Well, well, well, a little bird points to IBM as gumming up the works with the European Commission so Oracle and Sun can’t close their deal. Oracle of course picked up Sun after IBM’s negotiations with Sun failed and Oracle made IBM the intended target of the proposed acquisition in an ad on the front page of the Wall Street Journal last week so the idea that IBM is whispering in the EC’s ear makes perfect sense. And IBM has plenty of practice using the European Commission to attack its enemies. Just ask Microsoft. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison claims the European Commission’s prolonged investigation of Oracle’s proposed acquisition of Sun, which isn’t expected to finish much before the agency’s mid-January deadline, is costing Sun $100 million a month in revenues and a weakened revenue stream will impact how many employees Sun gets to keep if and when the acquisition i... (more)

Secrets of Java Serialization

Serialization in Java is an operation in which an object's internal state is translated into a stream of bytes. This binary stream or image of the object is created in an operating system-neutral network byte order. The image can be written to a disk, stored in memory, or sent over a network to a different operating system. This amazing feat requires little or no work on the part of the programmer. Just implement the serializable interface, which contains no methods, and call the writeObject() method on your object, and it's serialized! You can serialize an object to or from any I/O device that Java supports. The serializable interface doesn't contain any code or data; it's a marker interface. If a hierarchy of classes is to be serialized, each class in the hierarchy must implement the serializable interface. All objects that are in an object hierarchy, or "Web of ... (more)

i-Technology's All-Time Top 100?

Gene Amdahl: Implementer in the 60s of a milestone in computer technology: the concept of compatibility between systems Marc Andreessen: Pioneer of Mosaic, the first browser to navigate the WWW; co-founder of Netscape John Vincent Atanasoff: Inventor of an electronic computer in the late 1930s not for fun or glory, but because he had problems for it to solve Charles Babbage: Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge in 1828; inventor of the 'calculating machine' John Backus: Inventor (with IBM) of FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslator) in 1956 Ralph Baer: "The man who invented video games" (Pong) Kent Beck: Creator of JUnit and pioneer of eXtreme Programming (XP) Bob Bemer: One of the developers of COBOL and the ASCII naming standard for IBM (1960s) Tim Berners-Lee: "Father of the World Wide Web" and expectant father of the Semantic Web D J Bernstein: Author of qmail Jos... (more)

Using HTML5 Application Cache to Create Offline Web Applications

HTML5 introduces Application Cache, a new feature that enables you to make web apps and sites available offline. The new specification also provides an easy way to prefetch some or all of your web app's assets (HTML files, images, CSS, JavaScript, and so on) while the client is still online. During this caching process, files are stored in an application cache, where they sit ready for future offline use. Compare this to regular browser caching, in which pages that you visit are cached in the browser's cache based on server-side rules and client-side configuration. But-even if web pages are cached normally, this does not provide a reliable way for you to access pages while you're in offline mode (in an airplane, for example). In addition, an application cache can cache pages that have not been visited at all and are therefore typically unavailable in the regular br... (more)

[session] Infrastructure as Code By @AllmightySpiff | @CloudExpo @SoftLayer #Cloud #BigData

Infrastructure as Code - Powered by SoftLayer Using code to define your infrastructure is a trend that is quickly becoming common practice and a critical part of any successful deployment In his session at 17th Cloud Expo, Christopher Gallo, Developer Advocate at SoftLayer, an IBM Company, will discuss what it means to be powered by SoftLayer, and some really awesome tools to help you make your deployments agile. Speaker Bio Christopher Gallo is a developer and systems administrator with a passion for optimization and performance. He started his career on the front lines of support and has worked as a full-time systems administrator for a large-scale shared hosting environment, a professional services systems administrator, and a senior developer responsible for keeping a fleet of appliances online. Now he works as a developer advocate, helping other developers plug... (more)

Automated Software Inspection

The design of the Java language has done much to overcome the limitations of C and C++. However, testing and debugging continue to account for much of the cost of developing Java applications. Once you've deployed a Java application, it's even more difficult and costly to fix software faults. Unfortunately, most conventional test methodologies assess only about 60% of the code in any Java application. And as applications become larger and more complex, even less code is covered by conventional test methodologies. So the challenge facing Java developers remains: How do you effectively debug applications before you deploy them? New automated inspection techniques are becoming available from independent QA providers that make it practical to inspect and evaluate source code before you test. In fact, inspection at various stages of development can isolate critical, cras... (more)

Python Programming in the JVM

What This Series Is About This article is Part 2 of a series that discusses the many languages that compile and/or run on the Java platform. This is an interactive series. Java Developer's Journal invites you to vote for your favorite non-Java programming language in the JDJ Forum. Your vote will decide which languages will be covered by the series, and in what order. The last time I checked, JPython and NetRexx were neck and neck. NetRexx, though not mentioned previously, will be covered in the next article. There are some great languages that I didn't mention last month, but as I stated, the list wasn't comprehensive - I named less than 10% of all the languages for the JVM. And received my fair share of "Why didn't you mention language X?' Most of the languages covered by this series are scripting languages that are dynamic, interpreted and easy to program. For th... (more)

Google Web Toolkit in less than 160 Words

Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is an opensource project that gives you the tools needed to write Java using a Swing-like API. You then run/debug your Java code within your preferred IDE and immediately see the effect of what you wrote. ... (more)

Graph Visualization Library yFiles FLEX 1.3 Released

yWorks announces yFiles FLEX 1.3, the new major release of its Adobe® Flex-based client-side add-on for our flagship product, the yFiles Java class library for analysis, automatic layout, and visualization of diagrams, networks, and graphs. ... (more)

IT Architecture Is Not Enterprise Architecture

For many years I have observed lots of confusion with some basic definitions such as IT and Enterprise Architecture among other terms. I will not try to define the meaning of Enterprise Architecture by myself (despite I have my own view on this) as this is something being right now redefined by the Open Group (which by the way used to call their events “IT Architecture Practitioner Conference” and changed only recently to “Enterprise Architecture Practitioner Conference”). Looking at job definitions related to Architecture positions, I have also identified a clear misunderstanding of “who is supposed to be doing what…”. In addition to that, I’m frequently asked “what’s the difference between an Enterprise Architect and an IT Architect”. First, let’s assume that everyone agrees on the fact that Enterprise Architecture includes -Business Architecture -Information Archit... (more)

New Boost from Dell for Virtualization

Dell Software this week delivered Foglight for Virtualization, Enterprise Edition to extend the depth and breadth of managing and optimizing server virtualization as well as virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and their joint impact on such IT resources as storage. Building on the formerly named Quest vFoglight Pro virtualization management solution, Dell re-branded vFoglight to Foglight for Virtualization to make it the core platform to the Foglight family. Foglight is not sitting still either. Improvements this year move beyond monitoring support for VMware View VDI, to later support for VMware vCloud Director, OpenStack, and Citrix Xen VDI. [Disclosure: Dell Software and WMware are sponsors of BriefingsDirect podcasts.] The higher value from such ecosystem and heterogeneous management support is the ability for virtualization server and system administrators to ... (more)