Sunday, April 26, 2009

Best of this Week Summary 20 April - 26 April 2009

  • The big bigger biggest (sad?) news this week was of course Oracle going to buy Sun (here's Oracle's announcement). Rod Johnson (from SpringSource) is wondering what Oracle actually did buy. He concludes luckily one of the great strengths of Java is its developer and open source community, thus Oracle does not own the future of Java. Makes sense.

    Alef Arendsen (previously SpringSource, now JTeam) wonders which company/group will be the next, since only a few large opensource bodies are left: "the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), products in the Eclipse Foundation, products carying the JBoss name and last but not least, a broad set of products under the SpringSource umbrella".

    Sun "invited Oracle president Charles Phillips and chief corporate architect Edward Screven to an employee-only town hall last Wednesday", answering employee questions. In short: Oracle loves Sun's software (Java, MySQL) and hardware, but the future is unclear for OpenOffice and Sun's cloud effort.

  • A beginners tutorial on how to integrate GWT with PHP using XML as the "bridge" between the two technologies.

  • Manage your Amazon S3 with freeware CloudBerry Explorer. Makes it for example easy to move buckets between the US and Europe.

    Cloudkick is a free tool which allows you to migrate your Amazon EC2 AMIs to to Slicehost (owned by Rackspace).

Sunday, April 19, 2009

Best of this Week Summary 13 April - 19 April 2009

Sunday, April 12, 2009

Best of this Week Summary 06 April - 12 April 2009

Sunday, April 5, 2009

Best of this Week Summary 24 March - 05 April 2009

  • How can you make sure your site can handle peak-loads? This article lists the possibilities:

    • Over-provisioning (estimating what the peak will be).

    • Under-provisioning.

    • Right-sizing: estimate for a short period in time, then scale up or down: flexible scaling and auto-scaling.

    How this can be achieved? Add a middleware virtualisation layer that helps the application take advantage of these new dynamically added resources. The article also describes in detail how to add auto-scaling to your existing application, including a description how to try it out on GigaSpaces XAP which uses EC2.

  • Quite amazing, Salesforce.com runs on only about 1000 servers (and that's mirrored, so only really about 500 servers). Salesforce has more than 55K enterprise customers, 1.5M individual subscribers, 30M lines of third-party code and hundreds of TBs of data.

  • Here's a list of criteria when selecting a SOA testing tool.

  • A nice introduction to Hibernate's second-level cache.

  • Five tips for successfully deploying Maven. Including a bunch of pros and cons in the comments.

  • On a keep-an-eye-on-this-innovation side note, Digg introduced a interesting (new?) way of a URL shortener like TinyURL, and at the same time attract traffic. Just prefix any URL with http://digg.com/, and voila, a shortened URL appears including a Digg toolbar. Below I entered http://digg.com/http://ttlnews.blogspot.com/ in the address bar: