Latest News from JAVA Developer's Journal

Java Jury Deliberating Google’s Patent Infringement

Wed, 16 May 2012 08:15:00 EDT

Oracle’s Java patent infringement case against Google and Android went to the jury Tuesday afternoon. The jury, which delivered only a partial verdict on copyright infringement last week, deciding that Google infringed but unable to say whether that infringement made “fair use” of the IP, is now down to 11 jurors. One juror reportedly called in from the San Francisco Bay Bridge with car trouble, unlikely to make court at all. The judge excused her from ever coming back, ZDnet said, and pushed on. Only two patents are at issue. In its closing statement Oracle accused Google of being reckless and willful and told the jury that words like fair use, open source and clean room had no meaning in this phase of the trial, only the fact that Google’s Dalvik virtual machine works just like Oracle’s Sun-inherited Java virtual machine and that Google lacked a license. Google continued to maintain that it designed Android from scratch – though that’s not a defense in patent infringement cases – and different from the claims of the two patents. Over the weekend the judge told Oracle the damages phase of the trial couldn’t wait for a retrial of the fair use issue. Oracle, in turn, said it wouldn’t accept a bench verdict on damages and is insisting on asking for disgorgement of infringer’s profits on a few lines of copyright infringement although the judge has tried to disabuse Oracle’s lawyers of the notion that that theory is going to translate into a finding worth billions or even hundreds of million of dollars. It’s unclear when the judge will decide if APIs are copyrightable or not – but currently it won’t be in time for part three of the trial on damages – and until he does there’s no possible liability. According to Law.com Oracle lawyer David Boies tried to strike a deal with Judge Alsup. “He said Alsup should put off the damages phase of the trial until after the judge resolves the burning legal questions, chiefly whether the 37 API packages are copyrightable. And should Alsup rule against Oracle then Boies said he would agree to forgo a jury award on infringer’s profits and would let Alsup award any statutory damages on those two lines of infringed code. But should Oracle prevail in the legal finding that the API packages are copyrightable material then Oracle wants a shot at the more lucrative damages in a jury trial….Alsup seemed to indicate Boies’ idea might be doable if Google agreed. He asked for more briefing.”

DSLs with Groovy for Beginners

Wed, 16 May 2012 05:00:00 EDT

I've been neglecting my blog, but just a quick note to mention that my latest talk at JavaOne, DSLs with Groovy, is posted up on Slideshare.

The talk's designed for someone with no significant Groovy experience (unlike most Groovy DSL talks), so if it's interesting to you, check it out.

I'm hoping (but not promising) to turn the talk into a series of Blog entries in the coming weeks. So if you want, just wait, and I'll send you explanations in more digestible bits and pieces in the coming weeks.

(As usual, this entry is cross posted to my main blog site.)

Judge Finds Google Copied More Java Code than Jury Said

Tue, 15 May 2012 08:15:00 EDT

District Court Judge William Alsup, who refused last week to decide whether Google had fairly used the Java IP a jury said Android infringed, had no trouble Friday deciding that the jury made a mistake in finding Google only copied nine lines of Java’s rangeCheck code as well as infringing the sequence, structure and organization of 37 Java APIs. In a judgment as a matter of law the good judge said Google directly copied eight other Java files and that it wasn’t a petty little thing. FOSS Patents had said when it came out that the jury’s verdict was odd since “there are code files in there that are much larger than the rangeCheck function, and infringement was so clear that it shouldn’t even have been put before a jury.” The judge effectively said the blog was right.

The Net as Paradigm

Tue, 15 May 2012 07:00:00 EDT

Edward Burman recently sent me a very interesting email in response to my article about the 50th anniversary of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. So I bought his 2003 book Shift!: The Unfolding Internet – Hype, Hope and History (hint: If you buy it from Amazon, check the non-Amazon sellers listed there) which [...]

Do Software Patents Stifle Innovation?

Sat, 12 May 2012 09:00:00 EDT

Of late patents around mobile technologies have been in the news. Four high profile news items are (1) Oracle suing Google for Java patent violation, (2) Apple and Samsung fighting each other in different parts of the world, Microsoft, Apple, Rim and others jointly buying Nortel patent library for $4.5 billion and (4) Google buys Motorola Mobile and gets 17,000 patents. This is only the tip of the iceberg. This diagram from Reuters shows the complex battlefield of mobile patent and significant portion of these patents are for software.

Google Demands New Java API Trial

Thu, 10 May 2012 08:45:00 EDT

Google, as expected, has put in its papers asking the court to declare a mistrial because the jury only decided it infringed 37 Java APIs in building Android and didn’t decide whether that infringement constituted so-called “fair use” of the code. So it wants a whole new trial “as to both infringement and fair use as to Oracle’s claim that Google is liable for infringement of its copyright on the structure, sequence, and organization of the 37 API packages.” Google claims the two issues – infringement and fair use – are “opposite sides of the same coin” and “indivisible.” It’s standing on its Seventh Amendment rights to trial by jury and a unanimous decision on liability, using its “indivisible” contention to oppose a partial retrial in front of a new jury. Oracle has yet to reply to Google’s “indivisible” argument but it wants the judge to decide the fair use question in one of those handy judgments as a matter of law (JMOLs) that both Google and Oracle asked for before.

Judge Refuses To Decide ‘Fair Use’ in Java Trial

Thu, 10 May 2012 06:15:00 EDT

Judge William Alsup Wednesday refused to decide whether Google had fairly used the Java IP a jury found Android infringed Monday. There are, you see, circumstances that allow copyrighted work to be copied without the owner’s consent such as creating something new that advances the public interest but the jury deadlocked on that issue and returned only a partial verdict. Oracle hoped the judge would intervene and hand down a judgment in its favor as a matter of law since Google’s liability depends on it but he refused. He reportedly said, “I don’t think it would be right to rule in favor of Oracle” at a hearing Wednesday. His decision suggests that Google will get the new trial it’s asked for. “I hate to even contemplate the idea of another trial,” the judge was quoted as saying, “but if it comes to that, that’s the way it will have to be.” It’s unclear whether a new jury would be asked to decide infringement as well as fair use like Google wants. Judge Alsup also reportedly refused to throw out the jury verdict that Google cribbed nine lines of Java code. He is expected to rule on the copyrightability of APIs and of course he has to rule on Google’s motion for a mistrial. The existing jury is currently hearing the patent infringement phase of the case and has heard from folks like Android creator Andy Rubin as well as other engineers.

Judge Refuses To Decide ‘Fair Use’ in Java Trial

Thu, 10 May 2012 06:15:00 EDT

Cloud Expo New York: The Java EE 7 Platform - Developing for the Cloud

Mon, 07 May 2012 03:00:00 EDT

The focus of Java EE 7 is on the cloud, and specifically it aims to bring Platform-as-a-Service providers and application developers together so that portable applications can be deployed on any cloud infrastructure and reap all its benefits in terms of scalability, elasticity, multitenancy, etc. The existing specifications in the platform such as JPA, Servlets, EJB, and others will be updated to meet these requirements. Java EE 7 continues the ease of development push that characterized prior releases by bringing further simplification to enterprise development. It also adds new, important APIs such as the REST client API in JAX-RS 2.0 and the long awaited Concurrency Utilities for Java EE API. Expression Language 3.0 and Java Message Service 2.0 will undergo an extreme makeover to align with the improvements in the Java language. There are plenty of improvements to several other components. Newer web standards like HTML 5 and Web Sockets will be embraced to build modern web applications.

Why Consumerization of IT Is Happening Now

Wed, 02 May 2012 10:30:00 EDT

Has the world changed more between now (2012) and 1962 that is the last 50 years or the 50 years prior to that (1962-1912)? Wait a minute! What does this have to do with “Consumerization of IT”? Believe me, there is a connection – just hold your skepticism – humor me – and read on! What we had in 1962 that we did not have in 1912? I am sure you will dispute this list and add / subtract items from them. However, I am fairly certain that after some consideration you will agree that there has been more technological breakthrough between 1912 and 1962 then in last 50 years.

First Decision in Java Trial Goes to the Jury

Wed, 02 May 2012 07:45:00 EDT

Two weeks after the trial started, the first part of the three-part Oracle case against Google went to the jury mid-day Monday. Among other things the poor jury – one of whom reportedly didn’t want to continue but the judge persuaded her to – has to struggle with are the judge’s 19 pages of instructions, instructions neither side appreciated. A pity judges aren’t required to make instructions comprehensible to the average juror instead of an eventual appeals court. This jury has to decide if Google infringed Oracle’s Java copyrights, or rather parts of Java, to wit, the structure, sequence and organization of 37 Java APIs – as the judge instructed them – in developing Android and then whether Google made “fair use” of the widgetry and thereby advanced the public interest by adding something new and different to the whole megillah – and not necessarily something profitable – two separate decisions.

‘Google Totally Slimed Sun’: Gosling

Tue, 01 May 2012 08:15:00 EDT

After Sun’s ex-CEOs Scott McNealy and Jonathan Schwartz testified for and against Oracle, respectively, last week at the Oracle v Google infringement trial, Java creator James Gosling, who hasn’t been able to hold a job at either Oracle or Google for more than a few months, waded into the discussion over the weekend on Oracle’s side. “Just because Sun didn’t have patent suits in our genetic code doesn’t mean we didn’t feel wronged,” he wrote on his web site. “While I have differences with Oracle, in this case they are in the right. Google totally slimed Sun. We were all really disturbed, even Jonathan: he just decided to put on a happy face and tried to turn lemons into lemonade, which annoyed a lot of folks at Sun.”

Judge Plans to Tell Jury Java APIs Are Copyrighted

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 09:00:00 EDT

Judge Alsup – who really wishes Oracle and Google had settled so he wouldn’t have to hear the Java trial – is proposing to decide whether APIs are copyrightable himself and not have the jury wade into that legal brier patch. However, he is also proposing to instruct the jury that the structure, sequence and organization of the asserted Java APIs are copyrightable, which between you, me and those angels dancing on the head of a pin over there is the same as saying the APIs are copyrighted. The good judge is going to wait for the jury to come home with a verdict on whether Google infringed the Java APIs – and the overwhelming evidence presented at trial suggests it did – before he says whether or not they are copyrightable and springs that tiger out of its cage.

McNealy & Schwartz Testify for Opposite Sides in Java Trial

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 08:30:00 EDT

Former Sun CEO Scott McNealy, an off-again-on-again buddy of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, testified for Oracle Thursday in its infringement suit against Google and Android. His surprise appearance – in the middle of Google’s laying out its copyright defense – was used to scotch testimony given minutes before by his pony-tailed successor at Sun Jonathan Schwartz who testified for Google. (It’s just so utterly Sun.) As in all jury trials the decision could come down to personalities. From the industry’s point-of-view it’s the first – and long-overdue – time McNealy has publicly butted heads with Schwartz whose appointment as Sun CEO is at least as unfathomable as why HP ever let Mark Hurd go.

The Scrum Field Guide: Practical Advice for Your First Year

Sun, 29 Apr 2012 09:00:00 EDT

This is one cool book. If you are starting to use Scrum, read it. If you are using Scrum, read it. If you are just wondering what Scrum is all about, read it. It gives the best insight into the workings of Scrum I have seen in a book. The chapters are laid out in a really nice to read format. Each one contains sections titled The Story, The Model (or The Practices in some chapters), Keys to Success, References, and sometimes Works Consulted (although I never figured out what the difference between these and references where?). The story is literally a story that comes from the author's field experience that introduces the topic the chapter covers and brings to light problems being solved by the next section, The Model.

Announcing JReport 11: Advanced Data Visualization and Dashboards

Sat, 28 Apr 2012 11:00:00 EDT

“JReport 11 continues our mission to deliver data visualization, discovery, and self-service tools to our users on all modern platforms,” noted Dr. Bing Yao, President of Jinfonet Software, on the release of JReport 11. The new release, which provides advanced data visualization with a powerful dashboard system and a mobile solution, features 40+ chart types and styles now enhanced with live charting including motion, real-time, and scrollable charts. Motion charts allow users to dynamically view data trends by auto-playing chart parameters. For example, you can put a chart in motion to show month-by-month changes over the course of a year. Real-time charts enable any web services data feed to be displayed and refreshed automatically. It can be used for monitoring applications, including system performance, stock charts, and real time applications. Scrollable charts let users easily zoom in and out on the chart axis for inspection of details.

Build Powerful Business Intelligence and Reporting Applications

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 09:45:00 EDT

View this demo for an introduction to BIRT (Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools), the powerful open source report and Rich Information Application development environment, used by over one million developers. BIRT can be used to create compelling business intelligence and reporting applications that present data to users in a very simple, user friendly and intelligent way via the web on any device. Watch now to: See how simple it is to create interactive reports, ad-hoc queries and dynamic dashboards Learn how to create information-driven content based on a wide variety of sources, including your application, live feeds and legacy data Discover how to reduce the reliance on IT and improve user self-service capabilities

Book Excerpt: Java Application Architecture

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 11:45:00 EDT

Modularity plays an important role in software architecture. It fills a gap that has existed since we began developing enterprise software systems in Java. This chapter discusses that gap and explores how modularity is an important intermediary technology that fills that gap. There are numerous definitions of architecture. But within each lies a common theme and some key phrases. Here are a few of the definitions. From Booch, Rumbaugh, and Jacobson (1999): An architecture is the set of significant decisions about the organization of a software system, the selection of the structural elements and their interfaces by which the system is composed, together with their behavior as specified in the collaborations among those elements, the composition of these structural elements and behavioral elements into progressively larger subsystems, and the architecture style that guides this organization — these elements and their interfaces, their collaborations, and their composition.

Scott McNealy To Testify for Oracle in Java Trial

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 08:15:00 EDT

Former Sun CEO Scott McNealy, an off-again-on-again buddy of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, is going to testify for Oracle Thursday in its infringement suit against Google and Android. His appearance could wrap up Oracle’s side of the copyright infringement part of the trial and he could be followed on the witness stand by his successor at Sun Jonathan Schwartz who’s supposed to testify for Google.

Judge Bars Oracle’s Newly Validated Patent from Java Trial

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 00:01:00 EDT

The judge in the Java trial told Oracle late Wednesday that it can’t assert the patent that the Patent and Trademark Office just said was valid against Google. It’s too late, he said, although the patent part of the case won’t start until next week or whenever the jury decides the trademark infringement part it’s been hearing since April 16.

PTO Strengthens Oracle’s Java Case

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 08:30:00 EDT

The US Patent and Trademark Office has reconsidered its so-called “final” rejection of one of the Java patents that Oracle claimed Google infringed and decided that nine of the patents claims are perfectly valid. Apparently Oracle got wind of the PTO’s change of mind late last week and rushed in Sunday to tell the court about. Conveniently, the claims upheld match Oracle’s to a “T” with a little to spare, and, as FOSS Patents points out, there’s nothing quite like teeth of a re-examined patent. Google, of course, is going to squawk but the way Oracle left it with the court it would only assert patents that weren’t rejected by the PTO. And here the PTO has validated one neatly ahead of the patent side of the case getting heard so it’s likely that Google will have to face charges of violating three Java patents not the whittled-away two.

Java Trial: Google Witnesses Incredibly Hazy

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 08:30:00 EDT

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, decked out in dark Armani duds for the trial of his landmark case against Google and Android, testified Tuesday that he had considered buying RIM or Palm to compete against Apple and its iPhone. Ultimately he decided that RIM was too expensive and Palm wasn’t competitive enough and a separate “Project Java Phone” that Oracle had started was a “bad idea.” Google’s lawyer claimed that because Oracle failed to develop its own product it’s going after Google and Android to get a piece of the action. Google CEO Larry Page, widely reported as uncomfortable on the witness stand and unable to make eye contract except with the ceiling, testified that he couldn’t remember much of anything. He appeared so evasive and said “I don’t recall” or “I’m not sure” to so many of the questions posed by Oracle’s star lawyer, David Boies, that CNBC ran the headline “Blank Page?”

Generating Ext JS and Java CRUD Applications with CDB

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 05:00:00 EDT

Clear Data Builder for Ext JS (CDBExt) is an open source tool that automatically builds Ext JS/Java EE CRUD applications given one or more annotated Java interfaces. The generated JavaScript and Java code enforce best Ext JS and Java EE practices and is deployed on the development version of the Tomcat ready to run. A [...]

Java Application Architecture: Modularity Patterns with Examples

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 07:30:00 EDT

Finally someone has put the most important software architecture practices into words. Within this book lies the concepts that are the heart of true agility. Without a modularized architecture, any decent size project can not achieve agility. I have seen so many agile projects flop because they ignored architecture, in particular they ignored modularization. This book also provides the keys concepts needed to ensure modifiability, the number one quality attribute for any architecture. It drives home the importance of physical design. An often overlooked aspect of designing modularity, yet it is the most important. Good logical design does not really matter if you have a poor physical design.

IBM Buying Varicent Software

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 08:15:00 EDT

IBM has gotten as predictable in its acquisitions as it used to be in its suits. It’s buying another analytics house. This time it’s Varicent Software from up Toronto way. And again IBM isn’t saying what it’s paying. Nine-year-old Varicent does analytics software for compensation and sales performance management. More specifically, it automates and analyzes the collection and reporting of sales data across finance, sales, HR and IT. Blue figures it can be used horizontally, and combined with other stuff in its grab bag delivered through on-premise or cloud models. Les Rechan, the general manager of business analytics at IBM, said the Varicent purchase would advance Blue’s efforts to get analytics into the hands of front-line employees in the name of improving the bottom line.

ERP and the Art of Action

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 11:30:00 EDT

In his book The Art of Action (2011), Stephen Bungay identifies three gaps that frustrate the ability of organizations to translate plans into actions that lead to desired outcomes. He calls them the knowledge, alignment and effects gaps. Here, I wish to reflect on Bungay’s perspective by reviewing these gaps in terms of the selection and implementation of enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. ERP software exerts a significant influence over the way an organization manages and monitors its performance. In large organizations, ERP software can touch hundreds, even thousands of people given that today’s ERP software may have a significant organizational footprint encompassing accounting, supply-chain, manufacturing, human resources (HR), customer relationship management (CRM), environmental, social and governance (ESG) and performance management activities. ERP software is at the heart of organizational management in the world’s leading businesses.

Agile Adoption – Crossing the Chasm

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 09:15:00 EDT

Everybody acknowledges that IT has to plays a key role in any new service or product design. Therefore, IT needs to align with business and be flexible to changing business needs. It is a question of how to be agile rather than should we be agile. Then, why is there such a gulf between the people who evangelize agile processes and those who look at them with great suspicion? Any application is built to satisfy a business goal. The process has two major steps where the step one is to define the application behavior which will help in meeting the business goal and the step two is to translate the application behavior to a working application. The definition of the application behavior is the requirement specification and it is the link between business and IT. In the waterfall methodology, development starts after the requirement is frozen. It is assumed that if business users can unambiguously and comprehensively specify the application behavior, IT can build the application satisfying the stated behavior. All the management practices based on waterfall methodology is build around this assumption. Times have changed and many of the IT applications are an integral part of the product or service offering. Significant part of the users are external to the organization. The focus has shifted from following the best practices to having innovative offering. If all these points are added up, it becomes clear that requirements will change. This has led to the realization that we need agile processes which works when requirements are constantly changing rather than spending time and energy on freezing requirement. As a result agile processes were born. The key principle behind any agile processes is to have a mechanism where the users can try out the application as it is being built and give feedback so that: - Gap in understanding is reduced - Sub-optimal solution can be improved - Application can be realigned to any change in business goal

Oracle’s Great Suit Against Google to Go to Trial

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 07:30:00 EDT

Monday April 16 is the start of what the judge has called the “World Series of IP cases,” an eight-week trial in which Oracle will seek to prove that APIs are copyrightable and that Google infringed 37 Java APIs when it spun up Android. The trick for Oracle, the judge said, will be convincing a jury that a programming language in the public domain can be infringed. Oracle, on the other hand, will be able to show the jury the now famous 2010 Tim Lindholm e-mail in which the Google engineer flatly told Google’s founders they needed to negotiate a Java license lest they infringe. All the alternatives, he said, “suck.” The judge has previously told Google this e-mail is a hot potato that could burn them.

What the Title “Senior Developer” Really Means

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 06:00:00 EDT

When I post a job opening for a Senior Java Developer, people send me resumes, and their titles match my post title. But the meaning of the word “senior” varies depending on the geography. Here in the USA a 22-24y.o. person graduates from college and starts as an intern or a junior programmer working his [...]

Are Native Mobile Apps Ready for the Enterprise?

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 07:00:00 EDT

The Apple App Store has reached 25 billion downloads, and many of us have bought and enjoy some of them. Really, the apps for iPad, iPhone and Android astonish us many times. The bad part comes when we go back to our desktop computer to use the enterprise software and feel as if we travel in the time some years back. It would be nice, very nice, to be able to use our mobile device to access to our enterprise software. The question is: are native mobile applications ready for enterprise software?

Component Development and Assembly Using OSGi Services

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 13:30:00 EDT

This article introduces the concepts of Component Oriented Development and Assembly (CODA) using the OSGi Service platform with an example application. The article starts with an introduction to software components, elaborates with an example application, followed by an overview of the OSGi Service platform, and an implementation of the example application using this platform. Components are parts that can be assembled to form a larger system. Electronic components such as ICs (Integrated Circuits) are assembled together to build an electronic system; similarly software components are assembled together to build a software system. Software systems have a static form as well as a dynamic runtime form. Software components can be assembled either in static form or dynamic form. In either case, the software component is an independent unit of development, deployment, and assembly. Using components to build software systems will provide many architectural advantages apart from promoting ease of reuse.

Monitoring JBoss with Monitis – Part 2

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 09:15:00 EDT

In a previous article we introduced the JBoss JMX monitoring capabilities and the Monitis JMX agent. Since most JEE web applications store data in relational databases accessed through JDBC, and the database is the most frequently cited source of performance bottlenecks, let’s take a closer look at how Monitis can help you.

The Java Courseware

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 06:15:00 EDT

If you are planning to do build a career as a software developer, you have to be prepared to get trained and re-trained every couple of years. But how? If you’re lucky, your employer will send you to classes, otherwise you have to spend substantial amount of time self-studying. Back in the nineties I was hungry for the courseware. Going through these thick manuals on hot technologies was the shortest way to master them. Beside software developers, university professors and contract instructors are also looking for the courseware that would help them to teach the class without major surprises and failures in front of the students. No matter who you are, I’d like to offer you some extra materials that’ll help you in learning or teaching programming in Java and Java EE.

Oracle-Google Talks Fail; Android to Go to Trial

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 08:45:00 EDT

As almost any causal bystander could have predicted, Oracle and Google couldn’t come to terms after a Pollyanna magistrate judge ordered them to try to settle their differences over Java and Android one more time last week ahead of a jury trial starting April 16. It’s just a good thing there have been no reports of Oracle co-president Safra Katz picking her teeth with the bones of Android chief Andy Rubin, both of whom were told to show up for the negotiations and presumably did. The judge sent out word Monday that “Despite their diligent efforts and those of their able counsel, the parties have reached an irreconcilable impasse in their settlement discussions” and that “no further conferences shall be convened.”

Why Is Scrum So Widely Adopted and So Very Dangerously Deceptive

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 08:45:00 EDT

I was sitting in a meeting sometime ago with a company that was embracing Scrum like a ten year old being offered a warm plate of chocolate chip cookies. They were grabbing at it as fast as they're little hands could reach out and grab the goodies. Watching this made me wonder what is was about Scrum that made them embrace it so emphatically. They had claimed to be an Agile shop for years, but were still failing to deliver quality software on time with in budget. Over the past years they refused every single proposed process improvement recommendation made by dozens of consultants. They literally went from zero process (using the name Agile to execute no process at all) to zealot Scrumbots overnight. After spending some time pondering this and interviewing a few people I found the answers I was looking for. Scrum was allowing them to preform the magic trick of perceived success better than they had ever been able to before just using the generic fake Agile process. A scary realization. This of course was not the fault of the Scrum process. It was the team's refusal to truly change anything except a few timelines, titles of individuals, and a few names like iteration to sprint.

Five Questions to Ask Before You Take Up an Agile Contract

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 07:00:00 EDT

You are a software service provider. You develop software for you clients. Majority of your clients are from a different city or even a different country. You are in a discussion with your client where you are exploring the option of adopting Agile Development Methodology for your next project. Does the above paragraph describe you? Are you concerned about how the whole thing will work out? If the above paragraph describes you, then I can assure you that you are not in minority. Many of us have been in a similar situation. The biggest challenge of adopting agile for an outsourced project is that there aren’t any clearly defined best practices available which you can adopt. The whole field is still evolving and the best practices are yet to emerge.

OpenXava 4.4: Rapid Java Web Development

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 06:45:00 EDT

OpenXava is a framework for Rapid Java Web Development, well-suited for business and database oriented applications. OpenXava allows you develop applications just by writing simple domain classes with Java or Groovy. The user interface is generated automatically in runtime, without code generation. OpenXava 4.4 has some new interesting features

HP & Oracle Each Wants Court to Say It’s Right

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 09:15:00 EDT

Ahead of a May 31 trial, HP and Oracle Monday separately asked the court for a summary judgment in its favor to resolve their bruising fight over whether Oracle can legally stop supporting servers based on Intel’s Itanium chip. HP, the biggest of the few Itanium users, claims Oracle is contractually obliged to continue supporting its Itanium boxes. Oracle claims it isn’t and stopped porting its software to the architecture last year claiming the chip was secretly at end of life. Oracle’s decision caused HP sales to tank. The litigation caps the dogfight HP sparked by hiring Léo Apotheker, the former CEO of Oracle’s hereditary enemy SAP, as its CEO and bringing in one-time Oracle president and now Oracle antagonist Ray Lane as non-executive chairman.

Oracle and Google Ordered Back into Android Settlement Talks

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 09:00:00 EDT

Oracle and Google have been ordered back into settlement talks. Magistrate Judge Paul Grewal, who tried to mediate a settlement last year over Oracle’s Java infringement beef with Google and Android, told the companies they have to sit down again before April 9, a week before the trial starts on April 16. They have to send Oracle co-president Safra Katz and Google’s Android chief Andy Rubin. The case is now pretty much an API copyright infringement case. Oracle’s patents claims having been decimated. Oracle could conceivably assert new patents in another case.

Cross-Platform Mobile Website Development – a Tool Comparison

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 11:45:00 EDT

Gartner says, in three years, mobile application development projects will outnumber PC projects by 4-1 ratio and in four years, 50% of the people will primarily access their emails from a mobile device. So, the necessity of establishing a mobile channel for your customer is – well a no-brainer. However, should you just build a mobile website or should you also invest in building native application is not easy to decide. There can be no doubt that you need to have a website optimized for mobile devices. What is the best way to build and maintain that website is not a simple decision.

Installing Vertica - Next Generation Relational Database Management System

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 08:15:00 EDT

Vertica - an advanced database that is very simple to install and administer, thanks to the its modern design and purpose built architecture. Vertica is high-performing, advanced RDBMS that is very simple to install and administer, thanks to the its modern design and purpose built architecture. Once we execute all preparatory steps on database servers and download Vertica software as per Installation Guide, we are starting installation process on a two node cluster (host01, host02). You should note ease and simplicity of installation and database creation process. There are no extensive cluster and shared storage preparations on special hardware ( in sharp contrast with Oracle RAC installation, for example ). This is all happening on commodity hardware, yet we end up with extremely powerful cluster. Vertica is up to 100 times faster than classic RDBMSs like Oracle. It is truly horizontally scalable database ( scale out ) i.e., you simply scale processing power and storage capacity by adding new nodes.

CCC Information Services Inc. Leverages Oracle Fusion Middleware

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 08:00:00 EDT

CCC Information Services Inc. has selected an Oracle Fusion Middleware-based solution to help the company realize greater efficiency in its development environment and to deliver improved performance to its installed customer base of approximately 21,000 collision repair facilities, 350 insurance companies and a range of other claims industry participants. CCC is the nation's leading provider of advanced software, workflow tools and enabling technologies to the automotive claims and collision repair industries. CCC is a customer advisor to Oracle through the Oracle Fusion Middleware Strategy Council. With Oracle WebLogic Server, Oracle SOA Suite 11g, Oracle Coherence and other Oracle Fusion Middleware products, including Oracle Identity Management, Oracle JDeveloper, and Oracle WebCenter, CCC can simplify its technology environment and minimize development time, improving the company's ability to quickly deliver enhanced solutions to customers.

A Quick Introduction to the Groovy Language (Part 1)

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 11:45:00 EDT

Before I start talking about using Groovy's capabilities to create a DSL (mostly in Java), let's take a few minutes to go over what Groovy is. Groovy is a general purpose scripting language that runs on the JVM, and can largely be viewed as a superset of Java. Is this a Groovy program or a Java program? Yes, it is - it will compile and run in both. This basic program is a bit wordy, and we can certainly do things more simply in Java, but this contains a number of patterns that you'd commonly see, including the use of the bean pattern, as well as the use of the main method to make the class executable via the java command line program. When we run it, it simply prints out "Hello world!", as is customary in these sorts of things.

Why the New Basecamp Refresh Is a Sign of Things to Come (Why That’s Good)

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 10:00:00 EDT

So, the new Basecamp is out, released with much applause (and yes, a few groans). We reviewed it last week and found it super promising. Exciting stuff. What’s more exciting than the sexy new project management tool, though, is how it was released. 37signals, the company behind Basecamp, basically rewrote the rules of software releases. They’ve re-invented their core product, which is pretty unprecedented for software companies, and married two models of software development, old and new. Now that’s exciting

Updated: Oracle v Google Android Trial Set for April 16

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 11:45:00 EDT

The District Court for the Northern District of California Tuesday scheduled the Android trial weighing Oracle's infringement claims against Google for April 16. It should run eight glorious weeks. Google wanted the trial to wait until fall as originally scheduled. So Oracle got what it wanted. But on Wednesday Google's lead counsel asked for a continuance, saying he and others on Google's legal team will be occupied elsewhere and wants the trial delayed until after June 29 or at least until April 30. Of course, the judge was aware of the scheduling conflict so it might not make any difference. According to patent wars observer FOSS Patents he told Google a few hours later that the prospects of any formal motion to delay "are not great." It appears that behind the scenes he's been coordinating with other district court judges to reschedule the trials demanding the presence of Google's lead counsel et al elsewhere.

Next-Gen Concurrency in Java: The Actor Model

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 10:00:00 EDT

In a time where the clock speeds of processors have been stable over the past couple of years, and Moore's Law is instead being applied by increasing the number of processor cores, it is getting more important for applications to use concurrent processing to reduce run/response times, as the time slicing routine via increased clock speed will no longer be available to bail out slow running programs. Carl Hewitt proposed the Actor Model in 1973 as a way to implement unbounded nondeterminism in concurrent processing. In many ways this model was influenced by the packet switching mechanism, for example, no synchronous handshake between sender and receiver, inherently concurrent message passing, messages may not arrive in the order they were sent, addresses are stored in messages, etc.

Scaling Java and JSP Apps with Distributed Caching

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 15:15:00 EDT

Java is the technology of choice for high-end enterprise applications. The most common applications that developers are involved with are JavaServer Pages web applications, also known as JSP applications. JSP has become one of the two standards for developing high traffic web applications, the other being Microsoft ASP.NET. Being part of Java, JSP has been popular for a long time and is highly instrumental in promoting Web technologies for developing high-traffic applications. Millions of people are using JSP applications and those numbers keep growing. These JSP applications are endowed with an architecture that scales very nicely. You can handle more and more users by adding more web servers to a load-balanced Web farm. As you have an increasing amount of transaction load, you just keep adding more servers to the Web farm. That way you can handle more transactions and more concurrent users.

Book Excerpt | Good Relationships: The Spring Data Neo4j Guide Book

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 13:15:00 EDT

The Spring Data Neo4j Project This project is part of the Spring Data project, which brings the convenient programming model of the Spring Framework to modern NOSQL databases. Spring Data Neo4j, as the name alludes to, aims to provide support for the graph database Neo4j. The first part of the book provides a tutorial that walks through the creation of a complete web application called cineasts.net, built with Spring Data Neo4j. Cineasts are people who love movies, and the site is a gathering place for moviegoers. For cineasts.net we decided to add a social aspect to the rating of movies, allowing friends to share their scores and get recommendations for new friends and movies. The tutorial takes the reader through the steps necessary to create the application. It provides the configuration and code examples that are needed to understand what's happening in Spring Data Neo4j. The complete source code for the app is available on Github.

How to Get Started with Java and NetBeans

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 05:45:00 EDT

When Sun’s developers created Java, they tried to keep the syntax for Java similar to the syntax for C++ so it would be easy for C++ programmers to learn Java. In addition, they designed Java so its applications can be run on any computer platform. In contrast, C++ needs to have a specific compiler for each platform. Java was also designed to automatically handle many operations involving the creation and destruction of memory. This is a key reason why it’s easier to develop programs and write bug-free code with Java than with C++. To provide these features, the developers of Java had to sacrifice some speed (or performance) when compared to C++. For many types of applications, however, Java’s relative slowness is not an issue. Microsoft’s Visual C# language is similar to Java in many ways. Like Java, C# uses a syntax that’s similar to C++ and that automatically handles memory operations. However, in practice, C# code only runs on Windows. Because of that, C# is a good choice for developing applications for a Windows-only environment. However, Java is a better choice if you need to develop crossplatform applications.

Why Rule-Based Log Correlation Is Almost a Good Idea (Part 8)

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 07:15:00 EST

You bought a static rule-based correlation and you want to get the most out of it, or are you planning on getting and deploying one? There are some simple steps you can take to maximize its efficiency. The main use case for correlation is real-time incident management, so you need a 24x7x365 team of forensics experts to validate and follow-up on alerts - in real time. No need to have real-time correlation if you only have a 9-5 operation... If an alarm goes on at 3.a.m., do you have the skilled staff to act on it? If the answer is no, can you afford such a team? If you can't afford a 24x7 staff of experts, ask yourself if correlation is really the most appropriate effort for you.