Java Developer Magazine

The term Business Transactions and Business Transaction Management is widely used in the industry but it's not always well understood what we really mean by it. The BTM Industry Portal provides some good articles on this topic and is definitely recommended to check out. The general goal is to answer business-relevant questions that business owners have for application owners: "How much revenue is generated by a certain products?", "What are my conversion and bounce rates and what impacts them?" or "Do we meet our SLAs to our premium account users?" Challenge 1: Contextual Information Is More than just the URL In order to answer these questions we need information captured from the underlying technical transactions that get executed by your applications when users interact with your services/web site. Knowing the accessed URL, its average response time and then mappin... (more)

Not Everyone Is an Application Expert

The majority of us in IT are specialists, with the exception of a few VP of engineering who are “special” in their own “special” world of being “special”. What I mean by this is that no single person has the skills or experience to do everything well in IT. IT is too big for me to explain or summarize in a few words, other than it requires a lot of different people with different skills to make it tick along. Despite applications being the living breathing entities of the business, a large portion of folk in IT have little context of how applications are built, how they execute, ... (more)

IBM's Cloud Billows

IBM wants 200 million users on its cloud widgetry by the end of next year. It has to get to them before Oracle, HP or Dell do. It projects $7 billion in revenue from cloud computing hardware, software and services by 2015. To advance its ambition it's unveiled a new "simplified" enterprise-grade public cloud PaaS it calls SmartCloud Application Services (SCAS) that will ride on its SmartCloud Enterprise and Enterprise+ IaaS, which won't be deployed globally until the end of next year. Initially it'll be US-only. SCAS is supposed to be safe enough for new and traditional mission-cri... (more)

Book Review: Java The Complete Reference, 8th Edition

This is a great place to start learning Java. I think the book is good for beginners to start learning Java, as well as great reference for those experienced with Java. The book does not use an IDE to create, compile, and run the programs. It uses javac and java commands to compile and run. I used both the SDK command lines and the IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition to compile and run the programs. Both worked fine, but I also have an interest in learning to use IntelliJ IDEA. The book covers the Java language, the Java Library, Software Development with Java Beans, Swing, Servlets,... (more)

Java Hosting Platform, Jelastic, Delivers More Performance and Efficiency

Jelastic, a next-generation platform‑as‑a‑service (PaaS) offering that runs any Java application in the cloud without code changes, announced on Wednesday the addition of NGINX, the second-most popular open source web server in the world – giving customers greater performance and efficiency for their applications. Using NGINX requires no extra deployment steps or pre-configuration. NGINX offers built-in Layer 7 load balancing and content caching to provide a cost-effective and highly available platform for hosted applications. NGINX delivers 10 times greater performance on exist... (more)