Open Source Journal

Open standards are a nice idea. And democracy is a great idea too, all citizens can vote, yet we only have two real parties representing us. Similarly, I think that standards start out as a good idea, yet over time may start to become ineffective. For the most part standards committees never actually complete a standard, and the industry starts working from a "draft." In the Cloud I think standards should be less important to the subscriber than the actual capabilities. I recognize that nobody choosing a Cloud platform "wants" lock-in, or a proprietary system, yet at the same time I hear a constant din of demand for "Private Cloud" and for "better" security. While I don't necessarily think the "Private Cloud" and security and portability demands preclude a standard, I think firms need to focus more closely on leveraging what the Cloud has to offer today. I can't thin... (more)

Samba 3.6 Out

The Samba Team has released Samba 3.6, a major new release of the Free Software file, print and authentication server suite for Microsoft Windows clients. The widgetry includes the first Samba implementation of Microsoft's new SMB2 file-serving protocol. Samba's new SMB2 server has been tested by major vendors and has reportedly been able to double the performance of some network applications when run in conjunction with Windows 7 clients. Samba has also completely rewritten its print subsystem. Samba 3.6 is the first "on the wire"-compatible version of Microsoft's SPOOLSS printi... (more)

Red Hat’s OpenShift PaaS Supports JEE6

Red Hat said Wednesday that its three-month-old OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), currently a free developer preview that runs on Amazon EC2, now supports Java Enterprise Edition 6, because it's been integrated with Red Hat's open source JBoss Application Server 7. That makes OpenShift, akin to Google App Engine, Microsoft Azure and VMware Cloud Foundry, the first PaaS to deliver JEE 6, a particular Red Hat pet it touts as one of the biggest advances in Java in over 10 years. The widgetry should simplify how application developers build and deploy Java in the cloud. While t... (more)

Hubbub ❤ SproutCore – Introduction

I was recently asked to do a write-up about my SproutCore app, Hubbub (@hubbubapp), as a general anecdotal guide to those interested in writing large scale applications in SproutCore for the first time. I’m afraid this first post won’t be very technical, but I will at least attempt to make it an enjoyable read, and to tell you about some of my early bumps in the road so that you can avoid them. My overview of Hubbub will also span a few posts, so if you have particular questions, I can spend some time on them in future. What’s all the Hubbub? This isn’t the place to talk up the a... (more)

RabbitMQ Joins Cloud Foundry

VMware is making a public beta of the open source RabbitMQ messaging system part of Cloud Foundry, its equally free, open source, and still-in-beta PaaS, encouraging developers to use the thing as a service to create and connect to cloud applications because messaging is a cloud enabler," a theory it shares with NASA, which uses RabbitMQ in its Nebula IaaS. See, messaging is fundamentally a communication technology and "in the cloud, communication is the design center." According to a VMware blog, "Messaging is essential for successful cloud applications for two reasons." "Firs... (more)