Thursday, July 29, 2010 Woodcliff Lake, New Jersey   To the President of Syria, Mr. and Mrs. Bashar al-Assad Mr. and Mrs. President Bashar al-Assad: At the tender age of 17 months my severely ill daughter Sofia, an American citizen, was abducted by her mother on Monday, July 26, in Istanbul, Turkey, and taken to Syria. Fox News: ▸ video ▸ story I was informed yesterday by Sofia's mother that she will not be coming back to the United States nor will she allow Sofia to return home. Sofia has been diagnosed with a severe medical condition that requires immediate treatment in the United States. It was scheduled to start on July 27, 2010, in New Jersey, the day after her abduction and was supposed to last until she reaches the age of 3. Any delay in the urgently needed treatment will result in a life-long disability for Sofia and make her dependent for the whole of her a... (more)

Application Performance Management Done Right

What is Application Performance Management (APM)? Like a lot of good questions, it depends on your business needs.  What is the goal of an ideal APM?  Does it mean 99.999% availability?  Perhaps it is a favorable overall end user experience when using the application but, as compared to what? My point is that Application Performance Management / Monitoring means different things to different businesses and it can even depend on the application involved. What is the Goal of APM “Begin with the goal in mind.” I wish I could take credit for that quote.  What is the goal of the APM? Have you listed out the objectives you hope to obtain from your APM strategy?  This approach will help your team ensure satisfaction with the final solution chosen.  Here are some examples. Minimum of 99.999% availability with lower Mean Time To Know (MTTK) and Mean Time To Repair (MTTR) Less ... (more)

Driving Java Innovation in the Cloud at Cloud Expo 2011 New York

Cloud Expo 2011 New York $500 Savings here! With the emergence of cloud computing, enterprise Java applications need to be easy-to-use, provide access anywhere/anytime, and enable collaboration. Until recently, developers were in the dark when it came to navigating cloud application development. VMware's Application Platform helps developers meet the ever changing demands of this growing industry by driving Java innovation through portability and productivity. In his session at the 8th International Cloud Expo, Rod Johnson, senior vice president of the Application Platform Division at VMware, will explain how to tackle the challenges of Java applications development in the private, public or hybrid cloud, and walk away with a keen understanding of what it takes to push application development forward in this new era. Explore Cloud Expo Sponsorship & Exhibit Opportuni... (more)

Cloud Computing From "Agile Cloud Integration" to "Zero Latency"

Delegates, speakers, sponsors and exhibitors will be traveling from all over the world to New York this coming June 6-9 to attend 8th International Cloud Expo in New York City, co-located at the Jacob Javits Convention Center with 11th Virtualization Conference & Expo. Listen to Cloud Expo being promoted yesterday in New York City on CBS Radio/1010Wins [WikiUpload - MP3 file] Here is an early sneak-peek at some of the many and varied themes and topics due to be discussed in the breakout technical sessions scheduled in the course of the jam-packed four days. (Editorial Note: this is a small initial selection only – the Call for Papers for 8th Cloud Expo only closed February 4th, and new sessions are being selected and posted on a daily basis.) Agile Cloud Integration – see The Transactional Cloud Application Development in the Cloud – see Java in the Cloud Automation in... (more)

Jini Surrogate as a Platform for J2ME Games

In Part 1 of this article (JDJ, Vol. 7, issue 3) I introduced the idea of using the surrogate architecture within Jini as a platform for J2ME games. I also showed how to start Madison, Sun's reference implementation, and how to connect to it with the provided device simulator. This article continues the surrogate architecture tour and introduces a method through which a J2ME device can use it. To briefly recap, the architecture allows any device, in our case a J2ME one, to connect to a Jini network through a surrogate object that represents the device in the network. The surrogate host provides a mechanism for the devices to register themselves and obtain a context that enables access to the underlying Jini infrastructure. Another important reason for choosing the surrogate architecture is that it allows us to view the device as a single object from the network persp... (more)

Understanding JSSE

The Java Secure Socket Extension (JSSE) is a set of packages that enable secure Internet communications. It implements a Java version of the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocols. It includes functionality for data encryption, server authentication, message integrity, and optional client authentication. Although the JSSE guide provides detailed information on the JSSE API and its use in application programming, this article dives deeper into the different message exchanges involved when a programmatic Java client communicates with a server over the SSL. It will help developers understand the fundamental but often overlooked JSSE concepts of keystore, truststore, cipher suites, certificates, and the public key infrastructure and help them solve some of the common programmatic and configuration issues that arise when developing Java ... (more)

i-Technology & Katrina: Sun and the Sun Foundation Delivering Immediate Aid

"Our hearts go out to the victims of this disaster, tens of thousands of whom now find themselves without basic necessities in the ability to connect with the outside world," said Jonathan Schwartz, president and COO of Sun as Sun and Sun Foundation, of which Schwart is also president, yesterday announced that they are dispatching company volunteers to Red Cross donation sites and communications equipment to the disaster zone to help provide support to Hurricane Katrina victims. "We are sending numerous volunteer technicians armed with internet infrastructure to the Cajun Dome in Lafayette, Louisiana, to construct Internet access points so those affected may access email, search for missing loved ones and connect with friends and relatives desperately awaiting news," Schwartz continued. Sun technicians are currently putting infrastructure in place to expand connec... (more)

The madness begins!

On Friday, Tommy came to visit Sun's offices in Menlo Park, and then did some driving around Sun's campus on Saturday. It's a new generation DARPA Urban Grand Challenge car that uses Solaris and realtime Java. He and his parents will be at JavaOne. Spent the weekend doing last minute prep. The most fun part was re-engineering a t-shirt slingshot - yes, there will be a tshirt shoot Tuesday morning at the beginning of the opening keynote while the walk-in music is playing. The t-shirt design turned out especially well this year. Today will mostly be taken up by CommunityOne, NetBeans Day, some customer visits and rehearsals... I'm really looking forward to my keynote on Friday. There's a fantastic lineup of outrageously cool toys to play with. ... (more)

Sun Microsystems Discusses New Advances in Desktop Virtualization Technology on BlogTalkRadio

This week's Innovation Insider, Sun's Internet Radio show, will feature Andy Hall, Sr. Product Manager of Sun xVM VirtualBox discussing Sun's... Read more at VMblog.com. ... (more)

SOA & Cloud Bootcamp: Who Ya Gonna Call? Cloudbusters!

As the theme tune to the classic 1984 Ghostbusters movie goes, "If there's something strange, in your neighborhood, Who ya gonna call?", I am left wondering what we'll all be singing (shouting?) when something goes wrong in our cloud world. When you've got your whole business in the cloud and there is an outage, just what happens to your bottom line? What happens to your customers? What do you do? Register Today for SOA World and Attend SOA & Cloud Bootcamp for Free As the richness of our cloud-oriented world grows, this is becoming a serious consideration. We've come to rely, for example, on various web-based email systems such as Microsoft's Hotmail, Yahoo Mail and Google's Gmail. Each of these have had high-profile outages in the last year, and whenever that happens, you are completely powerless to do anything. You are merely a voice among millions caught in the s... (more)

Oracle + Sun Will Be Like the iPhone: Larry Ellison

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison told Reuters in an e-mail interview that then got put in a filing and shipped to the SEC that, despite all the armchair speculation, he's keeping Sun's hardware business. Not only that but he's going to pour money into Sun's Sparc chip. He's going to keep Sun's flagging hardware because it will make Oracle like the iPhone. Larry explains: "While most hardware businesses are low-margin, companies like Apple and Cisco enjoy very high-margins because they do a good job of designing their hardware and software to work together. If a company designs both hardware and software, it can build much better systems than if they only design the software. That's why Apple's iPhone is so much better than Microsoft phones." Larry continues: "Once we own Sun we're going to increase the investment in Sparc. We think designing our own chips is very, very import... (more)