DevOps is speeding towards the IT world like a freight train and the hype around it is deafening. There is no reason to be afraid of this change as it is the natural reaction to the agile movement that revolutionized development just a few years ago. By definition, DevOps is the natural alignment of IT performance to business profitability. The relevance of this has yet to be quantified but it has been suggested that the route to the CEO's chair will come from the IT leaders that successfully make the transition to a DevOps model. If this still seems foreign to you, I recommend reading up on DevOps Blog from IT Revolution, the OpsCode Blog, and check out The Phoenix Project. Despite all the talk around simple monitoring tools, breaking through the walls between Dev and Ops still poses a real challenge. This is because of a misunderstanding around Operations real pu... (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)

XML Data Binding with JAXB and UBL

As more and more industries standardize their data formats around XML, Java developers are challenged to keep up. That's especially true of developers employing a document-centric programming model, where an evolving schema can expose brittleness in your code and leave you wishing for a better solution. XML data binding relieves the pain of any Java programmer who has ever winced at having to work with a document-centric processing model. Unlike SAX and DOM, which force you to think in terms of a document's structure, XML data binding lets you think in terms of the objects the structure represents. It does so by realizing that structure as a collection of Java classes and interfaces. This is especially valuable when lots of applications use the same document schemas. Then the data binding approach yields a set of standard classes and interfaces that are reused acros... (more)

Mobile Performance Testing | @CloudExpo #DevOps #IoT #M2M #ML #BigData

If you read the title and assumed this post would be filled with baseball analogies, you'd be right! It's game day and all those fans who fill up major league stadiums, those are your application users. They are invested in the game and have shown up to watch the players (i.e. your application) perform. Depending on how the game plays out, your audience will either head home elated or full of disappointment. The great thing is that in your case, unlike in the case of traditional baseball games, there doesn't have to be a loser. You can consistently ensure happy mobile users by setting yourself up for home runs and the crème de la crème, grand slams. Despite the monumental importance of providing a seamless app experience for mobile users, companies still fall short in terms of mobile performance testing - some even choose to completely forgo the practice. Striking ou... (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)

Working with Swing

One of the strengths of Java is the abundance of standard APIs for doing everything from enterprise-level data access to manipulating data structures, sending and receiving e-mail and building GUIs. This broad sweep of APIs makes choosing how to implement the various parts of an application much simpler, but it also presents a problem: How do you best use the API? Javadocs – the raw API documentation – are never enough for this purpose because they concentrate on each class or interface as a separate entity from the other classes. API specifications aren't much better because they deal with the minutiae of the API and with being a correct specification of how everything works. The most useful tool I've found for any newcomer to an API is the Java Tutorials (www.java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/index.html). These Tutorials guide you to correct and efficient use of an ... (more)

Best Practices for JDBC Programming

As a consultant, developer and database administrator, I've often been asked to provide coding guidelines and tuning assistance for Java code that utilizes JDBC. Over time, I've been introduced to or developed standard coding practices that make JDBC code faster and less error-prone, and easier to read, understand and use. This article documents some of the more important "best practices" for using JDBC libraries to perform database access. As most of my clients are using Oracle database technologies, I've included several practices that are Oracle-specific. For the purposes of this article the goals of best practices for JDBC programming are maintainability, portability and performance. Maintainability refers to the ease with which developers can understand, debug and modify JDBC code that they didn't write. Portability refers to the ease with which JDBC code can ... (more)

Combining RMI with SOAP

At the end of last year, I was given a rather unpleasant assignment. This company had several Java Remote Method Invocations (RMI) services that were interacting with the legacies of the organization and I needed to open up an XML interface for them. My first idea was to use the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). But the current W3C specification and implementation of the SOAP API from Apache presented only the HTTP binding for SOAP. Because of this, the SOAP services had to be deployed in a Web server container. The possibility of opening up a SOAP-based interface to the existing RMI services was limited by the following factors: If we convert the existing RMI services as SOAP-based and deploy them in a Web server container, the existing clients to those services have to be rewritten or reconfigured in order to be able to talk to the SOAP server in a SOAP-reco... (more)

WASP Developer 4.5 Seamlessly Extends Popular Java IDEs for Web Services Creation

(March 27, 2003) - The latest edition of Systinet's WASP Developer product, which seamlessly extends the industry's most popular Java IDEs to support Web services creation, debugging and deployment, is now available. WASP Developer 4.5 provides a point-and-click experience that turns any existing Java application into a Web service in minutes, allowing customers to leverage the benefits of Web services quickly and efficiently. WASP Developer 4.5 is updated to supports the latest editions of Sun ONE Studio/NetBeans, Eclipse, IBM WebSphere Studio Application Developer, and Borland JBuilder and is available for free download at www.systinet.com. WASP Developer 4.5 can automatically generate client-side code for an existing Web service, regardless of where it is running, what programming language is used for development, or what SOAP implementation it is running on. WAS... (more)

The i-Technology Right Stuff

Related Links: Wanted: 19 More of the Top Software People in the World Sung and Unsung i-Technology Heroes Who's Missing from SYS-CON's i-Technology Top Twenty?" Our search for the Twenty Top Software People in the World is nearing completion. In the SYS-CON tradition of empowering readers, we are leaving the final "cut" to you, so here are the top 40 nominations in alphabetical order. Our aim this time round is to whittle this 40 down to our final twenty, not (yet) to arrange those twenty in any order of preference. All you need to do to vote is to go to the Further Details page of any nominee you'd like to see end up in the top half of the poll when we close voting on Christmas Eve, December 24, and cast your vote or votes. To access the Further Details of each nominee just click on their name. Happy voting!   In alphabetical order the nominees are:   Tim Berner... (more)

Delegates Reloaded: Walking the Path

The function pointer, a powerful concept in the C and C++ programming languages, has no direct equivalent in Java. No syntax exists to pass the address of a method to a JButton, for instance, that links it with pressing the button. Instead, Java promotes the use of anonymous inner classes, like this one: okButton.addActionListener(new ActionListener() { public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e) { startProcessing(); } }); Back in October 1996, in an attempt to eliminate the need for this bloated syntax, Microsoft introduced an object-oriented method pointer into J++ called a "delegate." Sun Microsystems, citing the delegate as language pollution, sued Microsoft a year later for violating its Java license agreement. The lawsuit successfully maintained the purity of Java, but it also encouraged Microsoft to develop a competing Java-like language, C#. Today, the delega... (more)