, support and manage mobile applications for both customers and employees.
- Momentum for Sencha Builds as Company Expands Globally, Adding New Staff and Locations to Serve its Growing Application Developer Ecosystem – Sencha was recently identified as a Visionary in the Gartner "Magic Quadrant for Mobile Application Development Platforms"
- Full Samsung Galaxy S III launch event now online | The Verge – If you weren't around for our live coverage of yesterday's Galaxy S III event, it's fair to say that you missed quite a lot. Luckily, Samsung has uploaded the entire event, along with some close-ups, additional hands-on videos, and interviews that you wouldn't have seen yesterday
- RubyMotion – Ruby for iOS – RubyMotion is a revolutionary toolchain for iOS that lets you quickly develop and test native iOS applications for iPhone or iPad, all using the awesome Ruby language you know and love.
- A Relevant Tale: How Google Killed Inktomi – Diego Basch’s Blog – In the end, Inktomi was acquired by Yahoo for 250M. What happened? Among other things, Google. Grab some popcorn and enjoy this story
- LinkedIn For iPad: using local storage for snappy mobile apps | LinkedIn Engineering – We've found HTML 5 local storage to be an effective way to improve an application's performance, both in terms of time and space requirements
- You’ll never believe how LinkedIn built its new iPad app (exclusive) | VentureBeat – Yes, only one screen in the entire LinkedIn iPad app is actually native. The rest is good ol’ HTML5-based mobile web technology, running in the browser and leaning heavily on Node.js.
- InfoQ: Architecting in the Gaps – Eoin Woods suggests creating the architecture of a system by discovering the interactions between the components and focusing on the boundaries, helping with defining the interfaces and interactions.
- Real world feedback from a Java dev using Scala | Cape Coder – Since I fall squarely within the target audience for Scala I’ve decided to share my experiences and impressions using Scala from a Java programmer’s perspective. Overall I’m very impressed by Scala and plan to use it more, but do have plenty of constructive criticism which I provide at the end of this blog pos
- GitHub Enterprise 11.10.260 Release · GitHub – We're excited to announce the latest release of GitHub Enterprise. The response to the product since its launch last November has blown us away and we'd like to tell you about a few of the great things we've been working on to make it even better.
- The Vision for "QlikView.next" – Donald Farmer presented the themes for “QlikView.next,” the code name for the next generation of the QlikView Business Discovery platform.
- Here’s Why Google and Facebook Might Completely Disappear in the Next 5 Years – Forbes – With the rate that the tech world is moving these days, there are good reasons to think Google & Facebook might be gone completely in 5 – 8 years. Not bankrupt gone, but MySpace gone. And there’s some academic theory to back up that view, along with casual observations from recent history
- Java creator James Gosling: ‘Google totally slimed Sun’ – Gosling said that Sun was "wronged" by Google and that Oracle is right to sue Google for the way it used Java code in Android.
- Why Postgres – Very often recently I find myself explaining why Postgres is so great. In an effort to save myself a bit of time in repeating this, I though it best to consolidate why Postgres is so great and dispel some of the historical arguments against it.
April 29, 08:42 PM
- InfoQ: Decisions, Decisions – Dan North engages the audience into a discussion about the tradeoffs involved in making decisions regarding the team composition, development style, architecture, and deployment solutions.
- Google has lost control of Android – Only a miraculous Google I/O developer conference can take back Android, but challenges remain. Big ones. Google's problem: Two partners are overwhelming successful, while the majority limp along, and one hurts the entire Android ecosystem. Apple is now the least of concerns. Putting Amazon and Samsung in their place is more important.
- Touch4j – A simple to use Java API for Sencha Touch 2.0 now with PhoneGap, Charts and Map integration! – Touch4j – A simple to use Java API for Sencha Touch 2.0 now with PhoneGap, Charts and Map integration!
- Tessell is a GWT application framework that follows a Model View Presenter architecture – Tessell is a GWT application framework that follows a Model View Presenter architecture & requires less boilerplate (10x less LOC than hand-coded MVP)
- Developing a GWT TodoMVC application – It is worth noting that one of the greatest strengths of GWT is not that it means you don’t have to understand JavaScript. Rather, it is that you are developing using a strongly-typed language. As a result, when one of the TodoMVC project reviewers asked for name changes, and other refactoring tasks, I was able to make these changes with complete confidence via the Eclipse refactoring tools.
- What is Model View Presenter (MVP) in GWT Application? – The MVP pattern is extremely useful when building large, web-based applications with GWT. Not only does it help make code more readable, and subsequently more maintainable, it also makes it much easier to implement new features, optimizations, and automated testing
- Meteor – A new way to build apps. – Meteor is a set of new technologies for building top-quality web apps in a fraction of the time, whether you're an expert developer or just getting started.
- Spring Data JPA Tutorial Part Seven: Pagination | Petri Kainulainen – The previous part of my Spring Data JPA tutorial described how you can sort query results with Spring Data JPA. This blog entry will describe how you can paginate the query results by using Spring Data JPA. In order to demonstrate the pagination support of Spring Data JPA, I will add two new requirements for my example application:
- GWT Highcharts – A comprehensive API enabling the use of Highcharts within a GWT application. – GWT Highcharts is a freely available open source library that provides an elegant and feature complete approach for including Highcharts and Highstock visualizations within a GWT application using pure Java code (including GWT widget libraries, such as SmartGWT or Ext GWT.)
April 26, 09:05 PM
- MongoDB and Spring Data » Mathew’s Thoughts! – This blog will give the reader a decent start with writing a Spring-based application that writes to MongoDB, retrieves data via queries and finally runs a simple MapReduce query. All this using Spring Data MongoDB support.
- Former Sun CEO says Google’s Android didn’t need license for Java APIs | Mobile – CNET News – Jonathan Schwartz testifies that Java APIs were not considered proprietary or protected by Sun, as long as Google didn't use the Java name, countering Oracle's claims that Google infringed on its intellectual property.
- Twitter CLI – A command-line power tool for Twitter. – The CLI attempts to mimic the Twitter SMS commands wherever possible, however it offers many more commands than are available via SMS.
- Why Tablets Will Become Our Primary Computing Device | Forrester Blogs – All these reasons add up to our prediction that tablets will become the preferred, primary device for millions of people around the world, which is in the just-published report "Tablets Will Rule The Future Personal Computing Landscape."
- VMware buys big data startup Cetas — Cloud Computing News – Cetas is the logical next step, a big data application that’s designed to run on virtual resources – specifically Amazon Web Services and VMware’s vSphere
- Git vs Mercurial: Why Git? | Atlassian Blogs – Hopefully this article and the previous one exploring the advantages of Mercurial over Git will illuminate some of the strengths and weaknesses of both systems. Our next blog post in this series will provide a “cheat sheet” for users moving from the centralized version control system Subversion to Git or Mercurial.
- Unforgiven: The consequences of profit failure in mobile phones | asymco – Until and unless these endangered companies solve the dilemma of having the wrong business model at the wrong time, the chances are that they will not be forgiven for market failure.
- CRaSH a shell to extend the Java Platform – The Common Reusable SHell (CRaSH) deploys in a Java runtime and provides interactions with the JVM. Commands are written in Groovy and can be developped at runtime making the extension of the shell very easy with fast development cycle.
- Raising Software Architecture. 9 Troubles and 3 Answers – One cannot embrace the unembraceable and deeply focus on all architectural dimensions at the same time. However, you can tailor your approach to your current situation and most pressing challenges.
- Modern Web Development Part 1 – The Webkit Inspector – The blog post is the first in a series of posts that attempts to outline what a modern web development toolchain looks like and how to use the best-of-breed tools for efficient, effective development.
- DON’T READ this Less CSS tutorial – must read from @verekia’s blog – We’ve seen a lot of amazing features in this tutorial, and I hope it made you want to start using Less. I personally think Less is a real game changer for web development, and I cannot even consider going back to pure CSS. Less is like CSS5 in 2011!
- Kalendae – A framework agnostic javascript date picker – Kalendae is an attempt to do something that nobody has yet been able to do: make a date picker that doesn't suck. Kalendae provides the following features:
April 21, 11:28 PM
- iTextEditors – iPhone and iPad text/code editors and writing tools compared – Comprehensive comparison of iOS text-editing apps out there. Via @daringfireball
- Android, Java, and the tech behind Oracle v. Google (FAQ) | Business Tech – CNET News – In essence, Google sidestepped Sun — and by the way managed to build its Java knock-off into the stunningly successful foundation for smartphone programs that Sun only dreamed of.
- InfoQ: Building Offline Access to Websites Using HTML5 – Israel Hilerio presents how to cache data locally with HTML5 technologies: IndexedDB, App Cache, DOM Storage and File API.
- Java IAQ: Infrequently Answered Questions – A question is infrequently answered either because few people know the answer or because it is about an obscure, subtle point (but a point that may be crucial to you). I thought I had invented the term, but it also shows up at the very informative About.com Urban Legends site. There are lots of Java FAQs around, but this is the only Java IAQ.
- TodoMVC – A common learning application for popular JavaScript MV* frameworks – To help solve this problem, we created TodoMVC – a project which offers the same Todo application implemented using MV* concepts in most of the popular JavaScript MV* frameworks of today.
- Cloud Server and Virtual Server Hosting powered by Openstack – The next generation Rackspace Cloud powered by OpenStack, backed by Fanatical Support
- Modern Web Architecture: The HTML5 Web Storage | Technical Advices – The Web Storage increases the scalability of the web applications on the server level and on the network level. In this article, I will show you how to work with the HTML5 Web Storage feature.
- JRockit jrcmd tutorial – Java Code Geeks – I hope this article has helped you understand you can leverage the JRockit jrcmd tool for quick Java Heap analysis
April 16, 05:23 PM
- Tuning JVM for a VM – Lessons Learned, Directly from VMware – This talk will present a lot of the innovation, practical insight, and lessons learned gained from the last year by a senior engineer from VMware who recently developed a Java "ballooning" solution called Elastic Memory for Java (EM4J)
- SQL? NoSQL? NewSQL? What’s a Java developer to do? – YouTube – We will compare and contrast each database's data model and Java API using NoSQL and NewSQL versions of a use case from the book POJOs in Action. We will learn about the benefits and drawbacks of using NoSQL and NewSQL databases.
- Arquillian · No more mocks. No more container lifecycle and deployment hassles. Just real tests! – Mocks can be tactical, but more often than not, they are used to make code work outside of a real environment. Arquillian let's you ditch the mocks and write real tests. That's because Arquillian brings your test to the runtime, giving you access to container resources, meaningful feedback and insight about how the code really works.
- A Baseline for Front-End Developers – Adventures in JavaScript Development – There’s a new set of baseline skills required in order to be successful as a front-end developer, and developers who don’t meet this baseline are going to start feeling more and more left behind as those who are sharing their knowledge start to assume that certain things go without saying.
- Firebase – A scalable real-time backend for your website – Firebase is a cloud service that automatically synchronizes data between clients and with our cloud servers. It frees developers from worrying about how their data will be communicated and stored, and allows them to focus on their own application logic
- WordPress completely dominates top 100 blogs – We just completed a study and found that WordPress is in use by 49% of the top 100 blogs in the world. This is an increase from the 32% we recorded three years ago.
- Amazon CloudWatch Monitoring Scripts for Linux – Amazon CloudWatch – The Amazon CloudWatch Monitoring Scripts for Linux are sample Perl scripts that demonstrate how to produce and consume Amazon CloudWatch custom metrics. The scripts comprise a fully functional example that reports memory, swap, and disk space utilization metrics for an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Linux instance
- MongoDB Hadoop Connector Announced – The core feature of the Connector is to provide the ability to read MongoDB data into Hadoop MapReduce jobs, as well as writing the results of MapReduce jobs out to MongoDB
April 10, 06:44 PM
- Ziptastic is a simple API that allows people to ask which Country,State and City are associated with a Zip Code. – Ziptastic is a simple API that allows people to ask which Country,State and City are associated with a Zip Code.
- People Use IE at Work, But Chrome at Home – The company attributes the use of IE during the workday to constraints of corporate policy. In other words, those people using IE would gladly turn to Chrome if their IT departments would let them, but they’re stuck, so that’s what they use.
- Cloud Foundry Further Improves Support for Ruby Applications | Blog – In the past few months, we have been quietly adding features and improving support for running Ruby, Rails, Sinatra, Rack, and even JRuby applications on CloudFoundry.com.
- An Articulate Introduction to MongoDB | Architects Zone – One thing I am very impressed by MongoDb is that it is extremely easy to use and the underlying architecture is also very easy to understand.
- InfoQ: Seven Secrets Every Architect Should Know – Frank Buschmann’s secrets: User Tasks-based Design, Be Minimalist, Ensure Visibility of Domain Concepts, Use Uncertainty as a Driver, Design Between Things, Check Assumptions, Eat Your Own Dog Food.
- GWT-Eureka is a library for the Google Web Toolkit – GWT-Eureka is a library for the Google Web Toolkit. The main objective of this library is to include all those widgets and other helpful tricks that are not big enough to have their own project.
- 6 Advantages of Developing Cross-Platform HTML5-based financial apps: Part 1 – There are multiple advantages, that HTML5-based financial apps offer. In this blog post, I explore the top 6 advantages that HTML5 offers.
- Gazel – A high performance key/value store for the browser modeled after Redis. – Gazel – A high performance key/value store for the browser modeled after Redis.
- Beginners guide to one modern web development stack « Coffee Spoons of Code – This post is for a person who knows how to program, and wants to learn a modern web development stack. At my new job we use Padrino, an alternative to Ruby on Rails, so I’ll be describing that.
April 07, 11:33 PM
- Cube – Time Series Visualization with MongoDB, Node and D3 – Cube is an open-source system for visualizing time series data, built on MongoDB, Node and D3. If you send Cube timestamped events (with optional structured data), you can easily build realtime visualizations of aggregate metrics for internal dashboards.
- Customer Conversations – How Intuit and Edmodo Innovate using Amazon RDS – From tax preparation to safe social networks, Amazon RDS brings new and innovative applications to the cloud
- Migrating to Spring 3.1 and Hibernate 4.1 – As part of the Core-Spring course, we have a lab application that we use to show how to integrate Spring and JPA/Hibernate together. We have just upgraded it to Spring 3.1 / Hibernate 4.1, and thought we should share a few tips.
- Challenges With MongoDB • myNoSQL – Stone Gao: "This talk is not Yet Another Talk about it's Awersomeness but challenges with MongoDB". Plus workarounds.
- Pragmatic Programming Techniques: MongoDb Architecture – Jared Rosoff from 10gen in a technical conference and have a discussion about the technical architecture of MongoDb. I found the information is very useful and want to share with more people
- GitHub Styleguide – living CSS styleguide, JavaScript styleguide and some recommendations on how to write Ruby code. – Welcome to the internal GitHub styleguide. This is where you should look if you're interested in how to write code for GitHub. We have a living CSS styleguide, JavaScript styleguide and some recommendations on how to write Ruby code.
April 05, 09:23 PM
- InfoQ: Panel: Hadoop for the Enterprise Architect – Peter Sirota, Amr Awadallah, Eric Baldeschwieler, Ted Dunning, Guy Bayes, and moderator Ron Bodkin discuss various existing Hadoop use cases, ecosystems, and disaster recovery.
- InfoQ: Cloud Foundry Boot Camp – Dave McCrory explains how Cloud Foundry works, demoing setting up and running an application on it and Micro Cloud Foundry, and using the services available in VMware’s cloud.
- This page is a brief introduction to NoSQL offering a set of definitions of the NoSQL term and NoSQL databases, explaining the reasons behind NoSQL databases. – This page is a brief introduction to NoSQL offering a set of definitions of the NoSQL term and NoSQL databases, explaining the reasons behind NoSQL databases.
- InfoQ: Java in the Cloud – PaaS Platform in Comparison – Eberhard Wolff introduces Cloud Computing, IaaS/PaaS, comparing the Java support provided by Google GAE, Amazon Beanstalk, VMware Cloud Foundry, and Cloud Bees.
- Man Survives Steve Ballmer’s Flying Chair To Build ’21st Century Linux’ | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com –
- mojito – Mojito is the JavaScript library implementing Cocktails, a JavaScript-based on-line/off-line, multi-device, hosted application platform. – Yahoo is open-sourcing Mojito, a bit of software that uses JavaScript and Node.js to run a single codebase both on client and server side.
- Dell Linux Engineers work over 5000 bugs with Red Hat | domsch.com blog – This is a testament to the hard work Dell puts into ensuring Linux "Just Works" on our servers, straight out of the box, with few to no extra driver disks or post-install updates needed to make your server fully functional.
- Windows Phone 8 OS will be based on e4 (SWT QT port) and next Visual Studio 11 release will be based on Eclipse 4.2. – Microsoft officials will never confirm this, but think – why should Microsoft open a new Visual Studio development lab in Zürich and hire Erich Gamma? Now it's pretty obvious.
- Refreshing caches in ehcache (@meyersdc) – Ehcache has a way to change this behaviour called decorators. And ehcache spring annotations provide some with annotations.
- Upwardly Mobile – Compare the cost of living and average salaries between areas across the country – Upwardly Mobile lets you find out where in the country it's best to live by comparing various types of salary, living and employment data and ranking it based on your preferences. Now go ahead, start moving up!
- Chrome Multitask Mode – funny stuff for April 1st. – Chrome Multitask Mode lets you browse the web with multiple cursors at the same time, so you can get more done, faster. Welcome to the ambinavigation revolution.
- 16 Linux Server Monitoring Commands You Really Nee… – Input Output – Want to know what's really going on with your server? Then you need to know these essential commands. Once you've mastered them, you'll be well on your way to being an expert Linux system administrator.
- How to rock out with JRebel and Google Web Toolkit (GWT) | zeroturnaround.com – The goal of using JRebel with GWT is to eliminate server restart/browser refresh when you change some parts of the code. That includes Java code (of course) and also JSNI functions, all sorts of generated classes (i18n, templates etc).
March 30, 12:03 PM
- Google is developing advanced programming technology to simplify Web application development | Pixelstech.net – Google engineer Alex Russell this week at EclipseCon meeting said the company is now developing lots of advanced programming techniques to simplify Web application development.
- 5 Things To Know About Big Data – Wall Street & Technology – Google searches for 'big data' have gone up 1200% in the last 12 months, according to sources. Here's big data 101
- apigee – Free and Enterprise API Management and Infrastructure – Apigee is for a new internet of APIs – where billions of mobile, tablets, and set-top apps connect in a web that has moved beyond the browser. Over 250 enterprises and thousands of developers use Apigee technology to make their APIs better.
- Timeline – Beautifully crafted timelines that are easy, and intuitive to use. – Timeline – Beautifully crafted timelines that are easy, and intuitive to use.
- How to GitHub: Fork, Branch, Track, Squash and Pull Request – Gun.io – This guide will teach you how to properly contribute to open source projects on GitHub. It assumes that you already know about how to use Git for version control and that you already have a GitHub account.
- Swagger: A simple, open standard for describing REST APIs with JSON – Swagger is a specification and complete framework implementation for describing, producing, consuming, and visualizing RESTful web services.
- Coding Horror: Welcome to the Post PC Era – At the point where these simple, fixed function Post-PC era computing devices are not just "enough" computer for most folks, but also fundamentally innovating in computing as a whole … well, all I can say is bring on the post-PC era.
- defmacro – Functional Programming For The Rest of Us – This article only scratches the surface of functional programming. Sometimes a small scratch can progress to something bigger and in our case it's a good thing
- The Starter, the Architect, the Debugger and the Finisher | jacquesmattheij.com – The Starter, the Architect, the Debugger and the Finisher – Every software project that is remotely successful needs all four of these
March 20, 07:22 PM
- Dropwizard – Java framework for developing ops-friendly, high-performance, RESTful web services. – Developed by Yammer to power their JVM-based backend services, Dropwizard pulls together stable, mature libraries from the Java ecosystem into a simple, light-weight package that lets you focus on getting things done.
- Khan Academy: The future of education? – CBS News – With the backing of Gates and Google, Khan Academy and its free online educational videos are moving into the classroom and across the world. Their goal: to revolutionize how we teach and learn. Sanjay Gupta reports
- Brendan’s blog » Top 10 DTrace scripts for Mac OS X – Since version 10.5 “Leopard”, Mac OS X has had DTrace, a tool used for performance analysis and troubleshooting.
- The Ruby on Rails Tutorial, now with Twitter’s Bootstrap – Due to popular demand, I have prepared a new version of the Ruby on Rails Tutorial using Twitter's Bootstrap framework. The result, which represents the final draft of the 2nd edition, can be found here:
- Leaving the Evil Empire – Tales from the Evil Empire – I have a conviction that this is only the beginning of a profound change in our societies, that innovation is considerably more likely to occur in cooperative networks of small structures than in large competing corporations.
- New problem for Amazon: Sony defects to OpenStack – Sony’s gaming arm is moving at least some of its workload from Amazon Web Services to the rival Rackspace OpenStack
- Why I will use Java EE instead of Spring in new Enterprise Java Projects in 2012 – Java Code Geeks – The question comes up often. It came up in my new project in November 2011, too. I will use Java EE (JEE) instead of the Spring framework in this new Enterprise Java project.
- InfoQ: A Quick Tour of Dart – Gilad Bracha discusses Dart, its type system, interfaces, generics, ADTs without types, built-in factory support.
- Sencha Touch 2.0 is released – Today we're proud to announce the release of Sencha Touch 2.0. We’re certain it will change the way you think about mobile apps.
- InfoQ: Spring Social: For the New Web of APIs – Craig Walls discusses the need for adding social features to applications, how to secure such applications and how Spring Social can help.
March 05, 10:08 PM
- InfoQ: Running Heroku on Heroku – Noah Zoschke discusses self-hosting, bootstrapping, cross-compiling, avoiding circular dependencies, distributed process management, all in the context of running Heroku support apps on Heroku.
- HTTPie: cURL for humans – HTTPie is a CLI HTTP utility built out of frustration with existing tools. The goal is to make CLI interaction with HTTP-based services as human-friendly as possible. HTTPie does so by providing an http command that allows for issuing arbitrary HTTP requests using a simple and natural syntax and displaying colorized responses:
- InfoQ: AMQP in Financial Service – Hanno Klein explains how AMQP is used by Deutsche Börse and where it fits within their strategy.
- Chrome to be deployed on State Department computers worldwide | Geek.com – On January 26th, when Secretary Clinton was asked what could be done about the painfully slow update process for Internet Explorer, she announced that the State Department would be deploying Google Chrome to their offices worldwide
- Field Guide to Web Applications from Google – This field guide is designed to help you create great user experiences in your web apps. Whether you’re building your first web app, or are just looking for ways to improve existing experiences, there’s something here for you!
- Pinterest Is Not A Virtual Pinboard via @codertrader – In summary, Pinterest is not a Virtual Pinboard. It is the answer to consumers engaging with brands, something Facebook has been unable to do.
- Continuous Improvement: The Importance of the Team Retrospective — Application Development Trends – Even good agile teams can get better. Mark J. Balbes walks you through how retrospectives have impacted his team and shows you options for yours.
- When will tablets outsell traditional PCs? | asymco – Given these assumptions, the day when the tablet market (by units) will exceed that of traditional PCs will come sometime in the fall of 2013.
- How To Be Happy Anywhere | Fast Company – For my job I spent 300 days traveling the world last year. I met a lot of happy people. Who they are and where they live will surprise you.
- Introducing Spring Hadoop | SpringSource Team Blog – VMware have announced the availability of Spring Hadoop, which integrates the Spring Framework and the Apache Hadoop platform. The project provides a convenient mechanism for the configuration, creation, and execution of the various services and utilities such as MapReduce, Hive, Pig, and Cascading jobs via the Spring container
- Spring Thread Pool Services – Java Code Geeks – Thread Pools are very important to execute synchronous & asynchronous processes. This article shows how to develop and monitor Thread Pool Services by using Spring. Creating Thread Pool has been explained via two alternative methods.
- Interpreted Languages: PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby – A side-by-side reference sheet – Interpreted Languages: PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby (Sheet One) – A side-by-side reference sheet
- Working With Data in Sencha Designer | Learn | Sencha – This screencast provides an overview of the data layer in Sencha frameworks and demonstrates how you can use Designer to use the data capabilities. We explore the basics of creating stores, defining record structure using models, using proxies and readers to load data, sorting and grouping data, previewing loaded data, and attaching stores to views.
- Sencha Touch 2 RC—Now with Native Packaging | Blog | Sencha – Today, we’re happy to announce the release candidate of Sencha Touch 2 as well as our native packaging for Windows and Mac.
February 24, 04:01 PM
- The Sun is Setting on Rails-style MVC Frameworks « caines.ca/blog – I'm becoming more and more certain that this means that Rails-style MVC frameworks on the server-side are going to end up being phased out in favour of leaner and meaner frameworks that better address the new needs of thick-client architecture.
- Trigger – cross-platform app framework – The simplest way for web developers to create native iOS and Android apps from a single HTML5 codebase
- InfoQ: Writing Usable APIs in Practice – Giovanni Asproni presents techniques for writing usable APIs: using user's perspective, naming, the caller should have the control, explicit context, error reporting, logging, organizing.
- InfoQ: Tailoring Spring for Custom Usage – Josh Long uncovers some of the hooks available in the Spring framework: life cycles, scopes, beans, resources, XML marshallers, REST, transactions, caching, Spring Integration adapters, and others.
- WhySQL? Why Evernote is sticking with MySQL instead of NoSQL – There are a few reasons that we’ve decided to store all of your account metadata within a single (replicated) MySQL instance instead.
- The Pope is Apparently not a Republican – The world of finance, while necessary, no longer represents an instrument that favours our well-being or the life of mankind, instead it has become an oppressive power, that almost demands our adoration, mammon, the false divinity that truly dominates the world.
- JPA Applications in the Era of NoSQL and Clouds – Introducing OGM by Hardy Ferentschik @ JUDCon London on Vimeo – In this talk we discuss briefl y the different NoSQL solutions and show where Hibernate OGM fits into the picture. Hibernate OGM (Object Grid Mapper) is built on the robust and proven Hibernate core engine and helps you to port existing JPA (Hibernate) applications to alternative storage engines decoupling application code from a specific NoSQL solution
- OnLive Desktop Plus Puts Windows 7 on the iPad in Blazing Speed – State of the Art – NYTimes.com – The news today is the new service, called OnLive Desktop Plus. It’s not free — it costs $5 a month — but it adds Adobe Reader, Internet Explorer and a 1-gigabit-a-second Internet connection.
- The 6 Major Mobile Trends for 2012 – About Agility – Mobile is one of the big trends for 2012, and with the year just starting, it's a great time to make some predictions about what will happen in the upcoming months. So here they are, the 6 major mobile trends for 2012:
- Steve Jobs Solved the Innovator’s Dilemma – James Allworth – Harvard Business Review – That "subtle difference" — of flipping the priorities away from profit and back to great products — took Apple from three months away from bankruptcy, to one of the most valuable and influential companies in the world.
- RESTEasy lets you build RESTful Web Services and RESTful Java applications – RESTEasy is a JBoss project that provides various frameworks to help you build RESTful Web Services and RESTful Java applications. It is a fully certified and portable implementation of the JAX-RS specification. JAX-RS is a new JCP specification that provides a Java API for RESTful Web Services over the HTTP protocol.
- The “Unhyped” New Areas in Internet and Mobile | TechCrunch – I'm very excited about what the next few years will bring — the rate of change is accelerating and the possibilities are endless!
February 19, 09:47 PM
- Groklaw – Oracle Drops Final Claim in Patent ’476 and Google Moves to Strike Portions of 3rd Oracle Damages Report ~pj – I feel very much the same about Oracle's patents, and I have from the start wondered if any of them are valid, let alone worth millions in damages. So, to me, the risk has been very much on Oracle's side, that it might lose all its patents in this case.
- The Great Web Framework Shootout | Curia – Welcome to the great web framework shootout. On this page you will find benchmark results comparing the performance of a few of the most popular F/OSS web frameworks in use today.
- Online Text to Speech | ReadSpeaker – Get a spoken version of your online content so that your users can listen to what you have to say.
- The NoSQL movement – How to think about choosing a database. – For years, the relational default has kept developers from understanding their real back-end requirements. The NoSQL movement has given us the opportunity to explore what we really require from our databases, and to find out what we already knew: there is no one-size-fits-all solution.
- Agile Succeeds Three Times More Often | Mike Cohn’s Blog – The agile process is the universal remedy for software development project failure. Software applications developed through the agile process have three times the success rate of the traditional waterfall method and a much lower percentage of time and cost overruns
- How to Analyze Java Thread Dumps | CUBRID Blog – Here I will explain what threads are in Java, their types, how they are created, how to manage them, how you can dump threads from a running application, and finally how you can analyze them and determine the bottleneck or blocking threads. This article is a result of long experience in Java application debugging.
- MIT OpenCourseWare | Economics – Principles of Microeconomics – Principles of Microeconomics is an introductory undergraduate course that teaches the fundamentals of microeconomics. This course introduces microeconomic concepts and analysis, supply and demand analysis, theories of the firm and individual behavior, competition and monopoly, and welfare economics
- Jease – The Java CMS with Ease – Jease is an Open Source Content-Management-System which is driven by the power of Java. Jease means "Java with Ease", so Jease promises to keep simple things simple and the hard things (j)easy.
- GroupBy in MongoDB – Operations in the New Aggregation Framework – In version 2.1, MongoDB is introducing a new aggregation framework that will make it much easier to obtain the kind of results SQL group-by is used for, without having to write custom JavaScript.
- InfoQ: Mobile HTML5 Design and Development, with David Kaneda – David talks about the unique challenges facing developers building mobile HTML5 apps, especially on WebKit. He also outlines the recent developments on this field and how they empower a whole new genre of applications.
- Xcode, GCC, and Homebrew – This is an incredible day for the Homebrew community. You can now setup a complete OS X develop environment with a single 171.7 MB package download. It's official. It's legal. It'll be maintained.
February 12, 12:40 PM
- InfoQ: Mobile HTML5 – Scott Davis explains how to prepare a website for mobile devices from small tweaks –smaller screen sizes, portrait/landscape- to using HTML5’s local storage, application cache, and remote data.
- InfoQ: How to Stop Writing Next Year’s Unsustainable Piece of Code – Guilherme Silveira mentions some of the turning points in project development that may affect the quality of the code offering advice on avoiding writing crappy code.
- InfoQ: All things Hadoop – In this interview Ted Dunning talk about Hadoop, its current usage and its future. He explains the reasons for Hadoop's success and make recommendations on how to start using it.
- rap mobile – Secure Mobile Apps. Native Performance. Multi-Platforms. – RAP mobile provides a powerful widget toolkit that renders native iOS and Android widgets. It provides a proven technology stack with SWT, JFace and OSGi. You can write your application entirely in Java, re-use existing code and benefit from first-class IDE tools without the need for cross-compiling.
- Are You a Zen Coder or Distraction-Junkie? – The key to true productivity and efficiency is to focus 100% on the one thing you are doing at the moment, and then to completely switch and do something else. There shouldn’t be any blurry transitions from one thing to the next.
- High performance libraries in Java | Vanilla #Java – There is an increasing number of libraries which are described as high performance and have benchmarks to back that claim up. Here is a selection that I am aware of.
- InfoQ: Have Your Cake and Eat It Too: Meta-Programming Techniques for Java – Howard Lewis Ship discusses how to add extend class functionality at runtime via meta-programming for Java using Tapestry Plastic.
- InfoQ: SQL Server Unit Testing with tSQLt – tSQLt is a free, open-source framework for unit testing in SQL Server. By writing tSQLt test cases, developers can create fake tables and views based on production data, then compare expected versus actual results in testing. Tests are written in T-SQL, so they can be created directly in SQL Server Management Studio.
- InfoQ: Identity Management with Spring Security – David Syer discusses identity management, SSO, security standards –SAML, OpenID, OAuth, SCIM, JWT-, how Spring Security can fit in, and demoing IdM as a service.
- Flexing NoSQL: MongoDB in review | InfoWorld – MongoDB shines with broad programming language support, SQL-like queries, and out-of-the-box scaling
- GUI Architectures essay from Martin Fowler – In this essay I want to explore a number of interesting architectures and describe my interpretation of their most interesting features. My hope is that this will provide a context for understanding the patterns that I describe.
February 09, 07:59 PM
- What is Apache Hadoop? – A look at the components and functions of the Hadoop ecosystem – What is Apache Hadoop? – A look at the components and functions of the Hadoop ecosystem
- Ext GWT 3.0 State API | Blog | Sencha – The Ext GWT 3.0 State API provides the ability to persist state information. The API supports saving state data to different persistence providers. These include providers based on cookies and HTML5 local storage.
- PhoneGap Releases Version 1.3 With Full Windows Phone Support – PhoneGap is turning 1.3 today. There are a plethora of new features, tools and controls across five platforms in the new PhoneGap release. Biggest among these is Windows Phone's support of all PhoneGap features, a first for any mobile platform that is not iOS or Android.
- Dive into DataView with Sencha Touch 2 Beta 2 | Blog | Sencha – The enhanced DataView in Sencha Touch 2 Beta 2 makes it easy to build complex data bound lists.
- HeapAudit – JVM Memory Profiler for the Real World | Foursquare Engineering Blog – HeapAudit is not a monitoring tool, but rather an engineering tool that collects actionable data – information sufficient for directly making code change improvements. It is created for the real world, applicable to live running production servers.
- App Economy has created almost half a million jobs — Tech News and Analysis – A new report suggests that the nascent app economy spurred on by iOS, Android and Facebook apps has generated 466,000 jobs in the U.S. economy since 2007.
- Spring Mobile 1.0.0.RC1 Released | SpringSource.org – Spring Mobile provides extensions to Spring MVC that aid in the development of cross-platform mobile web applications. The 1.0.0.RC1 release ships a general facility for user site preference management that can be used independently or in conjunction with the mobile site switcher
- Ruby Trick Shots: A Video of 24 Ruby Tips and Tricks – Over the years, I've saved the Ruby techniques that have surprised other Rubyists I know. Now past 100, I'm making an e-book of them! It'll be free in all forms
- InfoQ: The Seven Deadly Sins of Enterprise Agile Adoption – Sanjiv Augustine and Arlen Bankston discuss the Seven Deadly Sins that organizations repeatedly make so you can steer clear of them and benefit from a successful Enterprise Agile Adoption.
- The Object Network: Linking up our APIs – Instead of writing a whole new, dedicated HTTP API to your site, publish your data using common JSON object formats, and link your data up, both within your own sites and to other sites. Become part of a global Object Network!
- InfoQ: Questions for an Enterprise Architect – Erik Dörnenburg answers: What is Enterprise and Evolutionary Architecture?, discussing 4 issues: Turning strategy into execution, Ensuring conformance, Where do the architects sit? Buying or building?
- InfoQ: Writing Applications for Cloud Foundry Using Spring and MongoDB – Thomas Risberg and Jared Rosoff show how to create Spring applications using Spring Data and MongoDB, applications deployed on Cloud Foundry.
- Bootstrap, from Twitter – HTML, CSS, and JS toolkit from Twitter – Bootstrap is Twitter's toolkit for kickstarting CSS for websites, apps, and more. It includes base CSS styles for typography, forms, buttons, tables, grids, navigation, alerts, and more.
January 31, 11:11 PM
- InfoQ: The Rise of OAuth – Craig Walls talks about securing the modern web and how OAuth can help with that, showing how to secure and consume resources with OAuth.
- This guide introduces you to Spring Data Neo4j – This guide introduces you to Spring Data Neo4j, using the fast, powerful and scalable graph database Neo4j to enjoy the benefits of having good relationships in your data.
- Google Guava EventBus – an easy and elegant way for your publisher – subscriber use cases | Tomasz Dziurko – Google Guava in version number 10 introduced new package eventbus with a few very interesting classes to deal with listener (or publisher – subscriber) use case. Below I present my short introduction to EventBus class and its family.
- The Elegant Ruby Web Framework – Padrino Ruby Web Framework – Padrino is a ruby framework built upon the Sinatra web library. Sinatra is a DSL for creating simple web applications in Ruby. Padrino was created to make it fun and easy to code more advanced web applications while still adhering to the spirit that makes Sinatra great!
- InfoQ: The Open Group Releases Standards for SOA Architects, Cloud Service Providers – The Open Group recently published three standards that aid organizations that are building infrastructure-as-a-service offerings and service oriented architectures. In addition to releasing the Service Oriented Architecture Reference Architecture (SOA RA) and Service Oriented Cloud Computing Infrastructure Framework (SOCCI), the Open Group also updated their Open Group Service Integration Maturity Model (OSIMM). In concert, these standards provide expert advice in the form of best practices, questionnaires, and templates for SOA and cloud-scale infrastructure architecture.
- MongoDB for Analytics // MongoTips by John Nunemaker – Just over a month ago, I presented on storing stats in MongoDB at MongoChi 2011. 10Gen posted the video recently, so I thought I would share it here.
- paperplanes. A Tour of Amazon’s DynamoDB – Sorted range keys, conditional updates, atomic counters, structured data and multi-valued data types, fetching and updating single attributes, strong consistency, and no explicit way to handle and resolve conflicts other than conditions. A lot of features DynamoDB has to offer remind me of everything that's great about wide column stores like Cassandra, but even more so of HBase
- Announcing Sencha Designer 2 Beta | Blog | Sencha – We’re thrilled to announce that Sencha Designer 2 Beta is available for download! Designer 2 makes it easier than ever to build desktop and mobile applications using Ext JS and Sencha Touch.
- The Five Stages of Hosting (Pinboard Blog) – I thought it might be fun to write up five common options for hosting a web business, ranked in decreasing order of 'cloudiness'. People who aren't interested in this kind of minutia would be wise to pull the rip cord right here.
- Q&A: An Introduction to the Scala Programming Language — Enterprise Systems – We explore what the Scala programming language can do for your organization with the language’s inventor.
January 27, 08:26 PM
- InfoQ: Mobile Web Development with HTML5 – Keith Donald and Josh Long discuss the mobile browsers, the hardware constraints, the existing simulators, emulators and JavaScript frameworks, and the HTML5 support for doing mobile development.
- The Persistence Layer with Spring Data JPA | Javalobby – This is the forth of a series of articles about Persistence with Spring. This article will focus on the configuration and implementation of the persistence layer with Spring 3.1, JPA and Spring Data.
- Concordion is an open source tool for writing automated acceptance tests in Java* – Concordion is an open source tool for writing automated acceptance tests in Java
- Three years later, Mr. Moore is still letting us punt on database sharding – (37signals) – We’ve grown enormously over the last three years but RAM keeps getting cheaper and FusionIO SSD’s keep getting faster. If anything, it seems like recent advances in SSD technology are accelerating and it’s ever more unlikely that we’ll need to shard Basecamp.
- Scaling GitHub – A month after launching, GitHub hosted one thousand repositories. Three years later, we host over three million. In the same time we've gone from one thousand users to over a million. I'll dig into our development workflow and how we address concepts like scaling, deployment, code review, and testing.
- The Little Redis Book – Redis is wonderfully simple, which makes it awesome to use, but I thought it would turn any book into little more than reference material. Well, I decided to give it a try and hopefully you'll agree with me that The Little Redis Book is a solid addition to the Little family
- gitextensions – Git Extensions is the only graphical user interface for Git that allows you control Git without using the commandline. It comes with a manual and video tutorials to get you started quickly. – Google Project Hosting – Git Extensions is the only graphical user interface for Git that allows you control Git without using the commandline. It comes with a manual and video tutorials to get you started quickly.
- Solving OutOfMemoryError (part 5) – JDK Tools | Plumbr – Today we will talk about the command line tools that are bundled with the Oracle JDK and can be used to find memory leaks. The benefit of knowing the bundled tooling is obvious: they are available everywhere where Oracle's Java is installed
January 21, 11:54 AM
- How to build a simple GWT event bus using Generators | North Concepts – In his Google I/O session Best Practices For Architecting Your GWT App, Ray Ryan discusses the benefits of using an event bus in GWT (Google Web Toolkit) applications. Inspired by this talk, I decided to try my hand at building a simple GWT event bus modeled after our pure java event bus.
- InfoQ: How to get the most out of Spring and Google App Engine – Chris Ramsdale will get you up and running building Spring apps on Google App Engine. He'll go step-by-step building a real Spring app and identify not only the basics of App Engine, but more advanced topics such as integrating with Google's SQL Service and using App Engine's "Always on" feature to ensure high performance.
- The Persistence Layer with Spring Data JPA | Javalobby – This is the forth of a series of articles about Persistence with Spring. This article will focus on the configuration and implementation of the persistence layer with Spring 3.1, JPA and Spring Data
- Big data market survey: Hadoop solutions – O’Reilly Radar – Apache Hadoop is unquestionably the center of the latest iteration of big data solutions. At its heart, Hadoop is a system for distributing computation among commodity servers. It is often used with the Hadoop Hive project, which layers data warehouse technology on top of Hadoop, enabling ad-hoc analytical queries.
- Sensei DB – Open-source, distributed, realtime, semi-structured database – Sensei is both a search engine and a database. Sensei is designed to query and navigate through documents with parts that contain text and are unstructured, as well as parts containing meta information that have well-formed structures.
- Cloud Computing Has Become a Dominant Force in Financial Services – Wall Street & Technology – Cloud computing is emerging as a dominant technology category in the financial services industry, and investment banks, brokers, market makers and asset managers all will look to push more sophisticated applications into the private cloud.
- Amazon DynamoDB – a Fast and Scalable NoSQL Database Service Designed for Internet Scale Applications – All Things Distributed – Amazon DynamoDB is designed to maintain predictably high performance and to be highly cost efficient for workloads of any scale, from the smallest to the largest internet-scale applications.
- Managing User Presence, Software Caches, Counters, Sessions among other things using Redis – As a software architect, the hardest thing to do is pick the right tool for the job while balancing complexity, cost, performance and learning. And if there is one tool I never forget and keep on getting back to is redis which is an intentionally kept simple but superb artifact of the KISS principle.
- A technology decision making process: Java EE 6 vs. Spring Framework | Javalobby – There is a long list of parameters when you decide what technology stack to use. Those I have described in this article were very imprtant ones in our decision making process. Our conclusion is that the best way forward for now is to use a mixed technology stack
- InfoQ: RESTful SOA in the Real World – Sastry Malladi presents different ways used by the industry to implement a RESTful SOA, detailing how eBay did it in order to achieve performance, and what lessons can be taken from that.
- InfoQ: Large Scale Integration in Financial Services – John Davies addresses some of the difficulties dealing with FIX, FpML, SWIFT and integration in financial services software industry, challenging some of the canonical models existing today.
- InfoQ: Service-Oriented Architecture Maturity – An SOA maturity model must incorporate both perspective and execution maturity. Progress must be made across a 3D space, with movement from an IT-driven perspective toward an enterprise-transformation outlook – embracing governance, metrics, drivers, and even terminology – likely trumping execution refinements within a particular perspective.
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I am a geek that lives in Brookfield – WI (Milwaukee), making my living as an architect/developer, spending all my time with Java, J2EE, Linux, gadgets, mobile devices, open source and the art of software development. In my spare time, when I am not in front of my computers, I spend every other minute with my other loves: My wife and daughter, books, music, guitars, gadgets, and Formula-1 racing.
