On the surface, everything seems fine. If you do a search, you’ll see lots of people offering support for cloud-centric application frameworks. But, when I speak with companies actually moving Java applications into the Cloud or trying to create new Cloud services based on Java, I get a different story. It’s not the application in many cases that’s in the way, it’s the JVM.
An example that highlights these issues comes from one of our partners, Intalio. Intalio offers Cloud solutions based mostly on open source. They and their customers are frustrated by the fact that Java can’t take advantage of Cloud elasticity – the JVM strictly limits the amount of memory and cores an individual instance can use. To make matters worse, operators have to deploy multiple small instances (around 2-4 GBs of memory each) to keep garbage collection pauses short enough so users wouldn’t really notice the delay. Plus, managing it all is painful. Developers have to create distributed networks within individual machines, and the IT staff has to create and launch lots of new instances and tune carefully to avoid long response times delays. (Their CEO, Ismael Chang Ghalimi, describes the problem in detail in a paper called “Cloud Computing is Memory Bound – located here: http://www.intalio.com/cloud-computing-is-memory-bound.)
Oracle’s Java patent infringement case against Google and Android went to
the jury Tuesday afternoon.
The jury, which delivered only a partial verdict on copyright infringement
last week, deciding that Google infringed but unable to say whether that
infringement made “fair use” of the IP, is now down to 11 jurors.
One juror reportedly called in from the San Francisco Bay Bridge with
car trouble, unlikely to make court at all. The judge excused her from ever
coming back, ZDnet said, and pushed on.
Only two patents are at issue. In its closing statement Oracle accused Google
of being reckless and willful and told the jury that words like fair use, open
source and clean room had no meaning in this phase of the trial, only the fact
that Google’s Dalvik virtual machine works just like Oracle’s Sun-inherited
Java virtual machine and that Google lacked a license.
Google continued to maintain that it designed Android from scratch –
though that’s not a defense in patent infringement cases – and different from
the claims of the two patents.
Over the weekend the judge told Oracle the damages phase of the trial
couldn’t wait for a retrial of the fair use issue. Oracle, in turn, said it
wouldn’t accept a bench verdict on damages and is insisting on asking for
disgorgement of infringer’s profits on a few lines of copyright infringement
although the judge has tried to disabuse Oracle’s lawyers of the notion
that that theory is going to translate into a finding worth billions or even
hundreds of million of dollars.
It’s unclear when the judge will decide if APIs are copyrightable or not – but
currently it won’t be in time for part three of the trial on damages – and until
he does there’s no possible liability.
According to Law.com Oracle lawyer David Boies tried to strike a deal with
Judge Alsup. “He said Alsup should put off the damages phase of the trial
until after the judge resolves the burning legal questions, chiefly whether the
37 API packages are copyrightable. And should Alsup rule against Oracle
then Boies said he would agree to forgo a jury award on infringer’s profits
and would let Alsup award any statutory damages on those two lines of
infringed code. But should Oracle prevail in the legal finding that the API
packages are copyrightable material then Oracle wants a shot at the more
lucrative damages in a jury trial….Alsup seemed to indicate Boies’ idea
might be doable if Google agreed. He asked for more briefing.”
I've been neglecting my blog, but just a quick note to mention that my latest talk at JavaOne, DSLs with Groovy, is posted up on Slideshare.
The talk's designed for someone with no significant Groovy experience (unlike most Groovy DSL talks), so if it's interesting to you, check it out.
I'm hoping (but not promising) to turn the talk into a series of Blog entries in the coming weeks. So if you want, just wait, and I'll send you explanations in more digestible bits and pieces in the coming weeks.
Judge Finds Google Copied More Java Code than Jury Said
Tue, 15 May 2012 08:15:00 EDT
District Court Judge William Alsup, who refused last week to decide whether Google had fairly used the Java IP a jury said Android infringed, had no trouble Friday deciding that the jury made a mistake in finding Google only copied nine lines of Java’s rangeCheck code as well as infringing the sequence, structure and organization of 37 Java APIs.
In a judgment as a matter of law the good judge said Google directly copied eight other Java files and that it wasn’t a petty little thing.
FOSS Patents had said when it came out that the jury’s verdict was odd since “there are code files in there that are much larger than the rangeCheck function, and infringement was so clear that it shouldn’t even have been put before a jury.” The judge effectively said the blog was right.
Edward Burman recently sent me a very interesting email in response to my article about the 50th anniversary of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. So I bought his 2003 book Shift!: The Unfolding Internet – Hype, Hope and History (hint: If you buy it from Amazon, check the non-Amazon sellers listed there) which [...]
Of late patents around mobile technologies have been in the news. Four high profile news items are (1) Oracle suing Google for Java patent violation, (2) Apple and Samsung fighting each other in different parts of the world, Microsoft, Apple, Rim and others jointly buying Nortel patent library for $4.5 billion and (4) Google buys Motorola Mobile and gets 17,000 patents.
This is only the tip of the iceberg. This diagram from Reuters shows the complex battlefield of mobile patent and significant portion of these patents are for software.
Google, as expected, has put in its papers asking the court to declare a mistrial because the jury only decided it infringed 37 Java APIs in building Android and didn’t decide whether that infringement constituted so-called “fair use” of the code.
So it wants a whole new trial “as to both infringement and fair use as to Oracle’s claim that Google is liable for infringement of its copyright on the structure, sequence, and organization of the 37 API packages.”
Google claims the two issues – infringement and fair use – are “opposite sides of the same coin” and “indivisible.” It’s standing on its Seventh Amendment rights to trial by jury and a unanimous decision on liability, using its “indivisible” contention to oppose a partial retrial in front of a new jury.
Oracle has yet to reply to Google’s “indivisible” argument but it wants the judge to decide the fair use question in one of those handy judgments as a matter of law (JMOLs) that both Google and Oracle asked for before.
Judge William Alsup Wednesday refused to decide whether Google had
fairly used the Java IP a jury found Android infringed Monday.
There are, you see, circumstances that allow copyrighted work to be copied
without the owner’s consent such as creating something new that advances
the public interest but the jury deadlocked on that issue and returned only a
partial verdict.
Oracle hoped the judge would intervene and hand down a judgment in its
favor as a matter of law since Google’s liability depends on it but he refused.
He reportedly said, “I don’t think it would be right to rule in favor of
Oracle” at a hearing Wednesday.
His decision suggests that Google will get the new trial it’s asked for. “I
hate to even contemplate the idea of another trial,” the judge was quoted as
saying, “but if it comes to that, that’s the way it will have to be.”
It’s unclear whether a new jury would be asked to decide infringement as
well as fair use like Google wants.
Judge Alsup also reportedly refused to throw out the jury verdict that Google
cribbed nine lines of Java code.
He is expected to rule on the copyrightability of APIs and of course he has to
rule on Google’s motion for a mistrial.
The existing jury is currently hearing the patent infringement phase of the
case and has heard from folks like Android creator Andy Rubin as well as
other engineers.
Judge William Alsup Wednesday refused to decide whether Google had
fairly used the Java IP a jury found Android infringed Monday.
There are, you see, circumstances that allow copyrighted work to be copied
without the owner’s consent such as creating something new that advances
the public interest but the jury deadlocked on that issue and returned only a
partial verdict.
Oracle hoped the judge would intervene and hand down a judgment in its
favor as a matter of law since Google’s liability depends on it but he refused.
He reportedly said, “I don’t think it would be right to rule in favor of
Oracle” at a hearing Wednesday.
His decision suggests that Google will get the new trial it’s asked for. “I
hate to even contemplate the idea of another trial,” the judge was quoted as
saying, “but if it comes to that, that’s the way it will have to be.”
It’s unclear whether a new jury would be asked to decide infringement as
well as fair use like Google wants.
Judge Alsup also reportedly refused to throw out the jury verdict that Google
cribbed nine lines of Java code.
He is expected to rule on the copyrightability of APIs and of course he has to
rule on Google’s motion for a mistrial.
The existing jury is currently hearing the patent infringement phase of the
case and has heard from folks like Android creator Andy Rubin as well as
other engineers.
Cloud Expo New York: The Java EE 7 Platform - Developing for the Cloud
Mon, 07 May 2012 03:00:00 EDT
The focus of Java EE 7 is on the cloud, and specifically it aims to bring Platform-as-a-Service providers and application developers together so that portable applications can be deployed on any cloud infrastructure and reap all its benefits in terms of scalability, elasticity, multitenancy, etc. The existing specifications in the platform such as JPA, Servlets, EJB, and others will be updated to meet these requirements.
Java EE 7 continues the ease of development push that characterized prior releases by bringing further simplification to enterprise development. It also adds new, important APIs such as the REST client API in JAX-RS 2.0 and the long awaited Concurrency Utilities for Java EE API. Expression Language 3.0 and Java Message Service 2.0 will undergo an extreme makeover to align with the improvements in the Java language. There are plenty of improvements to several other components. Newer web standards like HTML 5 and Web Sockets will be embraced to build modern web applications.
Has the world changed more between now (2012) and 1962 that is the last 50 years or the 50 years prior to that (1962-1912)?
Wait a minute! What does this have to do with “Consumerization of IT”?
Believe me, there is a connection – just hold your skepticism – humor me – and read on!
What we had in 1962 that we did not have in 1912?
I am sure you will dispute this list and add / subtract items from them. However, I am fairly certain that after some consideration you will agree that there has been more technological breakthrough between 1912 and 1962 then in last 50 years.
Two weeks after the trial started, the first part of the three-part Oracle case against Google went to the jury mid-day Monday.
Among other things the poor jury – one of whom reportedly didn’t want to continue but the judge persuaded her to – has to struggle with are the judge’s 19 pages of instructions, instructions neither side appreciated.
A pity judges aren’t required to make instructions comprehensible to the average juror instead of an eventual appeals court.
This jury has to decide if Google infringed Oracle’s Java copyrights, or rather parts of Java, to wit, the structure, sequence and organization of 37 Java APIs – as the judge instructed them – in developing Android and then whether Google made “fair use” of the widgetry and thereby advanced the public interest by adding something new and different to the whole megillah – and not necessarily something profitable – two separate decisions.
After Sun’s ex-CEOs Scott McNealy and Jonathan Schwartz testified for and against Oracle, respectively, last week at the Oracle v Google infringement trial, Java creator James Gosling, who hasn’t been able to hold a job at either Oracle or Google for more than a few months, waded into the discussion over the weekend on Oracle’s side.
“Just because Sun didn’t have patent suits in our genetic code doesn’t mean we didn’t feel wronged,” he wrote on his web site. “While I have differences with Oracle, in this case they are in the right. Google totally slimed Sun. We were all really disturbed, even Jonathan: he just decided to put on a happy face and tried to turn lemons into lemonade, which annoyed a lot of folks at Sun.”
Judge Plans to Tell Jury Java APIs Are Copyrighted
Mon, 30 Apr 2012 09:00:00 EDT
Judge Alsup – who really wishes Oracle and Google had settled so he wouldn’t have to hear the Java trial – is proposing to decide whether APIs are copyrightable himself and not have the jury wade into that legal brier patch.
However, he is also proposing to instruct the jury that the structure, sequence and organization of the asserted Java APIs are copyrightable, which between you, me and those angels dancing on the head of a pin over there is the same as saying the APIs are copyrighted.
The good judge is going to wait for the jury to come home with a verdict on whether Google infringed the Java APIs – and the overwhelming evidence presented at trial suggests it did – before he says whether or not they are copyrightable and springs that tiger out of its cage.
McNealy & Schwartz Testify for Opposite Sides in Java Trial
Mon, 30 Apr 2012 08:30:00 EDT
Former Sun CEO Scott McNealy, an off-again-on-again buddy of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, testified for Oracle Thursday in its infringement suit against Google and Android.
His surprise appearance – in the middle of Google’s laying out its copyright defense – was used to scotch testimony given minutes before by his pony-tailed successor at Sun Jonathan Schwartz who testified for Google. (It’s just so utterly Sun.)
As in all jury trials the decision could come down to personalities.
From the industry’s point-of-view it’s the first – and long-overdue – time McNealy has publicly butted heads with Schwartz whose appointment as Sun CEO is at least as unfathomable as why HP ever let Mark Hurd go.
The Scrum Field Guide: Practical Advice for Your First Year
Sun, 29 Apr 2012 09:00:00 EDT
This is one cool book. If you are starting to use Scrum, read it. If you are using Scrum, read it. If you are just wondering what Scrum is all about, read it. It gives the best insight into the workings of Scrum I have seen in a book.
The chapters are laid out in a really nice to read format. Each one contains sections titled The Story, The Model (or The Practices in some chapters), Keys to Success, References, and sometimes Works Consulted (although I never figured out what the difference between these and references where?).
The story is literally a story that comes from the author's field experience that introduces the topic the chapter covers and brings to light problems being solved by the next section, The Model.
Announcing JReport 11: Advanced Data Visualization and Dashboards
Sat, 28 Apr 2012 11:00:00 EDT
“JReport 11 continues our mission to deliver data visualization, discovery, and self-service tools to our users on all modern platforms,” noted Dr. Bing Yao, President of Jinfonet Software, on the release of JReport 11.
The new release, which provides advanced data visualization with a powerful dashboard system and a mobile solution, features 40+ chart types and styles now enhanced with live charting including motion, real-time, and scrollable charts. Motion charts allow users to dynamically view data trends by auto-playing chart parameters. For example, you can put a chart in motion to show month-by-month changes over the course of a year. Real-time charts enable any web services data feed to be displayed and refreshed automatically. It can be used for monitoring applications, including system performance, stock charts, and real time applications. Scrollable charts let users easily zoom in and out on the chart axis for inspection of details.
Build Powerful Business Intelligence and Reporting Applications
Fri, 27 Apr 2012 09:45:00 EDT
View this demo for an introduction to BIRT (Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools), the powerful open source report and Rich Information Application development environment, used by over one million developers. BIRT can be used to create compelling business intelligence and reporting applications that present data to users in a very simple, user friendly and intelligent way via the web on any device.
Watch now to:
See how simple it is to create interactive reports, ad-hoc queries and dynamic dashboards
Learn how to create information-driven content based on a wide variety of sources, including your application, live feeds and legacy data
Discover how to reduce the reliance on IT and improve user self-service capabilities
Modularity plays an important role in software architecture. It fills a gap that has existed since we began developing enterprise software systems in Java. This chapter discusses that gap and explores how modularity is an important intermediary technology that fills that gap.
There are numerous definitions of architecture. But within each lies a common theme and some key phrases. Here are a few of the definitions.
From Booch, Rumbaugh, and Jacobson (1999):
An architecture is the set of significant decisions about the organization of a software system, the selection of the structural elements and their interfaces by which the system is composed, together with their behavior as specified in the collaborations among those elements, the composition of these structural elements and behavioral elements into progressively larger subsystems, and the architecture style that guides this organization — these elements and their interfaces, their collaborations, and their composition.
Former Sun CEO Scott McNealy, an off-again-on-again buddy of
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, is going to testify for Oracle Thursday in its
infringement suit against Google and Android.
His appearance could wrap up Oracle’s side of the copyright infringement
part of the trial and he could be followed on the witness stand by his
successor at Sun Jonathan Schwartz who’s supposed to testify for Google.
Judge Bars Oracle’s Newly Validated Patent from Java Trial
Thu, 26 Apr 2012 00:01:00 EDT
The judge in the Java trial told Oracle late Wednesday that it can’t assert
the patent that the Patent and Trademark Office just said was valid against
Google.
It’s too late, he said, although the patent part of the case won’t start until
next week or whenever the jury decides the trademark infringement part it’s
been hearing since April 16.
The US Patent and Trademark Office has reconsidered its so-called “final” rejection of one of the Java patents that Oracle claimed Google infringed and decided that nine of the patents claims are perfectly valid.
Apparently Oracle got wind of the PTO’s change of mind late last week and rushed in Sunday to tell the court about.
Conveniently, the claims upheld match Oracle’s to a “T” with a little to spare, and, as FOSS Patents points out, there’s nothing quite like teeth of a re-examined patent.
Google, of course, is going to squawk but the way Oracle left it with the court it would only assert patents that weren’t rejected by the PTO. And here the PTO has validated one neatly ahead of the patent side of the case getting heard so it’s likely that Google will have to face charges of violating three Java patents not the whittled-away two.
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, decked out in dark Armani duds for the trial of his landmark case against Google and Android, testified Tuesday that he had considered buying RIM or Palm to compete against Apple and its iPhone.
Ultimately he decided that RIM was too expensive and Palm wasn’t competitive enough and a separate “Project Java Phone” that Oracle had started was a “bad idea.”
Google’s lawyer claimed that because Oracle failed to develop its own product it’s going after Google and Android to get a piece of the action.
Google CEO Larry Page, widely reported as uncomfortable on the witness stand and unable to make eye contract except with the ceiling, testified that he couldn’t remember much of anything.
He appeared so evasive and said “I don’t recall” or “I’m not sure” to so many of the questions posed by Oracle’s star lawyer, David Boies, that CNBC ran the headline “Blank Page?”
Generating Ext JS and Java CRUD Applications with CDB
Fri, 20 Apr 2012 05:00:00 EDT
Clear Data Builder for Ext JS (CDBExt) is an open source tool that automatically builds Ext JS/Java EE CRUD applications given one or more annotated Java interfaces. The generated JavaScript and Java code enforce best Ext JS and Java EE practices and is deployed on the development version of the Tomcat ready to run. A [...]
Java Application Architecture: Modularity Patterns with Examples
Wed, 18 Apr 2012 07:30:00 EDT
Finally someone has put the most important software architecture practices into words. Within this book lies the concepts that are the heart of true agility. Without a modularized architecture, any decent size project can not achieve agility. I have seen so many agile projects flop because they ignored architecture, in particular they ignored modularization.
This book also provides the keys concepts needed to ensure modifiability, the number one quality attribute for any architecture. It drives home the importance of physical design. An often overlooked aspect of designing modularity, yet it is the most important. Good logical design does not really matter if you have a poor physical design.
IBM has gotten as predictable in its acquisitions as it used to be in its suits.
It’s buying another analytics house. This time it’s Varicent Software from up Toronto way. And again IBM isn’t saying what it’s paying.
Nine-year-old Varicent does analytics software for compensation and sales performance management. More specifically, it automates and analyzes the collection and reporting of sales data across finance, sales, HR and IT.
Blue figures it can be used horizontally, and combined with other stuff in its grab bag delivered through on-premise or cloud models.
Les Rechan, the general manager of business analytics at IBM, said the Varicent purchase would advance Blue’s efforts to get analytics into the hands of front-line employees in the name of improving the bottom line.
In his book The Art of Action (2011), Stephen Bungay identifies three gaps that frustrate the ability of organizations to translate plans into actions that lead to desired outcomes. He calls them the knowledge, alignment and effects gaps. Here, I wish to reflect on Bungay’s perspective by reviewing these gaps in terms of the selection and implementation of enterprise resource planning (ERP) software.
ERP software exerts a significant influence over the way an organization manages and monitors its performance. In large organizations, ERP software can touch hundreds, even thousands of people given that today’s ERP software may have a significant organizational footprint encompassing accounting, supply-chain, manufacturing, human resources (HR), customer relationship management (CRM), environmental, social and governance (ESG) and performance management activities. ERP software is at the heart of organizational management in the world’s leading businesses.
Everybody acknowledges that IT has to plays a key role in any new service or product design. Therefore, IT needs to align with business and be flexible to changing business needs. It is a question of how to be agile rather than should we be agile.
Then, why is there such a gulf between the people who evangelize agile processes and those who look at them with great suspicion?
Any application is built to satisfy a business goal. The process has two major steps where the step one is to define the application behavior which will help in meeting the business goal and the step two is to translate the application behavior to a working application. The definition of the application behavior is the requirement specification and it is the link between business and IT.
In the waterfall methodology, development starts after the requirement is frozen. It is assumed that if business users can unambiguously and comprehensively specify the application behavior, IT can build the application satisfying the stated behavior. All the management practices based on waterfall methodology is build around this assumption.
Times have changed and many of the IT applications are an integral part of the product or service offering. Significant part of the users are external to the organization. The focus has shifted from following the best practices to having innovative offering. If all these points are added up, it becomes clear that requirements will change.
This has led to the realization that we need agile processes which works when requirements are constantly changing rather than spending time and energy on freezing requirement. As a result agile processes were born. The key principle behind any agile processes is to have a mechanism where the users can try out the application as it is being built and give feedback so that:
- Gap in understanding is reduced
- Sub-optimal solution can be improved
- Application can be realigned to any change in business goal
Monday April 16 is the start of what the judge has called the “World Series of IP cases,” an eight-week trial in which Oracle will seek to prove that APIs are copyrightable and that Google infringed 37 Java APIs when it spun up Android.
The trick for Oracle, the judge said, will be convincing a jury that a programming language in the public domain can be infringed.
Oracle, on the other hand, will be able to show the jury the now famous 2010 Tim Lindholm e-mail in which the Google engineer flatly told Google’s founders they needed to negotiate a Java license lest they infringe. All the alternatives, he said, “suck.”
The judge has previously told Google this e-mail is a hot potato that could burn them.
When I post a job opening for a Senior Java Developer, people send me resumes, and their titles match my post title. But the meaning of the word “senior” varies depending on the geography. Here in the USA a 22-24y.o. person graduates from college and starts as an intern or a junior programmer working his [...]
The Apple App Store has reached 25 billion downloads, and many of us have bought and enjoy some of them. Really, the apps for iPad, iPhone and Android astonish us many times. The bad part comes when we go back to our desktop computer to use the enterprise software and feel as if we travel in the time some years back.
It would be nice, very nice, to be able to use our mobile device to access to our enterprise software. The question is: are native mobile applications ready for enterprise software?
Component Development and Assembly Using OSGi Services
Tue, 10 Apr 2012 13:30:00 EDT
This article introduces the concepts of Component Oriented Development and Assembly (CODA) using the OSGi Service platform with an example application. The article starts with an introduction to software components, elaborates with an example application, followed by an overview of the OSGi Service platform, and an implementation of the example application using this platform.
Components are parts that can be assembled to form a larger system. Electronic components such as ICs (Integrated Circuits) are assembled together to build an electronic system; similarly software components are assembled together to build a software system. Software systems have a static form as well as a dynamic runtime form. Software components can be assembled either in static form or dynamic form. In either case, the software component is an independent unit of development, deployment, and assembly. Using components to build software systems will provide many architectural advantages apart from promoting ease of reuse.
In a previous article we introduced the JBoss JMX monitoring capabilities and the Monitis JMX agent. Since most JEE web applications store data in relational databases accessed through JDBC, and the database is the most frequently cited source of performance bottlenecks, let’s take a closer look at how Monitis can help you.
If you are planning to do build a career as a software developer, you have to be prepared to get trained and re-trained every couple of years. But how? If you’re lucky, your employer will send you to classes, otherwise you have to spend substantial amount of time self-studying. Back in the nineties I was hungry for the courseware. Going through these thick manuals on hot technologies was the shortest way to master them.
Beside software developers, university professors and contract instructors are also looking for the courseware that would help them to teach the class without major surprises and failures in front of the students. No matter who you are, I’d like to offer you some extra materials that’ll help you in learning or teaching programming in Java and Java EE.
As almost any causal bystander could have predicted, Oracle and Google couldn’t come to terms after a Pollyanna magistrate judge ordered them to try to settle their differences over Java and Android one more time last week ahead of a jury trial starting April 16.
It’s just a good thing there have been no reports of Oracle co-president Safra Katz picking her teeth with the bones of Android chief Andy Rubin, both of whom were told to show up for the negotiations and presumably did.
The judge sent out word Monday that “Despite their diligent efforts and those of their able counsel, the parties have reached an irreconcilable impasse in their settlement discussions” and that “no further conferences shall be convened.”
Why Is Scrum So Widely Adopted and So Very Dangerously Deceptive
Tue, 03 Apr 2012 08:45:00 EDT
I was sitting in a meeting sometime ago with a company that was embracing Scrum like a ten year old being offered a warm plate of chocolate chip cookies. They were grabbing at it as fast as they're little hands could reach out and grab the goodies.
Watching this made me wonder what is was about Scrum that made them embrace it so emphatically. They had claimed to be an Agile shop for years, but were still failing to deliver quality software on time with in budget. Over the past years they refused every single proposed process improvement recommendation made by dozens of consultants. They literally went from zero process (using the name Agile to execute no process at all) to zealot Scrumbots overnight. After spending some time pondering this and interviewing a few people I found the answers I was looking for.
Scrum was allowing them to preform the magic trick of perceived success better than they had ever been able to before just using the generic fake Agile process. A scary realization. This of course was not the fault of the Scrum process. It was the team's refusal to truly change anything except a few timelines, titles of individuals, and a few names like iteration to sprint.
Five Questions to Ask Before You Take Up an Agile Contract
Tue, 03 Apr 2012 07:00:00 EDT
You are a software service provider. You develop software for you clients. Majority of your clients are from a different city or even a different country. You are in a discussion with your client where you are exploring the option of adopting Agile Development Methodology for your next project.
Does the above paragraph describe you? Are you concerned about how the whole thing will work out?
If the above paragraph describes you, then I can assure you that you are not in minority. Many of us have been in a similar situation.
The biggest challenge of adopting agile for an outsourced project is that there aren’t any clearly defined best practices available which you can adopt. The whole field is still evolving and the best practices are yet to emerge.
OpenXava is a framework for Rapid Java Web Development, well-suited for business and database oriented applications.
OpenXava allows you develop applications just by writing simple domain classes with Java or Groovy. The user interface is generated automatically in runtime, without code generation. OpenXava 4.4 has some new interesting features
Ahead of a May 31 trial, HP and Oracle Monday separately asked the court for a summary judgment in its favor to resolve their bruising fight over whether Oracle can legally stop supporting servers based on Intel’s Itanium chip.
HP, the biggest of the few Itanium users, claims Oracle is contractually obliged to continue supporting its Itanium boxes.
Oracle claims it isn’t and stopped porting its software to the architecture last year claiming the chip was secretly at end of life. Oracle’s decision caused HP sales to tank.
The litigation caps the dogfight HP sparked by hiring Léo Apotheker, the former CEO of Oracle’s hereditary enemy SAP, as its CEO and bringing in one-time Oracle president and now Oracle antagonist Ray Lane as non-executive chairman.
Oracle and Google Ordered Back into Android Settlement Talks
Thu, 29 Mar 2012 09:00:00 EDT
Oracle and Google have been ordered back into settlement talks.
Magistrate Judge Paul Grewal, who tried to mediate a settlement last year over Oracle’s Java infringement beef with Google and Android, told the companies they have to sit down again before April 9, a week before the trial starts on April 16.
They have to send Oracle co-president Safra Katz and Google’s Android chief Andy Rubin.
The case is now pretty much an API copyright infringement case. Oracle’s patents claims having been decimated. Oracle could conceivably assert new patents in another case.
Cross-Platform Mobile Website Development – a Tool Comparison
Tue, 27 Mar 2012 11:45:00 EDT
Gartner says, in three years, mobile application development projects will outnumber PC projects by 4-1 ratio and in four years, 50% of the people will primarily access their emails from a mobile device. So, the necessity of establishing a mobile channel for your customer is – well a no-brainer. However, should you just build a mobile website or should you also invest in building native application is not easy to decide. There can be no doubt that you need to have a website optimized for mobile devices. What is the best way to build and maintain that website is not a simple decision.
Installing Vertica - Next Generation Relational Database Management System
Tue, 27 Mar 2012 08:15:00 EDT
Vertica - an advanced database that is very simple to install and administer, thanks to the its modern design and purpose built architecture.
Vertica is high-performing, advanced RDBMS that is very simple to install and administer, thanks to the its modern design and purpose built architecture.
Once we execute all preparatory steps on database servers and download Vertica software as per Installation Guide, we are starting installation process on a two node cluster (host01, host02).
You should note ease and simplicity of installation and database creation process. There are no extensive cluster and shared storage preparations on special hardware ( in sharp contrast with Oracle RAC installation, for example ). This is all happening on commodity hardware, yet we end up with extremely powerful cluster. Vertica is up to 100 times faster than classic RDBMSs like Oracle. It is truly horizontally scalable database ( scale out ) i.e., you simply scale processing power and storage capacity by adding new nodes.
CCC Information Services Inc. Leverages Oracle Fusion Middleware
Mon, 26 Mar 2012 08:00:00 EDT
CCC Information Services Inc. has selected an Oracle Fusion Middleware-based solution to help the company realize greater efficiency in its development environment and to deliver improved performance to its installed customer base of approximately 21,000 collision repair facilities, 350 insurance companies and a range of other claims industry participants.
CCC is the nation's leading provider of advanced software, workflow tools and enabling technologies to the automotive claims and collision repair industries.
CCC is a customer advisor to Oracle through the Oracle Fusion Middleware Strategy Council.
With Oracle WebLogic Server, Oracle SOA Suite 11g, Oracle Coherence and other Oracle Fusion Middleware products, including Oracle Identity Management, Oracle JDeveloper, and Oracle WebCenter, CCC can simplify its technology environment and minimize development time, improving the company's ability to quickly deliver enhanced solutions to customers.
A Quick Introduction to the Groovy Language (Part 1)
Tue, 20 Mar 2012 11:45:00 EDT
Before I start talking about using Groovy's capabilities to create a DSL (mostly in Java), let's take a few minutes to go over what Groovy is.
Groovy is a general purpose scripting language that runs on the JVM, and can largely be viewed as a superset of Java.
Is this a Groovy program or a Java program? Yes, it is - it will compile and run in both. This basic program is a bit wordy, and we can certainly do things more simply in Java, but this contains a number of patterns that you'd commonly see, including the use of the bean pattern, as well as the use of the main method to make the class executable via the java command line program. When we run it, it simply prints out "Hello world!", as is customary in these sorts of things.
Why the New Basecamp Refresh Is a Sign of Things to Come (Why That’s Good)
Sat, 17 Mar 2012 10:00:00 EDT
So, the new Basecamp is out, released with much applause (and yes, a few groans). We reviewed it last week and found it super promising. Exciting stuff.
What’s more exciting than the sexy new project management tool, though, is how it was released. 37signals, the company behind Basecamp, basically rewrote the rules of software releases. They’ve re-invented their core product, which is pretty unprecedented for software companies, and married two models of software development, old and new. Now that’s exciting
Updated: Oracle v Google Android Trial Set for April 16
Thu, 15 Mar 2012 11:45:00 EDT
The District Court for the Northern District of California Tuesday scheduled the Android trial weighing Oracle's infringement claims against Google for April 16. It should run eight glorious weeks.
Google wanted the trial to wait until fall as originally scheduled. So Oracle got what it wanted. But on Wednesday Google's lead counsel asked for a continuance, saying he and others on Google's legal team will be occupied elsewhere and wants the trial delayed until after June 29 or at least until April 30.
Of course, the judge was aware of the scheduling conflict so it might not make any difference. According to patent wars observer FOSS Patents he told Google a few hours later that the prospects of any formal motion to delay "are not great." It appears that behind the scenes he's been coordinating with other district court judges to reschedule the trials demanding the presence of Google's lead counsel et al elsewhere.
In a time where the clock speeds of processors have been stable over the past couple of years, and Moore's Law is instead being applied by increasing the number of processor cores, it is getting more important for applications to use concurrent processing to reduce run/response times, as the time slicing routine via increased clock speed will no longer be available to bail out slow running programs.
Carl Hewitt proposed the Actor Model in 1973 as a way to implement unbounded nondeterminism in concurrent processing. In many ways this model was influenced by the packet switching mechanism, for example, no synchronous handshake between sender and receiver, inherently concurrent message passing, messages may not arrive in the order they were sent, addresses are stored in messages, etc.
Scaling Java and JSP Apps with Distributed Caching
Wed, 14 Mar 2012 15:15:00 EDT
Java is the technology of choice for high-end enterprise applications. The most common applications that developers are involved with are JavaServer Pages web applications, also known as JSP applications. JSP has become one of the two standards for developing high traffic web applications, the other being Microsoft ASP.NET. Being part of Java, JSP has been popular for a long time and is highly instrumental in promoting Web technologies for developing high-traffic applications. Millions of people are using JSP applications and those numbers keep growing.
These JSP applications are endowed with an architecture that scales very nicely. You can handle more and more users by adding more web servers to a load-balanced Web farm. As you have an increasing amount of transaction load, you just keep adding more servers to the Web farm. That way you can handle more transactions and more concurrent users.
Book Excerpt | Good Relationships: The Spring Data Neo4j Guide Book
Mon, 12 Mar 2012 13:15:00 EDT
The Spring Data Neo4j Project
This project is part of the Spring Data project, which brings the convenient programming model of the Spring Framework to modern NOSQL databases. Spring Data Neo4j, as the name alludes to, aims to provide support for the graph database Neo4j.
The first part of the book provides a tutorial that walks through the creation of a complete web application called cineasts.net, built with Spring Data Neo4j. Cineasts are people who love movies, and the site is a gathering place for moviegoers. For cineasts.net we decided to add a social aspect to the rating of movies, allowing friends to share their scores and get recommendations for new friends and movies.
The tutorial takes the reader through the steps necessary to create the application. It provides the configuration and code examples that are needed to understand what's happening in Spring Data Neo4j. The complete source code for the app is available on Github.
When Sun’s developers created Java, they tried to keep the syntax for Java similar to the syntax for C++ so it would be easy for C++ programmers to learn Java. In addition, they designed Java so its applications can be run on any computer platform. In contrast, C++ needs to have a specific compiler for each platform. Java was also designed to automatically handle many operations involving the creation and destruction of memory. This is a key reason why it’s easier to develop programs and write bug-free code with Java than with C++. To provide these features, the developers of Java had to sacrifice some speed (or performance) when compared to C++. For many types of applications, however, Java’s relative slowness is not an issue.
Microsoft’s Visual C# language is similar to Java in many ways. Like Java, C# uses a syntax that’s similar to C++ and that automatically handles memory operations. However, in practice, C# code only runs on Windows. Because of that, C# is a good choice for developing applications for a Windows-only environment. However, Java is a better choice if you need to develop crossplatform applications.
Weekend Project: Replace Active Directory with Resara Server and Samba4
Carla Schroder - Fri, 18 May 2012 16:49:39 +0100
Samba4 aims to be a drop-in Active Directory server replacement. It's still in alpha, so the easy way to try it out is with Resara Server, which supplies a polished administration console and decent documentation. So grab your Windows peecees and come take Resara for a spin.
Open Cloud Roundup: Top Stories this Week
Libby Clark - Thu, 17 May 2012 18:20:25 +0100
This week's open source cloud headlines yielded the not-so-suprising news that NASA will discontinue support for the OpenStack cloud platform it helped engineer. The reason? OpenStack is now receiving commercial support and the agency's funds are best spent elsewhere, according to Datacenter Dynamics.
Uptime: NASA to cut involvement in OpenStack Datacenter Dynamics The agency that was central to developing the OpenStack platform has announced it will no longer be involved in the project. NASA will also stop work on Nebula, the cloud infrastructure developed alongside OpenStack.
Red Hat announced its open source PaaS offering for the enterprise, a competitor to VMWare’s Cloud Foundry.
How the Growth of Mobile is Driving Cloud Computing (Infographic) Alltop This isn't open source specific, but the connection between mobile computing and the growth of PaaS, the third largest cloud category, is interesting. PaaS is expected to grow 232% between 2010 and 2014. Who are the big open source PaaS providers? Red Hat's OpenShift, for one. VMWare's Cloud Foundry is another.
Open Source Cloud Computing: Could It Be Part of Your Next Cloud Project? Midsize Insider When does it make sense for mid-size businesses to use open source frameworks for cloud computing? Web and social applications are a good fit. Internal IT skills are a must, according to this article. And for many, it may be too soon. The article argues that security is still an issue for SMBs in cloud adoption, but a Microsoft study on cloud adoption disagrees.
Marten Mickos: Openness is Winning in the Cloud Linux.com The CEO of Eucalyptus says open source cloud startups are scaling in size with important customers and a large install base that make them competitive with closed source solutions.
Android Skins Refuse to Go Away
Eric Brown - Thu, 17 May 2012 15:00:00 +0100
After years of trying and failing to discourage manufacturers from adding user interface (UI) layers to Android, Google appeared destined for success with the visually refined Android 4.0 ("Ice Cream Sandwich"). Despite predictions that ICS would kill off the "skins" for good, however, HTC's Sense and Samsung's TouchWiz have not only arrived in new Android 4.0 versions, but they have met with positive reviews.
This week, these top two skins were joined by LG’s Optimus UI 3.0, yet another feature-rich interpretation of Android 4.0. Debuting soon on the new LG Optimus 4X HD and Optimus LTE II, the latest Optimus skin features great customization and the ability to take photos via voice command. Along with a growing list of third-party launchers and custom ROMs, vendor-supplied UI layers continue to both complicate and energize the Android standard.
Ranging from cosmetic modifications to more fundamental UI modifications and feature suites, UI layers offered some advantages in the early days of Android. Yet, as Android evolved, the skins have hindered more than helped, burdening users with sometimes cartoonish interfaces and awkward feature alternatives. More to the point, the UI layers often reduce performance and battery life, while cluttering the screen and wasting storage with "bloatware." Skins have also been criticized for delaying products and OS updates, and making it harder for Android app developers to reach a broad audience.
Some vendors have retreated from the skin game. Notably Motorola began scaling back its MotoBlur interface in 2010, and the latest, MotoBlur-derived Motorola Application Platform hews close to stock Android. HTC and Samsung, however, have stubbornly pushed out major Android 4.0 updates of their Sense and TouchWiz skins, respectively.
Their persistence was recently explained in a Laptop story by Drew Bamford, HTC's lead designer for Sense 4.0. HTC's goal with Sense, he said, is to "create that continuity of experience and that bridge of an identifiable HTC experience across our products."
Glowing reviews
Although some critics contend the new skins hide ICS' best design improvements, most reviews have been quite positive. Even the techies on the Android forums have had nice things to say, and some have even suggested they may keep the layers instead of rooting and replacing them with custom ROMs.
In the case of Sense 4.0, which debuted on the HTC One X, the praise focuses on the more refined interface. HTC has scaled back many of Sense's previous excesses, removing features that ICS already excels at. Its subtle matte-finish interface is far less cluttered, and new customization features include personalized widget sets, customizable lockscreens, and optional overlays.
Despite Samsung's addition of a nature-themed cosmetic overlay to the ICS-ready TouchWiz Nature UX, the UI layer is less dramatically altered from the previous TouchWiz 4.0 than Sense 4.0 is from Sense 3.5. Yet Samsung has loaded up TouchWiz with a bevy of innovative features, making it more of an application suite than a skin. Like Sense 4.0, Nature UX builds upon ICS enhancements with new lockscreens and improved camera controls, but it goes much further.
As demonstrated on the Samsung Galaxy S III, TouchWiz adds the somewhat Siri-like "S Voice" concierge service, as well as a picture-in-picture function. Various enhancements make use of sensors and cameras. For example, the "direct call" feature lets one switch from a messaging to a voice session by holding the phone to one's face. "Smart stay" uses face recognition to send the phone into a blank power-saving mode when one's glance is averted. And for the ultimate gee-whiz effect, tapping on a familiar face in a photo instantly pulls up the subject's contact info.
Uninstall isn't an option
Clearly, Sense and TouchWiz have both been greatly improved. Yet, a chief criticism of both UI layers remains the same: neither are easily removed. There's no uninstall function, and especially in the U.S., locked bootloaders dissuade users from modifying the vendors' branded experiences.
This is no big deal for Android techies, most of whom will continue rooting their devices to replace the latest skins with custom ROMs. An increasing number of stock Android 4.0 firmware alternatives are available from CyanogenMod, XDA-Developers, and others, and some let users switch between modded versions of vendor skins in addition to stock ICS.
For most consumers, however, the risk of "bricking" one's device into a coma makes rooting the phone with a new ROM an unwelcome option.
As Ryan Whitwam notes in a May 8 story in ExtremeTech, there are less risky ways to nudge a skinned phone toward Android purity. Installing an ICS-ready launcher like Apex and ADW adds home-screen customization options that approximate a stock Android experience. Whitwam also points to alternative browsers and other apps that can help restore a stock experience. These solutions, however, do not necessarily remove bloatware or address potential performance, storage, or battery problems.
Despite the drawbacks of fragmentation, vendors should be encouraged to make Android anything they want -- even if they go as far as Amazon with its partial fork of Android 2.3 for its Kindle Fire tablet. And in the interest of providing users with an open platform, too, perhaps the next versions could offer the option to uninstall.
Marten Mickos: Eucalyptus Opens Up Under Agile Model
Libby Clark - Wed, 16 May 2012 21:26:47 +0100
As part of our ongoing focus on open source cloud, we talked with Eucalyptus CEO Marten Mickos about the commoditization of hypervisors, what’s driving his company’s growth and its plans to release Eucalyptus 3.1 soon, marking the company’s shift to a much more open development model. The interview is presented in two parts. Yesterday’s post covered the open cloud, the role of APIs and where open source cloud computing is headed.
Marten Mickos: The driving force now is agility. Companies need the elasticity of cloud to assign infrastructure resources on the fly to different applications and shift the workloads around. That’s why our customers do it. Cloud is a new piece of software on your servers so there must be a benefit to installing it. Agility is that benefit. Longer-term, cloud also gives better manageability and higher utilization.
Linux.com: How much overlap is there between the surge in interest in big data and the open cloud movement? Is one influencing the other?
Mickos: I think both are driven by the large increase in the number of connected devices. The underlying trend is connected devices. How many new devices with an IP address are there? They produce a lot of data and have compute needs. They need clouds to run on and big data to be analyzed. You can run big data solutions on cloud platforms. That’s just a practical reality.
Linux.com: Is virtualization in the cloud going away? More companies are offering cloud services without the hypervisor. What does that mean for VMware and others?
Mickos: Virtualization is needed and useful but ultimately it will be compressed into the hardware, into the CPU. Sure you can do deployments that don’t use hypervisors and get some improvements in use case. But how do you maintain flexibility of your own virtual machine? I don’t think they’re going away but I can see them being commoditized.
But we shouldn’t think companies like VWMare are losing their business anytime soon. Although the technological change could happen fast, customer deployments happen slowly. They virtualization vendors will be able to monetize that for many years to come. And now they’re moving up the chain into PaaS and IaaS that they didn’t have before.
But with a hypervisor background you might not have the needed frame of thinking for building a cloud. A hypervisor is a single piece of software; it runs in one machine. A cloud platform like Eucalyptus is essentially a multi-machine piece of software. It takes a different mindset to develop distributed systems.
Here’s an analogy: The world had hierarchical databases, and then someone developed a relational database. It wasn’t the hierarchical designers who came up with it, it took new guys.
Linux.com: Where is Eucalyptus now?
Mickos: We are unique in the space in that we’ve had production use of Eucalyptus for over two years. We have taken a step into mission-critical uses and now have high availability (HA) in the product.
Linux.com: What’s new for you this year and where are you headed?
Mickos: We are growing very rapidly. We shipped Eucalyptus 3.0 which is revolutionary in that it has features no other cloud service has. We signed a deal with AWS and have raised $30 million in capital a few weeks ago.
We have lots of customers going and that’s just the U.S. We’re equally active in China , India and Europe. We’re pushing hard on all those fronts and shipping software faster than before. And we have the financial funds to keep expanding. But it’s always hard to build a company.
The 3.1 release is coming out in two months from now. It will mark the transition we agreed on internally in terms of a new development model. We’re working now under an agile model and we’ll use Git and GitHub for our source code repository. This marks a much more open model for how we develop our product.
Linux.com: Does that mean Eucalyptus will be completely open source, or will you still reserve some aspects of your code for customers under an “open core” model?
Mickos: The platform is totally open, we will have plugins we give to paying customers. The good news is anybody can develop plugins so we’re a much more pluggable architecture and we’ll welcome that sort of development.
How to Sync Files to Amazon S3 on Linux
Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier - Wed, 16 May 2012 18:22:03 +0100
Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) has a lot to like. It's cheap, can be used for storing a little bit of data or as much as you want, and it can be used for distributing files publicly or just storing your private data. Let's look at how you can take advantage of Amazon S3 on Linux.
2012 Linux Foundation T-shirt Contest: Inspired by Linux
Libby Clark - Wed, 16 May 2012 16:00:00 +0100
So much has happened recently in the Linux community to be inspired by. This is my second month as the Digital Content Editor for Linux.com and as a newbie member I’ve already met so many amazing people and seen so many significant milestones pass just since I started.
- With the Linux Foundation’s Annual Development Report we learned that more than 7,800 developers from almost 800 different companies have contributed to the Linux kernel since tracking began in 2005.
Their contributions make Linux the largest collaborative development project in the history of computing. That’s pretty amazing, and inspiring.
- Linux Creator and Linux Foundation Fellow Linus Torvalds in April was named a Millennium Technology Prize laureate -- an honor considered to be the Nobel prize of technology.
Wow, am I proud to work in the same community as him.
- New advances are happening all the time, whether it’s Ubuntu’s recent 12.04, the soon-to-be-released Linux 3.4, OpenStack and the open cloud movement, Android seizing market share or the myriad other technologies and trends that form the Linux juggernaut.
You had me at Ubuntu.
Bottom line: This community is continually innovating and inspiring the next generation of Linux products and developers. The list of accomplishments is as diverse as the community that contributes to the success of Linux. I can’t help but be in awe, and I’ll bet you can’t help it either. That’s why we’ve chosen the theme of this year’s T-shirt design contest to be “Inspired by Linux.” Tell us:
How does Linux inspire you?
We invite you to take that kernel of an idea and turn it into an inspiring T-shirt design for the Linux community to wear proudly in our 3rd Annual Linux Foundation T-shirt Design Contest. The design can depict literally or figuratively the events or ideas that get you pumped up for Linux. It can have words, graphics, or both in whatever font and colors you like. Let Linux be your muse.
This year we’re pleased to announce that two winners will be selected by the communty. The first place winner will be reimbursed $2,000 to be applied toward airfare, hotel and admissions to their choice of LinuxCon North America in San Diego, CA on Aug. 26 - 29, 2012, or LinuxCon Europe in Barcelona, Spain Nov. 5-7, 2012. Second place will be reimbursed $1,000 toward LinuxCon North America or LinuxCon Europe in 2012.
We’ve also taken steps this year to ensure a fair voting process. The Linux Foundation staff will choose the top 5-7 submissions from designs received by the deadline. The community will then vote on the finalists to choose two winners. Voters must be registered members of Linux.com and must be logged in to vote. Only one vote per registered member is allowed.
First place will be awarded to the design that receives the most community votes and second place will go to the runner up. Winners will be announced on or around July 17, 2012.
Good luck! I can’t wait to see all of your designs. And if you're looking for more inspiration, check out our contest video:
Marten Mickos: Openness is Winning in the Cloud
Libby Clark - Tue, 15 May 2012 21:12:44 +0100
Open source cloud computing software startup Eucalyptus has had an eventful past few months:
- In March the Infrastructure-as-a-Service company signed a deal with Amazon Web Services to improve its compatibility with the Amazon API and address customers jointly. This makes Eucalyptus the only cloud vendor to land a formal agreement with the market-leading platform, though it’s not the only one using the API.
- In April the company raised $30 million in Series C funding, setting it on solid financial footing to fuel its rapid expansion says CEO Marten Mickos.
- And Eucalyptus 3.1 is coming soon, marking the company’s shift to a much more open development model and placing it firmly at the center of the open source cloud computing movement.
As part of our ongoing focus on open source cloud, we talked with Mickos about Linux and the open cloud, the role of APIs and where open source cloud computing is headed. The interview is presented in two parts. In part two we discuss Eucalyptus’s business in more detail.
Linux.com: Open cloud has been gaining momentum in the past few months with the announcement of CloudOpen and activity around OpenStack. What’s driving that attention?
Marten Mickos: I think generally speaking people are realizing how important cloud is. And when you look at what’s out there, there’s VMWare and then there’s nothing. And then you have four open source projects: OpenNebula; OpenStack; CloudStack; and Eucalyptus. When you want an alternative you are immediately in open source space.
Linux.com: What has changed in open source cloud computing since you spoke about it a year ago at LinuxCon?
Mickos: Products have matured. It’s following a typical technology adoption lifecycle, described in Crossing the Chasm. We’re still early but we’re less early than a year ago.
Linux.com: In that talk last year you said GPL was vital to Linux, do you see a similar legal framework developing for the cloud yet?
Mickos: It’s an important question but it’s a little philosophical. We have GPL which defines software as free and open. When you go into the cloud it’s not only about source code - it is also about data and API. Today, openness in data and API is up to each vendor - there isn't yet a common rulebook for it like the GPL is the rulebook for free software.
But I do think we’re seeing de facto standards emerging in cloud. To take Eucalyptus as a specific example, we do the same cloud API as Amazon. We see EC2 as a de facto standard.
Linux.com:The Linux Foundation has announced a new conference this year, Cloud Open, intended to encourage collaboration among open source players in cloud computing. What do you see as the Linux Foundation’s role in the open cloud movement?
Mickos: The Linux Foundation is one of the most central bodies in software in the whole world. We don’t hear much from The Linux Foundation because it’s so well managed. There haven’t been any big conflicts. Linus Torvalds keeps working on the kernel and after 20 years it keeps feeding a huge ecosystem downstream. Just doing that is already amazing.
I don’t think The Linux Foundation feels that it has to take on some mandate. It is important and relevant that KVM and Xen are now part of the Linux kernel. That’s an indication of the importance of cloud. It’s so important to keep Linux in active development in managing all the work from different parties, which is the key mandate for The Linux Foundation.
Linux.com: What about the role of Linux in open cloud?
Mickos: As we get more datacenters running in the cloud the underlying architecture will be Linux. Cloud will mean an increase in the Linux install base. Linux is so well suited for it. It powers already the largest datacenters and as we move to cloud architectures it’s good to have it there. I think cloud will increase the share of Linux on servers.
Linux.com: What’s your outlook on the open source cloud movement in general?
Mickos: Openness is winning in cloud. I was just at a Goldman Sachs cloud conference. Out of 15 companies presenting, ten were open source companies. That’s significant. There’s much more coming and promising startups are scaling in size. Companies like Cloudera, Acquia, Opscode and Puppet Labs.
They have a large install base, they have great customers, and they’re competitive against closed source. It bodes well for the world of open source. It’s important in my mind that open source isn’t just a technology, but that there are businesses who thrive on and around open source. Take Red Hat as an example. People forget how critical it is that they’re successful showing that open source makes business sense. We need such role models and it’s very healthy for the open source community.
Linux.com: You’ve said that we’re in a transitional period in which programming freedom isn’t about source code anymore, it’s about API’s. What do you mean by that? And how does that apply to the open cloud?
Mickos: It is also about source code, but it’s not only about source code. I’m a huge supporter of open source, but the attention is pointing more to the APIs. Ten years ago you’d say that your application runs on Linux. The question now is does your application run on AWS? And of course AWS runs some Linux. But we have reached a new abstraction layer. We are higher up. And we talk about apps running on a specific cloud, not on a specific operating system. It’s difficult to find a public cloud today that doesn’t run on Linux.
Linux.com: Your talk about making API’s open was prescient considering the precedent now being set by Google and Oracle. What is the danger here?
Mickos: I’m not a legal expert so don’t want to comment on the specifics of the lawsuit. But generally speaking there are many products that claim Amazon API compatibility or are developing it.
PowerTOP 2.0 Debuts for Power Management Goodness
Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier - Mon, 14 May 2012 17:56:57 +0100
Power consumption is a major concern for Linux users. If you're using Linux in the server room, reduced power consumption can save a lot of money. If you're using Linux on a laptop, better power management means longer battery life. Likewise, when using Linux in devices, power consumption is all-important. The release of PowerTOP 2.0, then, is of interest to almost all Linux users.
Innovate or Imitate? Where Linux Lags, Where Linux Leads
Carla Schroder - Fri, 11 May 2012 18:20:32 +0100
In which we debunk the silly canard that Linux does not innovate, but merely imitates. And as a free bonus, suggest meaningful ways to contribute other than cranking out yet more Ubuntu respins.
Open Source Cloud Top Stories of the Week
Libby Clark - Thu, 10 May 2012 19:19:01 +0100
This week's open source cloud headlines featured doomsday predictions about the consequences of the Oracle and Google dispute; why Rackspace's first quarter earnings have some analysts scaling down cloud computing predictions; and a crop of interesting trends including moves to abandon hypervisors and go bare metal in the cloud.
Could Oracle Blow Up the Cloud?, Wired An analysis of how the recent decision in the Oracle v Google case would potentially affect the cloud. If APIs are protected under copyright, open source cloud projects including OpenStack and CloudStack could wind up paying fees to Amazon Web Services.
Rackspace Earnings: Cloud Computing, Services Reality Check, Talkin Cloud Blog The margins on Rackspace’s cloud computing earnings are fluctuating more than investors would like, signalling that the market isn’t going as gangbusters as predicted. Growth was still very strong, however, and the company reassured investors by pumping up its plans for OpenStack.
Piston Cloud, the Red Hat of OpenStack Cloud Computing?
Libby Clark - Wed, 09 May 2012 17:35:20 +0100
With the recent buzz around the OpenStack project, momentum behind open source cloud development is building. We’re now seeing an early ecosystem of companies and products built around OpenStack – a goal that Rackspace’s Lew Moorman laid out for the project when it launched two years ago.
“We hope to build a vibrant business community around this,” Moorman said in a 2010 OSCON presentation. “If companies can build around OpenStack it’s going to pay for developers to continue to give back.”
Piston Cloud Computing was one of the first to jump into the fray as an Infrastructure-as-a-Service startup built on the OpenStack framework. The one-year-old company is both contributing to and seizing the momentum behind OpenStack as the project’s only distribution (so far).
We talked recently with Christopher MacGown, a Piston Cloud co-founder and CTO, about the kind of open source ecosystem he sees developing around OpenStack and his company’s claim as the Red Hat of OpenStack.
Linux.com: There are now several IT companies built around OpenStack, mostly offering services, how are you different?
Christopher MacGown: We’re primarily a product company. We’ve built the first of many distributions of OpenStack. We’re also private cloud focused versus those focused on OpenStack-based public clouds.
We’re one of the few companies for whom OpenStack is the big bet for our company. We succeed when OpenStack succeeds. Whereas some of these other companies have services divisions or other open source projects they can fall back on.
Linux.com: How are you integrated with OpenStack?
MacGown: At Piston Cloud we’re amongst the founders of OpenStack. My fellow cofounders were both at NASA and worked on the Nebula project, one of the key technologies behind OpenStack. I was at Rackspace at the time and trying to figure out how to make it open source.
We’re still really involved with the project. I’m on the Nova Core team for OpenStack compute. And several engineers are on core teams and the new Cinder project as well.
Linux.com: Why is it worthwhile to gamble your whole company on OpenStack?
MacGown: In open source software it’s not the actual software that wins, it’s the ecosystem that builds services or applications around it that wins. Linux won because the ecosystem was so much larger than the BSD/s. There’s a huge ecosystem around OpenStack. That makes it a good bet.
Linux.com: To quote Wired in a recent article: Who will be the Red Hat of OpenStack?
MacGown: We’ve always described ourselves as the Red Hat of OpenStack, though that’s become a bit funnier since Red Hat has joined OpenStack. They’re not as focused on Infrastructure-as-a-Service as we are. So we think we can still make that claim.
Our competitive advantage is we’re the only people who have built large scalable clouds. Joshua (McKenty) helped build the first certified regulated cloud for NASA, which was used by the White House. We understand regulation and we built the first implementation of Cloud Audit API, and open sourced that framework. We understand the space and believe that other people won’t actually be able to compete with us on the advantage.
Linux.com: Is open source cloud heating up? Why now?
MacGown: It really is. Open source cloud is heating up now because so many people see the Amazon model and realize it’s going to lock them in long term and don’t want to turn Amazon into next IBM. They’re realizing they can actually drive the development to meet their needs better than if using other proprietary solutions such as KWS or VMWare.
Linux.com: What are some of the trends we should be paying attention to in the open cloud space right now?
MacGown: The licensing model is moving away from general public license (GPL) and transitioning to a freer, more open licensing. That enables companies to do more around open core proprietary extensions without feeling like they’re going to violate their own source code with the GPL. There’s a trend toward Apache licensing. On the tech side there’s a lot of research and development in software-defined networking.
Linux.com: How does software-defined networking fit in with open source cloud?
MacGown: When it becomes something people understand and view the benefit for, they’ll be able to build out federate cloud environments similar to how we build out web properties now. Everybody uses Apache, some use IIS, but when you use a web browser everything is the same with your experience. Back ends might not be identical but you have the same experience as an end user of the software or virtualization pieces directly and use that across cloud providers and platforms.
Linux.com: Has this been a focus of the OpenStack project?
MacGown: It’s definitely a focus. Companies like Cisco and Dell have contributed heavily. And with federation in general there’s a lot of expectation and work being done from the humanitarian and scientific computing communities.
Linux.com: Talk about some of the challenges of the open cloud and OpenStack project and your niche in the market.
MacGown: One of the main challenges is nobody’s quite sure what cloud means. With the OpenStack project in particular that’s very similar. You have a lot of excitement and driving that in a single direction that’s 80-90 percent for everyone has been historically difficult.
The work that’s been done around the foundation to put the control directly in the hands of the community will help that. There are efforts to formalize the relationship and the decision making structure.
Linux.com: Your startup is less than two years old now, how far have you come? Where are you headed?
MacGown: We raised series A funding in July of last year, announced a preview of our product, Piston Enterprise OS (pentOS) in September 2011 and pentOS went general availability in January of this year.
Our goal for the year is we’re going to have a great release of OpanStack Essex around the middle to the end of the third quarter. We were the first to release a distro of Diablo, but we don’t want to be the first for Essex. (Canonical plans to have Essex first.) We want to be the stately gravitas distro where we support it and know all about it and can guarantee the security of it.
To learn more about how open source is impacting the future of cloud computing, check out The Linux Foundation’s latest event CloudOpen.
Calligra Suite, the Promising Not-An-Office Suite
Carla Schroder - Wed, 09 May 2012 15:43:59 +0100
Once upon a time there was KOffice, all full of unrealized potential. And then it was forked as Calligra Suite. The first release of Calligra was on April 11, 2012. Is this a contender, or another niche productivity suite?
Third-Gen iPad Slows Android Tablet Onslaught, For Now
Eric Brown - Tue, 08 May 2012 15:16:00 +0100
The third generation iPad, featuring a 2048 x 1536-pixel Retina display and four processor cores, has once again raised the bar for Android competitors. According to a May 3 IDC report on first-quarter global tablet sales, Apple's latest iPad won back much of Android's recent tablet gains, which had swollen with the help of Amazon's Kindle Fire. Apple's iOS rebounded from a 4Q low of 55 percent market share back up to 68 percent, estimates IDC.
Yet Apple's recovery, boosted by the new iPad and a discounted iPad 2, may well be temporary, suggests IDC. "Although total Android shipments were down sharply in 1Q12, companies such as Samsung and Lenovo are beginning to gain traction in the market with their latest generation of Android products," states the research firm. "IDC expects the segment to rebound quickly as other vendors introduce new products in the second quarter and beyond."
Quad-core Android 4.0 tablets have just begun to ship, and Android OEMs like Acer and Samsung, which also manufactures the iPad's Retina display, are developing screens with comparable resolutions. By the time the next iPad arrives, several Android tablets should best the current model on features -- and with Android 4.0, they could arguably surpass it on user experience.
That said, no single high-end model will come close to outselling the iPad. Instead, low-end tablets will drive Android to overtake Apple's iOS within a few years, according to IDC. Promising contenders include a rumored Google-branded tablet from Asus intended to compete with the $199 Fire, as well as a larger version of the Fire, both of which will force tablet pricing lower, says IDC. In short, Android will win the tablet market the same way it won the smartphone market: with a flood of products with low prices and plenty of options on size and features.
IDC: Android tablets to overtake iPad by 2015
Last year, Android phones eclipsed the global market share of Apple's iPhone, and have now grown to a cumulative 51 percent of U.S. subscribers, compared to the iPhone's 30.7 percent, according to ComScore. The tablet market, however, has proven more challenging, in part due to flaws with Android 3.0. The vastly improved Android 4.0 should not only go far in helping Android compete on the high end, but will appear on many affordable tablets as well.
Despite Android's first-quarter downturn, IDC declined to modify its March projections on the global tablet market, in which it predicted that Android will overtake iOS by 2015, and advance to a roughly 50 percent share in 2016.
In an April report, Gartner projected a similar, but less spectacular trajectory. Gartner sees Android tablets growing from about half of iOS' share in 2012 -- 31.9 percent of total -- to 37 percent of total in 2016, compared to iOS' 45 percent. In 2016, the next closest competitor -- Windows 8 -- will trail at 12 percent, predicts Gartner. (IDC and others are much less bullish on Microsoft's prospects.)
Low-end options key to surge
By all accounts, the $199 Kindle Fire drove the fourth quarter Android surge, and continues to dominate. An April 26 report from ComScore estimates the Fire advanced to 54.4 percent of the Android market by the end of February. Yet, the Fire, which runs a highly modified version of Android 2.3, isn't alone in finding success on the low end. According to IDC, Pandigital and Barnes & Noble' Nook tablets have also succeeded with affordable Android slates.
Since Apple has yet to hint at an "iPad Jr." -- and Microsoft's OEMs will focus on the enterprise market -- Android vendors have the growing low- and mid-range markets to themselves. In March, ABI Research projected that sub-$400 tablets will rise to 60 percent of the market by 2016, driven by increasing sales to China and India.
Even if a scaled-down iPad arrives, the sheer volume and variety of Android options will be formidable. In the end, the more open platform will win, just as it has in smartphones and other embedded devices.
Chart: Worldwide Media Tablet Shipments Split by OS Historical and Forecast* 2010 - 2016 (Units in Millions)Description: Source: Worldwide Quarterly Media Tablet & e-Reader Tracker, March 12, 2012 Note: IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Media Tablet & e-Reader Tracker provides total market size and vendor share for both the Media Tablet and eReader markets in 46 countries. Detailed historical segmentation is provided by CPU type, operating system, connectivity type, screen size and resolution, storage capacity, distribution channel, and customer segment. Measurement for this tracker is in units, value, and end-user price. For more information, or to subscribe to the research, please contact Kathy Nagamine at 1-650-350-6423 or knagamine@idc.com. Further detail about this tracker can be found at: http://www.idc.com/tracker/showproductinfo.jsp?prod_id=81 Tags: IDC, Tracker, Worldwide, Media Tablets, Media Tablet, OS, Android, iOS ...Author: IDCcharts powered by iCharts
Big Data, Cloud Knowledge Key in IT Jobs Market
Jennifer Cloer - Mon, 07 May 2012 18:54:50 +0100
As a global community, we are creating and sharing more information than ever before. And, most of that activity is happening "in the cloud," which is hosted on millions of servers in datacenters located anywhere from the Columbia River Gorge, to the Nevada desert, to the most remote areas of China.
As the reality of managing that level of data sets in, the demand for employees with a unique combination of analytics and IT management expertise is on the rise. With our newest event, CloudOpen, taking place this coming summer, we wanted to learn more about this demand and the areas we should address at this event and as part of our ongoing Linux training program. So, we got in touch with Dice.com's Managing Director Alice Hill. Her responses were very useful and we thought we'd share them with you, the community.
Linux.com: We've been reading a lot about an increasing demand for professionals with big data expertise. What's your take on the primary drivers behind this trend?
Hill: Every company wants more intelligence – more insights into customer behavior, emerging trends, cost structures, etc. Many firms have the data, but it’s unused, unstructured and isn’t easily digestible by managers to make decisions. If companies can develop this asset, it will give them an edge in the market and potentially influence customer behaviors.
Linux.com: What kinds of expertise are employers looking for related to big data?
Hill: Data architects, analytics professionals and data scientists are high on the list right now. Employers are requesting experience with machine learning, statistics, and natural language processing. Big data takes that foundation and marries that know-how to newer technologies like Hadoop and NoSQL and other open-source tools/technologies.
Linux.com: You recently reported that demand for Linux talent hit an all-time high on the Dice.com boards. Do you see any parallels with the demand for big data talent?
Hill: About one-third of the “big data” jobs on Dice also request Linux expertise. The employment demand for Linux expertise is much more widespread and it’s really a core skill for technology professionals today.
Linux.com: We've heard that a big data expert is likely someone with a hybrid of expertise, including business and technical acumen. How are employers dealing with this challenge?
Hill: That’s true and we see more and more job postings on Dice.com that note an MBA is a plus. However, it’s not just the technology departments’ responsibility to gain business acumen. The line of business leaders need to have a willingness to dig into the technologies and ask questions when they don’t fully comprehend the back-end of getting the insights everyone wants.
For newer technologists, whether focused on big data or other areas, you should be able to “story board” what the business needs, contribute to the story, understand the financial analysis and deliver it in a way that is easily understood by any audience. This is where we should spend time teaching our less experienced colleagues.
Linux.com: What advice do you have for professionals seeking a career in the area of big data?
Hill: Focus on working with internet companies with consumer audiences – ecommerce, gaming, etc. Those firms have enormous data streams matched by a serious craving to use the data. Ultimately, though don’t fit your career into a trend – you should do what you are best at for real satisfaction.
Collaborative Classroom Computer Programming with JavaWIDE
Rikki Endsley - Mon, 07 May 2012 16:06:50 +0100
In this interview, Dr. Jam Jenkins, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Valdosta State University and creator of JavaWIDE, explains how the Java Wiki Integrated Development Environment provides a web-based Java programming environment for the classroom.
Member Profile: Open Source Founder and Android Fan Anthony Favre
Libby Clark - Mon, 07 May 2012 09:20:00 +0100
Anthony Favre used Linux for the first time as a student in 1997 and has since started two companies that specialize in Linux and open source technologies.
In 2002 he founded Linalis, an IT company in Geneva that provided LPI (LInux Professional Institute) certifications. There he wrote one of the first LPI-certified study guides. Then in 2009, he founded the Swiss branch of French IT company Smile, also active in open source, where he is now managing director.
"My job is to promote open source solutions in general and Linux in particular," Favre said. "My company is a Red Hat advanced partner and we provide solutions based only on open source."
He recently joined the Linux Foudation as an individual member after learning that membership is an option for anyone.
"I didn't know it was possible to join The Linux Foundation. Since I saw that, I was pleased to grant a little bit to the foundation," he said. "Unfortunately, I'm not technically strong enough to develop or help on projects."
He's still very active in the community through the events he organizes to promote Linux such as the 2009 conference LinuxDays and this year's Open Source Now event in Geneva. He's hoping to take advantage of his membership to attend Linux Foundation events such as LinuxCon Europe in Barcelona Nov. 5-7. Members receive 20 percent off the registration fee for LinuxCon events.
His favorite Linux innovation?
"All of them, but specifically Android," he said, because it's an easy-to-use Linux for end users.
Welcome, Anthony!
Want to share your story with The LInux Foundation and have your profile featured on Linux.com? Email Digital Content Editor Libby Clark, lclark (at) linuxfoundation.org.
MediaGoblin's One Year Anniversary: What's Next?
Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier - Fri, 04 May 2012 16:46:59 +0100
The GNU MediaGoblin project was announced just a year ago. The project, to build a decentralized, free software media sharing tool, has been going great guns ever since. To get an idea where the project stands today, we talked with lead developer Chris Webber. Here we share Webber's comments on the history and future of MediaGoblin, new features, and the switch away from MongoDB to SQL.
Top Open Cloud Stories This Week
Libby Clark - Wed, 02 May 2012 23:04:14 +0100
Open cloud news this week brought with it some new competition, some reflection on existing competitors and some unexpected cooperation. I've also thrown in a short counter perspective on the issue of portability -- is it a myth?
What did you think was this week's top open cloud story? Please tell me in the comments, below. I'd love to hear from you. Your feedback will help me refine this list and and make it more useful to the community. Thanks!
Mickos compares cloud storage to depositing money in the bank. All depositors should have free and open access to their stored data. He also comments on Eucalyptus’ partnership with Amazon to support Amazon Web Services’ API, saying it gives his company a competitive advantage over OpenStack, which doesn’t have a similar deal with Amazon.
Open Compute one year later. Bigger, badder and less disruptive than we thought, GigaOm With the growth of Facebook’s Open Compute open hardware project and OpenStack it’s possible to build an entirely open hardware infrastructure layer and companies are demanding more flexibility. The big data ecosystem has adjusted, with companies like Dell and HP offering new server and storage designs compatible with Open Rack.
A different perspective:
Two Cloud Myths Busted: Lock-In and Locked Up, PCWorld Portability is a favorite mantra of open cloud supporters. But is portability a myth? This commentary says profitability and intellectual property values will always trump portability.
The 2012 Top 7 Best Linux Distributions for You
Brian Proffitt - Wed, 02 May 2012 16:50:56 +0100
It is the mystery of mysteries, the one that ranks up there with the Gordian Knot, crop circles, and how many licks does it take to get the center of Tootsie Pop: what is the greatest Linux distro of all?
Getting Started with Embedded Linux and the Yocto Project
Jeff Osier-Mixon - Tue, 01 May 2012 20:18:15 +0100
It can be tough to get started with an embedded project, even for experienced developers, and the large number of choices out there can make things worse. Sometimes you need tools from one project, a board support package (BSP) from a different project or from a hardware provider, and applications from somewhere else - and no clues about how to make them all work together. Many developers are driven to proprietary solutions, or to taking a large desktop or server-oriented Linux distribution and carving away unneeded pieces until the distro fits into a resource-constrained environment. Surely there has to be a better way.
The Yocto Project is one answer. Created as a Linux Foundation workgroup, now a lab, the project is an umbrella of sorts that covers many different aspects of embedded Linux development with the goals of stability, usability, and interoperability. The Yocto Project provides a comprehensive build system with an Eclipse-based IDE, several related tools, EGLIBC, and an Application Development Toolkit that enables developers to provide SDKs based on the distros they create with the Yocto Project.
Several of the projects in the Yocto Project are well known to experienced Linux developers - including EGLIBC and Poky - and several pieces are shared with other organizations, particularly the BitBake build engine and the OpenEmbedded Core metadata layer, both of which have shared maintainership with the OpenEmbedded project.
The Yocto Project uses and contributes to many upstream projects as well, including GCC and the Linux kernel itself. The result is a cohesive set of tools that are tested, highly extensible, and come with an active community of developers from many different organizations. As the tagline says, the Yocto Project is not a distribution in itself. Instead, it helps you create your own distribution from the ground up.
One of the more interesting aspects of the project is its governance structure. Rather than being run as either a corporate consortium or a rag-tag fugitive fleet, the Yocto Project is governed as a meritocracy, with the project's chief architect as the ringleader directing a group of technical leaders and community participants. Many resources come from the project's member organizations who form an Advisory Board. This board is made up of organizations who normally compete with each other - operating systems vendors, hardware manufacturers, and consumer electronics companies - but who all see the value in working collaboratively on these tools. It is a striking example of cooperation among competitors.
You can get started with the Yocto Project even if you don't have an embedded board to work with - the project's tools can build a distribution for any of four QEMU-based virtual environments: ARM, MIPS, PowerPC, and x86. Check out the Getting Started page for more information, particularly the Quick Start Guide.
As further enticement, yesterday we released Yocto Project version 1.2, so you can be the first on your cubicle block to try it out.
And for those still wondering - the name Yocto comes from the smallest international unit, indicating 10^-24.
About the author: Jeff "Jefro" Osier-Mixon has been wandering the halls of Linux conferences and embedded and open source software companies for... well, a long time. He works for Intel Corporation and serves as community manager for the Yocto Project. This is the first article in a new monthly series from the Yocto Project on Linux.com.
Quotes From The Linux Foundation Enterprise End User Summit
Amanda McPherson - Tue, 01 May 2012 16:21:46 +0100
For the past two days, we've held our annual Enterprise End User Summit at the New York Stock Exchange. Besides the fun of ringing the bell during our evening reception, it's been an incredibly valuable event, fueling collaboration between kernel maintainers and enterprise end users who are pushing Linux to its edge. Here are highlights: “We’re not going to use our APIs to lock people out. Trust and security are at the heart of everything we do.” Stanley Young, CEO of NYSE Technologies “if there is one community who has embraced collaboration and openness,...
In Pictures: Linux Foundation Enterprise End User Summit
Jennifer Cloer - Tue, 01 May 2012 14:25:29 +0100
The Linux Foundation's Enterprise End User Summit kicked off yesterday in New York. The event this year is hosted at the NYSE Technologies' offices. It brings together Linux kernel developers and the world's largest users of Linux to collaborate face-to-face. The evening party was held on the trading floor of the NYSE, and we have some pictures available now that take you inside the event. {lfnews}
Two Years Fly By: Ubuntu Precise Pangolin Pads Into Production
Carla Schroder - Mon, 30 Apr 2012 18:40:14 +0100
I've been holding my breath for two years since the last Long-Term Support Ubuntu release, 10.04 Lucid Lynx. Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, Precise Pangolin, was just released so at long last I can breathe again.
Weekend Project: Get to Know LocalWiki for Local Information Sites
Nathan Willis - Fri, 27 Apr 2012 17:59:27 +0100
Wikis have a well-earned place among the ranks of content management systems (CMSes) as the de facto solution for crowdsourced, document-centric sites. But they are not one-size-fits-all. The encyclopedic style of MediaWiki is a good fit for Wikipedia, but TikiWiki makes for a better groupware solution thanks to features like access control and office document support. Let's take a look at one of the more unusual offerings among open source wikis: LocalWiki, which is focused on building community-driven, local information sites.
Open Source Cloud Roundup: Top Stories of the Week
Libby Clark - Thu, 26 Apr 2012 16:52:54 +0100
Not to over-inflate the horse race nature of the cloud computing space right now, but this is an exciting time to watch the action as open source projects seek to compete with giants such as Amazon and the telcos. This week's Open Cloud Roundup of top stories illustrates just how much the industry is heating up this year, with The Linux Foundation's announcement of a new CloudOpen conference and OpenStack's recent accumulation of big-name partners. The week also turned up an interesting "how-to" and a product launch for building your own private cloud with Debian.
Linux Foundation To Host Open Source Cloud Conference “CloudOpen”, TechCrunch Of course, this was the top news of the week for us! As Linux Foundation VP Amanda McPherson stated in her blog post about the announcement this week: "The cloud and the open source technologies that comprise it are now reaching the point of maturity that this collaboration can truly benefit users."
Top 10 Cloud Computing Providers of 2012, TechTarget TechTarget’s list of top 10 cloud providers this year includes three open source projects, with one (care to take a guess?) taking second place. That’s compared with just one OS project on the list last year, a sign that open source is heating up in the cloud space. The list is also missing some noteable drop-offs from last year including IBM and Google.
OpenStack Optimism Overrides Confusion, Wired Large companies are clamoring to participate in the project, but it’s still undefined. And many are asking who will be the Red Hat of the cloud? Hint: stay tuned for an interview here on Linux.com next week with a company that wants to answer this question.
Deploy Your Own "Cloud" with Debian "Wheezy", Debian-news list The open source project this week announced the availability of several new technologies that would ease the deployment of Debian-based clouds. Starting with the forthcoming release of Debian 7.0 "Wheezy", users will find ready-to-use packages for OpenStack® and Xen Cloud Platform (XCP).
I am pleased to announce CloudOpen, our new conference celebrating and exploring the open source projects, technologies and companies who make up the cloud. CloudOpen will bring together the open source projects, products and companies that are driving the cloud and big data ecosystems today and present best practices from the world of traditional open source.
You may be asking yourself, "Why another cloud event?" There are certainly no shortage of them, which isn't surprising given the nascent stage of an important new market segment. But there was nothing that I felt focused on the open source technologies and the open source way behind the cloud.
This event began when developers from various cloud-related projects came to me and said, "We should probably be talking to each other." The Linux Foundation's role in the industry is to facilitate collaboration amongst developers, projects, companies and users. The cloud and the open source technologies that comprise it are now reaching the point of maturity that this collaboration can truly benefit users. Cloud infrastructure choice is also reaching the point of proliferation that users need to have a place to educate themselves on "open" as it relates to the cloud. And this isn't just at a source level: the conversation must include data policies, APIs and so on. The Linux Foundation can provide the neutral forum and the platform for this conversation on open to take place.
I feel truly blessed to have assembled many leaders of cloud computing for the program committee:
Greg DeKoenigsberg, vice president of community, Eucalyptus Systems
Mark Hinkle, director of cloud computing community, Citrix
Gerrit Huzienga, cloud architect, IBM
Amanda McPherson, vice president of marketing and developer services, The Linux Foundation
Stefano Maffulli, community manager, OpenStack
Stephen Spector, cloud evangelist, Dell
John Mark Walker, director of communities, Red Hat
These indivuals represent the right technologies and also have the right background in open source to create a truly useful event. Expect content on cloud platforms, virtualization projects, storage, devops best practices and more. There will also be collaborative meetings between open cloud projects.
I want to thank the platinum sponsors of CloudOpen who are supporting this work: Canonical, HP, IBM, Intel. The Linux Foundation is a non-profit who needs the support of companies to make collaboration possible. And in an event landscape where prices continue to climb, we try to make our events affordable for a broad group of people. These sponsors help us to do that.
The CFP deadline is June 1 so please submit a talk if you would like to participate. Early bird registration ends on April 29th so please register. This year one registration gets you into both LinuxCon and CloudOpen. San Diego is truly shaping up to be an unforgettable gathering of the leaders behind open source. LinuxCon, CloudOpen, the Xen Summit, the Linux Kernel Summit, The Linux Plumbers Conference and more will all be there during the week. We hope you'll join us.
The Darktable RAW photo editor, light table and workflow manager takes a different approach to photo editing and management. The interface takes some getting used to; is it worth the learning curve?
Looking at the PostGIS 2.0 Release
Nathan Willis - Tue, 24 Apr 2012 15:55:11 +0100
The PostGIS database project made its long-awaited 2.0.0 release in April, marking the culmination of more than two years of development. PostGIS is an industrial-strength geographical database that serves as the storage system for a wide range of geo-data processing systems, from map servers to analysis tools.
Start Fine-Tuning Sudo on Linux
Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier - Mon, 23 Apr 2012 18:23:01 +0100
The sudo utility is one of the workhorses of Linux, but it's often not used as skillfully as it could be. If you're just using sudo to provide full root access to regular users, it's time to take a step back and fine-tune sudo to be a bit more picky.
Weekend Project: Discover Linux Astronomy Tools
Nathan Willis - Fri, 20 Apr 2012 18:12:56 +0100
Considering Linux's foothold in everything from embedded devices to supercomputers, describing the project's growth as astronomical is no exaggeration. But it is a literal truth, too, as Linux and open source software power scores of professional and amateur astronomy projects. Whether you need to precisely drive a large telescope for scientific purposes or just want to create decent-looking astrophotography, chances are there is a project out there already suited for the task.
New data points to demand for Linux skills, training in Asia
While the report published in January focused on large enterprises with more than $500 million in sales or 500+ employees, this previously unreleased data highlights regional trends among enterprise users in Europe and Asia.
For the most part the regional data showed similar patterns of adoption with large enterprise users. But one result in particular stood out.
More than 34 percent of 257 organizations surveyed in Asia cited finding trained developers and/or systems administrators as the top factor impeding Linux from having more success. That’s about double the percentage of large enterprises (17.6 percent) and European enterprises (16.3 percent) that listed finding talent as the top impediment.
Contrast these results with those of a recent Dice report that show demand for Linux skills in the job market reached a new high in April and you begin to see the need for more Linux training, especially in Asia. The data also jibes with Randstad Technologies manager Chris Mader’s suggestion that a huge opportunity awaits IT staffing agencies in Asia.
This data just scratches the surface of emerging trends in Linux enterprise use. For more insight and information on enterprise Linux we recommend attending the Enterprise End User Summit April 30 - May 1 in New York. The event is also an opportunity to meet other users such as Chicago Mercantile Exchange Group (see the video, below) that can help illuminate other development opportunities. For opportunities specific to the Asia/Pac markets, check out the LinuxCon Japan agenda. This event takes place June 6-8 in Yokohama.
Manage Your Database with Adminer
Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier - Thu, 19 Apr 2012 16:44:18 +0100
If you're looking for a simple way to manage your database effectively, you might want to have a look at Adminer. It's simple to install, supports multiple databases, and has a number of features you don't find in phpMyAdmin.
Physical Memory Analysis with the LiME Linux Memory Extractor
Rikki Endsley - Wed, 18 Apr 2012 16:43:34 +0100
The LiME Loadable Kernel Module allows digital investigators to perform physical memory analysis on Linux and Linux-based devices such as Android smartphones. LiME could capture currently running and previously terminated apps, for example, and the IP addresses of other devices to which it has connected. In this Linux.com interview, Joe Sylve, a Senior Security Researcher at Digital Forensics Solutions, explains what LiME is and how it works.
Open cloud top stories of the week
Libby Clark - Wed, 18 Apr 2012 16:15:56 +0100
With the OpenStack Folsom Design Summit happening this week, much of the open cloud news has revolved around OpenStack's growing list of partners and analysis of the open source platform's role in the overall cloud ecosystem. Here are six stories featuring OpenStack, its partners and its prospects.
NOTE: This round-up of open cloud headlines is a new weekly feature on Linux.com. What were your top open cloud stories of the past week? Please let us know in the comments, below, or email editor Libby Clark, lclark (at) linuxfoundation.org.
NEWS:
Rackspace launches new OpenStack based cloud portfolio, IT World The new Rackspace Cloud includes "cloud servers, databases, block storage, networks, and monitoring, as well as a new control panel." It's more scaleable than the company's current platform and will eventually form the basis of Rackspace public cloud offerings.
Where enterprise enemies hug, NYTimes Bits Blog OpenStack has united fierce competitors such as IBM, HP, Dell and Intel against Amazon Web Services. These 'frenemies' will have to distinguish themselves beyond the software to provide custom applications and services at low cost.
Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier - Tue, 17 Apr 2012 18:22:19 +0100
There's a new Linux Mint in town, and something new has been added. Specifically, Mint's Cinnamon desktop is now part of Linux Mint's Debian Edition (LMDE). Mint giveth, and Mint taketh away. The 201204 LMDE release also says goodbye to GNOME 2.x, though users do have a transition plan one way or another.
KDE4 Activities for Fast Efficient Workflow
Carla Schroder - Mon, 16 Apr 2012 16:16:05 +0100
KDE4 Activities are misunderstood, which is unfortunate because they are powerful, fast tools for organizing complex workflows. So what's the point, who needs them, and how do you use them?
Microsoft fields tough questions about open culture at the company
Libby Clark - Fri, 13 Apr 2012 22:32:26 +0100
A flurry of press coverage came with the news two weeks ago that for the first time Microsoft had made the top-20 list in the Linux Foundation’s annual development report on top contributors to the Linux kernel.
The announcement generated an audible buzz at the Collaboration Summit as well, where Microsoft engineers K.Y. Srinivasan and Tom Hanrahan presented “Microsoft’s journey to the Linux kernel.” They gave a technical talk, but much of the discussion revolved around Microsoft’s noticeable shift toward open source. And the pair fielded an intense round of questions from attendees, including kernel developers Greg Kroah-Hartman and James Bottomley.
Hanrahan began by asserting that Microsoft hadn’t done anything special to deserve the press attention. It was “just another company that decided to go down the path of contributing,” he said.
But the discussion opened wide when Kroah-Hartman didn’t accept that answer. To be fair, he said, Microsoft isn’t like every other company because it’s been “so anti-Linux.”
That attitude has been slowly changing within Microsoft, Hanrahan said, driven by customer demand for Linux integration. In fact, the biggest challenge Microsoft faced in the development process wasn’t resistance to Linux, but internal pressure to meet release deadlines. The Hyper-V team quickly learned that the open source community isn’t concerned as much with a company’s internal schedule but rather, with the quality of the code.
Hyper-V has benefited enormously from that extensive community exchange. Six Hyper-V drivers have now emerged from the kernel staging tree process with significant stability and performance improvements that expand what the drivers are capable of doing, Hanrahan said. And that was just the first phase of Microsoft’s work on Hyper-V.
The press attention and the obvious improvements to Hyper-V have also started to shift Microsoft’s internal culture to be more open and collaborative, Srinivasan said.
Has it also then, Bottomley asked, changed the way the Hyper-V group works to reflect a “more iterative feedback model?” And perhaps that model is creeping into other areas of the company?
“I’m not sure we’re there yet. But your feedback is important to help fix issues in a way that will help all operating systems on Hyper-V,” Srinivasan said. “We learned the hard way how best to deal with community comments and I suspect other companies have similar issues when they start working with open source.”
Overall, the presenters said, the community has been extremely helpful and welcoming throughout the past four years.
Said Srinivasan in conclusion: "Our goal is to make Linux a first-class citizen on Hyper-V."
Miss our Collaboration or Legal Summits? Here are some resources
Last week, we had our biggest turn-out ever for our Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit and our Legal Summit held immediately before. Collab has come a long way since the first meeting in 2007 at the Googleplex. While some of the issues and players have changed at heart the result is the same: a cross-section of people from the industry and community who may otherwise not meet collaborating together. We have assembled slides and videos from the week so if you weren't able to join us, please enjoy. I especially enjoyed Feargal O'Sullivan from NYSE's talk on OpenMama, the legal track on...
Gaming Freedom with Liberated Pixel Cup Contest
Rikki Endsley - Thu, 12 Apr 2012 19:44:57 +0100
The Creative Commons, Free Software Foundation, and OpenGameArt have joined forces to organize a free culture licensed artwork and software game competition. Cash prizes will be awarded to individuals and teams in art and code contribution categories.
Exclusive: Zipwhip to open source ‘Textspresso’ machine and release cloud texting for Ubuntu
Libby Clark - Thu, 12 Apr 2012 18:28:26 +0100
It’s a pretty nice dream. On your morning commute, you send a text message to the office espresso machine with your order for a double Americano and the warm mug is waiting when you get in.
For Seattle-based cloud texting company Zipwhip, the dream is reality. Its engineers custom-built an espresso machine that takes orders via SMS using their own cloud messaging application. (Watch the video, it’s pretty sweet.)
To make this dream perfect, though, it’s got to be built with Linux. So we wanted to know: what’s the underlying technology?
Zipwhip CEO John Lauer quickly and enthusiastically responded, “we couldn’t survive without Linux.”
While the “Textspresso” machine isn’t for sale, it operates entirely on Java code and could easily be built with a Linux box, Lauer said. Zipwhip plans to open source the entire application and release circuit designs with Arduino code so you can build your own, he said.
But really, open source coffee serves as a nice demo for their true product, the Zipwhip Android app, which runs on a whole suite of Linux-based products.
Zipwhip sends text messages to and from your desktop or tablet – fully synchronized with your phone to delete messages or mark them as read – via the cloud. The four-year-old company now runs 150 virtual machines across three datacenters that handle nearly a billion text messages each month.
Zipwhip is available now on Mac OS and Windows and the Linux app will be available in three weeks. Here’s an exclusive sneak peak at the Ubuntu application.
“We’re very proud of this, it lets you get your text messages popping up right on Ubuntu,” Lauer said. "We're huge proponents of the Linux community."
When a text message hits your Android phone, it also hits your desktop with a text bubble.
When you click reply, you get to type an inline message and hit Ctrl+Enter on your keyboard to quickly fire off the response.
The Zipwhip app runs in the notification area of your Ubuntu desktop—the same place apps like Skype run.
When you first install the app you have to login. If you have not created a Zipwhip account or installed the Zipwhip app on your Android phone, you can click register to do so.
Five ways to rev up Linux for the car industry
Rudolf J Streif - Wed, 11 Apr 2012 16:25:24 +0100
Linux is already being adopted by an increasing number of car makers such as GM and Jaguar predominantly for in-vehicle infotainment systems. But much work remains to ensure that Linux is automotive-grade. In this article we will discuss the opportunities for Linux in vehicles and the five requirements that need to be addressed to bring it up to speed.
Where does Linux fit into a car?
Today there can be over 100 electronic control modules (ECU) in a car performing a myriad of functions to assist the driver and provide comfort and convenience to the passengers. Anti-lock brakes and airbags; electronic climate control; central locking and unlocking systems; satellite navigation; in-vehicle infotainment systems. The list of features seems to be endless. But where does Linux fit into this picture? Not everywhere. Many of these modules perform a small range of very specific tasks in a constraint environment for which a rather heavyweight general purpose operating system such as Linux is not a good fit. Examples are engine management, airbag control, anti-lock brakes, automatic gearbox etc. These will not benefit from features such as memory management, multitasking, multi-core and multi-cpu support and more that the Linux kernel offers.
However, there is one component in a modern car that seems to be predestined for Linux: the head unit. Formerly just a simple control for the car stereo, the head unit has evolved into a universal command center providing a unified user interface for entertainment, climate control, communication, navigation and more. It commonly features a color LCD display which can include touch capability for interaction but can also be controlled via wheels and knobs integrated in the center console or buttons placed in the steering wheel at the driver's fingertips and increasingly through natural speech.
Because the head unit has to integrate and perform a range of tasks and often interrupts one task to carry out another it could greatly benefit from Linux. And indeed this is where car makers today are looking to deploy Linux. Below are five requirements that need to be addressed for Linux to meet the automotive grade needs of electronic control modules.
(Note: Linux is also a good fit for is a wide number of systems and services that fall under the umbrella term telematics. These form the core of the connected car: automated emergency call with location flagging, remote vehicle security and tracking, real-time traffic information, location-based services, concierge services, payment services for toll roads and parking, remote diagnostics and repair, breakdown prevention and maintenance scheduling, live audio-visual content and video-on-demand, and many more. All of the telematics systems and services will not only require an in-vehicle component but also infrastructure components. More great opportunities for Linux, although outside the scope of this article.)
5 ways to bring Linux up to speed
1. Powerplay
More ECUs in a car inevitably means increased consumption of electric power. But because there is considerable investment in the current electronic architecture, energy conservation to stay within the confines of the current 14.2 V system is the mandate. ECUs must reduce the peak and average power consumption during operation as well as their standby draw by dropping into a completely passive mode, waking up when they are needed and then returning to a dormant state. Reducing the total number of ECUs by integrating their functions into one or taking advantage of multi-core CPUs is another approach.
In electric vehicles the power challenges are magnified because all the power has to be provided by the batteries: for propulsion as well as for heating, cooling and every electrically-powered device including brought-in media players, smartphones and other gadgets.
Power management is a relatively new discipline within Linux. Instrumentation allowing the Linux kernel to measure power consumption of hardware components and to control power usage by turning them off is necessary to meet the automotive, as well as mobile, power challenges.
2. On-demand Configuration and Adaptation
A vehicle's systems constantly change their mode of operation dependent on many external and internal factors. The electronic systems must be capable of dynamically reconfiguring themselves within milliseconds and without user interaction dependent on the situation and requirements.
Linux already provides a strong set of features with loadable kernel modules, udev and others. Other features may be required such as incrementally loadable kernel modules. For example, only the portion of a Bluetooth driver that handles the link management protocol (LMP) is loaded and once a connection is established the driver will load other portions according to the required Bluetooth profiles.
3. Startup, Shutdown and Loss of Power
Driver assist systems with audio-visual interfaces such as rear-view cameras, proximity sensor in the bumpers, etc., need to be ready and available within 2 to 3 seconds from starting the car. Vehicular communication buses must be initialized within as little as 50 ms from cold-starting the ECU.
Linux has made great progress in speeding up the boot process with systemd and other efforts, however, there is still more work necessary to accelerate system startup even more from various hardware states to meet all automotive requirements.
Behavior during shutdown and sudden loss of power are another area where designers of embedded systems need to take great care. At no time must an interrupted shutdown or a sudden loss of power leave the system in a state from which it cannot recover.
4. Remote Software Updates
At first glance this seems like an easy problem to solve. Any Linux system can update kernel and packages over the network. However, for embedded and automotive systems things are quite different from regular computers. Updates may need to be downloaded via cellular data networks as cars are typically not connected to wired or wireless data networks.
Bandwidth is very limited and quality-of-service may greatly vary. Updates need to be carried out transparently for the user since the user cannot or should not have to monitor the process. Certain vehicle states may prevent installing software or rebooting the ECU. In case of an error the system must be able to roll back an update autonomously and return to the previous state.
Linux package managers are a good start but they typically update the entire package, which very often is not necessary if only a few files of the package has changed. Differential or delta package updates could be a solution. Verification of update package integrity is a must. Checksums are pretty much standard and help discover accidental corruption but are no protection from malicious activity.
5. Caution! Malware Ahead!
As the connected car is becoming a reality so will remote attacks on its systems.Wireless and web-based systems for vehicle control such as unlocking doors, starting/stopping the engine, or immobilization intended as a theft deterrent could be manipulated to compromise cars belonging to unsuspecting owners.
If not secured, over-the-air software update mechanisms could be used to infiltrate vehicle systems with malware potentially compromising not only privacy but also safety and health of passengers.
To become automotive-grade Linux will need to implement additional security mechanisms throughout the system. That starts with secure bootloaders, software components signed with hardware keys, hardware security support in form of cryptographic modules, etc.
DoudouLinux: A Starter Distro Where Baby Linux Gurus are Born
Carla Schroder - Wed, 11 Apr 2012 14:38:03 +0100
Where do Linux gurus come from? From baby newbies. How do baby newbies become gurus? One good way is with the help of the best child- and beginner-oriented distribution, DoudouLinux.
Into the Mosh Pit: A Mobile Shell Replacement for SSH
Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier - Tue, 10 Apr 2012 18:35:41 +0100
SSH is a wonderful thing, but it doesn't deal very well with today's mobile workers. When dealing with iffy Wi-Fi connections, moving around from coffeeshop to home office, or just putting your laptop to sleep for a few minutes, you lose your SSH connection. If you need a persistent connection, take a look at Mosh.
Tizen Developer Conference Agenda Announced
Brian Warner - Tue, 10 Apr 2012 18:26:14 +0100
HTML5 app developers and device makers, this conference is for you!
The Tizen project just posted the schedule of events for the first Tizen Developer Conference, which will be held in San Francisco on May 7-9, 2012. The agenda includes sessions that cover the Tizen platform itself, application development, and the community, with a special track for In-Vehicle Infotainment, or IVI.
Tizen Platform Tracks
There will be two parallel tracks on the Tizen Platform. The "Platform Introductory" track will discuss the Tizen architecture, development tools, web runtime, and various frameworks, including security, applications, UI, and graphics. It will also include talks on telephony, the Bluetooth stack, and location services.
The "Platform Advanced" track will discuss the need for standard accessibility APIs in Tizen, mobile text input challenges, details of the Tizen emulator, practical lessons in application development, optimizing services for systemd, using the Web API test suite, WebKit2/EFL, OBS, and a deep dive into DRM (Direct Rendering Manager) in the Tizen kernel.
Tizen Application Development Tracks
There will also be two tracks on application development in Tizen.
The "Application Introductory" track will cover the WebAPIs, WebCL for hardware acceleration, the Web UI framework, push notifications, and rich application development in HTML5 including touch input, gaming, and the use of . It will also include a session that helps developers determine which parts of the Tizen stack should be used when building or porting applications.
The "Application Advanced" track will focus on best practices when designing applications for low power, performance, security, beauty, and portability, and will include deep dives into cloud storage and podcasting HTML5 applications.
Community and Upcoming Technologies Track
Sessions in the "Project & Community / Upcoming Technologies" track will cover the state of the Tizen community, how to engage with open source projects, and discussions of Wayland, oFono, and secure NFC applications.
In-Vehicle Infotainment Track
Finally, the IVI track held on day two will include talks on the potential of Tizen in the automotive industry, the Tizen IVI architecture, security, and HTML5 application development for IVI.
As you can see, the conference focus is on the technologies in and around the Tizen platform, as well as best practices for HTML5 application development. If you are planning to build Tizen devices or write applications for the platform, this conference is definitely for you.
Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier - Mon, 09 Apr 2012 16:31:39 +0100
The next WordPress release is just around the corner, and the first beta came out on April 5th. If you're a WordPress user, or thinking about using WordPress in the near future, here's what you have to look forward to.
That's a Wrap: 2012 Linux Foundation Collab Summit Pictures
Jennifer Cloer - Fri, 06 Apr 2012 22:09:08 +0100
{lfnews}The day after one of The Linux Foundation events is always a bit like the day after a really great party: you're exhausted but in a good way. You're recounting all the great conversations you had and looking forward to the next time you get to see everyone again (perhaps, Enterprise End User Summit, LinuxCon Japan and/or LinuxCon North America).
To help get you through to the next time, and for those of you who are waiting to see everyone and collaborate in person again, here is another slideshow with some new pictures from The Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit 2012.
Five favorite Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit sessions
Libby Clark - Fri, 06 Apr 2012 18:17:53 +0100
As the annual Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit was wrapping up yesterday in San Francisco, we asked a few attendees to weigh in on their favorite sessions.
The invitation-only event brought together 430 Linux kernel developers, Linux Foundation members and other Linux community insiders for keynote talks, work sessions, training, project updates, industry trends and networking.
On day one, attendees heard seven keynotes on a variety of subjects from Facebook’s Open Compute Project, to upcoming Linux kernel updates and trends in cloud computing. The next two days were devoted to technical, legal and project-based sessions. (See the full schedule on the Linux Foundation events website.)
What was your favorite session at Collaboration Summit 2012?
"Mine! (Laughs) Removing stop machine from the tracing infrastructure. I got a lot of really good feedback. But really, the best session is the hallway track. Between sessions you find people and it’s when you get the most work done. Usually you get to sit people down and start hashing things out. People come from all over the world. It was weird, last night in the bar I was sitting there talking with eight developers, and I was the only American there." - Steven Rostedt, real-time Linux kernel maintainer at Red Hat (left).
"UEFI. It’s pretty entertaining. I’m looking forward to fireworks. This conference mostly isn’t contentious at all, which is quite nice. People get along. They’re friendly, which you don’t usually see at conferences. We get together and argue. We need to. But the UEFI stuff is probably going to be contentious. We’ve had nothing but issues for the last year. If everything is magically resolved, that will be nice. But I expect fireworks." - Adam Conrad, Canonical (right).
"The Yocto project sessions. I have been involved with the parent project for 8 years. What we did in the Yocto session was clear up all the confusion for new users. We explained how it works and how it was designed. So it was really useful." - Koen Kooi, software engineer, CircuitCo, which manufactures the BeagleBoard(not pictured).
"On the first day there was a session on the near future of the kernel, it’s a panel discussion of top Linux developers. Every year it’s really interesting and this year it was really great, as usual, seeing the top guns interacting the way they do with a really great sense of humor. You get an idea of where things are headed next year.
It’s interesting to see the people who end up at the top. You might think that, because they all used to be super coders and a lot of them still write a lot of code, you could actually wind up with a lot of antisocial people. But none of them really are that way. So it’s really great to see them in person being really funny all the time." - Greg Lindahl, CTO, Blekko search engine (left).
"Microsoft was my favorite presentation. It takes a lot of guts to be two guys from Microsoft showing up at a major Linux conference and getting up there to talk about how their company is embracing working with Linux. That is just awesome.
And now that they’re getting out of the staging tree and getting Windows Hyper-V support into Linux that’s what you want to see. You want to see everybody working together. It’s collaboration.
We’ve all grown up and gotten to the point where bashing Microsoft used to be fun. I think it still is fun but I think we’ve tempered that with a bit more pragmatism. We understand that open source can be on a Windows platform, there’s not just Linux or the kernel. There’s a lot of open source software out there and if we work together we can all win." - Jon Masters, prinicipal software engineer, Red Hat (right).
Weekend Project: Bug Out with Entomologist
Nathan Willis - Fri, 06 Apr 2012 16:16:16 +0100
Bug trackers are great. They are a critical tool for open source development – as a collaboration medium for teams, as a way for projects to communicate back-and-forth with users, and as an organizational tools for individual developers. But as open source software spreads further and further, one inevitably finds oneself with a bit of a Web 2.0 problem – every major project uses its own, separate bug tracker. The more projects you're involved with, the easier it is for information to get lost among all the clutter and noise. That's where Entomologist comes in, providing one interface for multiple bug-tracking systems, whether you are a developer managing your code or a user following progress.
ClearOS,the Missing Link LAN Server
Carla Schroder - Thu, 05 Apr 2012 18:28:26 +0100
There is a recurring lament that there are no Linux distributions equivalent to Windows Small Business Server, no nicely-integrated Linux LAN server that doesn't need a lot of tweaking. But there is one that is billed as a drop-in replacement for SBS, and that's ClearOS.
Counting Contributions: Who Wrote Linux 3.2?
Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier - Wed, 04 Apr 2012 18:23:23 +0100
Once again, it's time to take stock of the contributions to the Linux kernel. The Linux Foundation has released another report on the speed of Linux kernel development, as well as who's doing the work and what companies are sponsoring development. Since tracking has began, nearly 8,000 developers from just shy of 800 companies have contributed to the kernel.
Today, we are releasing a new template that will help companies manage the flow of data through the compliance process.
License compliance best practices require complete and accurate information about FOSS components being incorporated into the software supply chain. This requires a continual focus on ensuring the right information is collected and archived when a new FOSS component is to be introduced into a software product, from initial request to final shipment.
To help with this process we've just published a template for collecting information about a FOSS component and its usage, so that when a request is made to the company's internal open source review board, it can be easily and thoroughly evaluated. This template will also help development organizations spend less time re-submitting missing data, and a standardized format can accelerate the approval process.
{lfnews}The morning keynote presenters were super insightful here at The Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit. Useful ideas were shared that will be topics of further collaboration over the next couple of days. OpenMAMA, Open Compute, Tizen and Linux kernel development were among the topics discussed today. Here's a short slideshow with some great pictures of our speakers.
Facebook’s Open Compute Project Seeks New Ideas for Efficient Datacenters
Libby Clark - Tue, 03 Apr 2012 19:40:10 +0100
When a Facebook user ‘likes’ something, adds a friend or uploads a photo gallery, he doesn’t necessarily think of what goes on at the back end. That ever-mounting pile of information collected each second from millions of users presents a significant challenge to efficient data storage and management - not to mention a potentially daunting financial and environmental cost.
To address these issues, Facebook engineers have designed their own custom servers and datacenters that cut costs 24 percent and energy use by 38 percent compared with traditional commercially available infrastructure, said Amir Michael, leader of Facebook’s storage hardware team. And the company believes even more savings are possible through the collaborative development process, he said.
With the Open Compute Project, Facebook is now sharing its design specifications and seeking input and ideas from the engineering community in an effort to boost those savings.
“It’s time we stop thinking about this type of infrastructure as proprietary,” Michael said in his keynote talk Tuesday at the Linux Collaboration Summit in San Francisco. “Let’s build this together.”
Open source hardware presents some unique challenges compared with open source software because it requires a factory for product development, Michael said. But Open Compute does model the open source software development process, maintaining a mailing list and holding developer summits. An incubation committee forms projects, creates a charter and then an advisory board member sponsors the project to make sure there’s momentum and a deliverable behind it.
"It’s not just about ideas... we actually wanted to build things and take designs to actual hardware," Michael said.
Now about a year old, Open Compute has an impressive list of contributors, including Dell, Mellanox Technologies and Cloudera. But they’re looking for more partners to advance the project.
The project’s top priority is increased efficiency, in part by reducing server complexity. The things that differentiate a Dell from an HP server “aren’t really innovation,” Michael said. Getting rid of those peripheral features creates operational efficiency.
Scalability is also important in considering a project's potential. Open Compute aims to build hardware for large-scale datacenter deployments.
The best way to get involved, Michael said, is to become a member and join one of Open Compute’s six working groups focused on storage, interoperability, systems management, datacenter design, motherboards or power infrastructure.
The Open Compute Foundation is structured so that no single vendor has outsized influence on the direction of the project and no member dues are collected, he said. Instead, the Open Compute Summit serves as a fundraiser for their efforts. Interested engineers are encouraged to attend the upcoming summit, set for May 2-3 in San Antonio.
When you work for the Linux Foundation you get a lot of questions on just how Linux is built. Given the massive scale of the development and ubiquity of Linux today, some of us in the community might think everyone understands how the largest collaborative project in computing works. How you submit a patch. How maintainers work with Linux creator Linus Torvalds. But because of Linux's unprecedented growth in mobile, embedded and cloud computing, among other areas, new companies and developers are looking to participate. More than ever before, actually. In our "Who Writes Linux" report (http://go.linuxfoundation.org/who-writes-linux-2012) published today at The Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit (https://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/collaboration-summit), we find that more than 7800 individuals from about 800 companies have contributed to the Linux kernel since 2005 and that the rate of development continues to accelerate. The...
How Linux Talks to the Internet of Things: A Look at IEEE 802.15.4
Nathan Willis - Tue, 03 Apr 2012 13:29:52 +0100
If you pay much attention to the futurists on the Web these days, no doubt you're familiar with the term "Internet Of Things." It may be yet-another-buzzword, but the central concept is quite real: the spread of low power, Internet-connected devices that use wireless networks to communicate with our PCs and servers. After all, you don't need a computer in your water heater or electric meter: you just need a sensor, and way to read it remotely. Linux will be a major player in this space, but most developers still aren't familiar with the network standards that make it work, like IEEE 802.15.4.
GNOME 3.4: Are We There Yet?
Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier - Mon, 02 Apr 2012 14:54:45 +0100
The GNOME Project has dropped another update to the GNOME 3 platform, just a year after the first release of GNOME 3. The second update of GNOME 3 offers a few new features, applications, and improvements that might make it worth a second look for GNOME traditionalists.
Archiving Images with an Open Source Scanning Robot
Rikki Endsley - Fri, 30 Mar 2012 18:37:06 +0100
Project Gado is developing an inexpensive, open source, autonomous archival scanning robot. The goal? To create a tool that will allow small archives and museums digitize holdings at a low cost and help preserve important documents and pictures. In the process of developing the Gado, the ambitious project is also helping preserve the Afro-American Newspapers photo collection.
Wrangling Data Vizualization with Gnuplot 4.6
Nathan Willis - Thu, 29 Mar 2012 18:51:12 +0100
Let's face it: everybody likes having data, but nobody likes staring at a column of numbers. If you cannot sculpt your raw data into a visualization that either illuminates the problem or helps you find the solution, then you're only halfway done. Luckily there are tools like Gnuplot available, which allow you to manually or automatically generate high-quality visual representations of your data sets. The new release, 4.6, adds some important features from a mathematical standpoint — and just as importantly, many updates to the output framework, including support for generating interactive HTML5 displays.
What Red Hat Has Done is Worth So Much More Than a Billion
Jim Zemlin - Wed, 28 Mar 2012 19:28:36 +0100
Red Hat is widely expected to crack a billion dollars in revenue in today’s earning call. This achievement will finally put to bed the argument that "nobody can make money with open source." I want to congratulate Red Hat for this incredible achievement. However, I would also like to use this occasion to show that there is significantly more at play here. It isn't just the billion dollars Red Hat is making with open source; there are many more reasons why Linux and open source are fundamental building blocks of the future:
* Red Hat will today pass a billion dollars in revenue.
* The collective investment in Linux is $10billion - freely available to you.
* Billions of users a day use Linux systems in everything from their TV, to their ATM machine to the cell phone to the servers powering the cloud. B
* Billions of dollars are transacted on Linux systems running every major financial exchange EVERY day.
* The fastest Linux computer does 10 quadrillion operations a second (that is a thousand billion or a billiard in long scale countries).
* Facebook used Linux to build a company forecast to be worth one hundred billion dollars.
Credit where credit is due: Red Hat has worked extremely hard and extremely smart to leverage open source to make a billion dollars. Here at the Linux Foundation, we work with them everyday and I am continually impressed by their focus, their management and their consistent commitment to working upstream.
But even more significant to Red Hat's future prospects is the virtuous cycle that they now participate in. Platform economics have always been dominated by network effects. More users beget more applications, which beget more users and so on. This has resulted in great scale for particular companies who lock people into their network effect but has arguably not resulted in great innovation. Red Hat however, benefits from a different kind of network effect. A network effect centered around innovation.
Since Linux has grown, so have the benefits Red Hat receives (and gives to others). When Facebook contributes code to make their data centers more efficient, Red Hat benefits; when Red Hat contributes code to improve file systems, mobile device makers benefit; when mobile device makers contribute code to improve power consumption, super computer cooling costs go down; when super computer users contribute code to make Linux faster, Wall St. benefits with faster trading systems -- and so on and so forth. So you can see that the positive feedback loop that is represented in the billions of figures above shows no signs of slowing down. Congratulations to Red Hat but also to all Linux users and ecosystem members who participate in this virtuous circle.
How to Build an In-Vehicle Infotainment System with Drupal
Rikki Endsley - Wed, 28 Mar 2012 17:28:44 +0100
The "World's First DrupalCar," a 2011 Camaro, was unveiled at DrupalCon Denver. We don't look under the hood, but we do get hands on with the hardware and software inside this proof-of-concept IVI system.
Colllaboration Works, Even on Open Source License Compliance
Open compliance has become a bigger area of emphasis in the Linux and open source communities as the collaborative development model and software have become widely adopted. The topic is one in which we at The Linux Foundation receive many requests for resource and more information. As part of our series of Q&As with the Summit's keynote speakers, we asked Phil a few questions about the upcoming panel and the state of open source license compliance.
You will be moderating a keynote panel at The Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit. Can you give us a teaser about what we can expect from the group?
Odence: Everyone on the panel represents a company dependent on a software supply chain and is passionate about achieving efficiency and license compliance. Their organizations are unique, so each has their own perspective. It will be a great combination of conceptual agreement and differing perspectives.
How has the global supply chain changed in recent years and how is this impacting open source license compliance?
Odence: Two things: 1) Software has gone from from being developed within four walls to across complex supply chains, and; 2) the use of open source has ramped dramatically. Companies assembling software don't have very good upstream visibility and at the same time know there's lots of open source in the code and therefore potentially many license requirements with which they need to comply.
What are some of the key challenges companies still face with regards to open source licenses and compliance? What is being done to address them?
Odence: It's a lot of work and it tends to be redundant, i.e. repeated down the supply chain. It's that frustration that has lead a number of companies to come together to work on SPDX. There are other components to the answer—polices, processes, eduction, tooling—but SPDX is a keystone.
Can you tell us more about SPDX and how it works?
Odence: It conceptually simple: A common way to represent what's in a software package and the associated license. There are devilish details, but the idea is that if everyone in a supply chain is sharing information in this way, it makes it much easier and cheaper to know what's in the software and what the licenses are. The SPDX workgroup has really advanced work on how to ease open source license compliance. Can you tell us how the group was able to accomplish so much? Companies and community members can learn a lot from others about best practices on how to collaborate.
Odence: While the group is not developing software per se, from the outset we've run ourselves like an open source project without a lot of rules, hierarchy, structure or budget. Everyone involved is open source savvy so we can tell new participants, "We run like an open source project," and they get it. The support of The Linux Foundation was helpful in initially assembling a critical mass, and on a ongoing basis, the infrastructure and events have provided us logical gathering opportunities and places. I'm not sure we'd ever actually see each other without Linux events.
What's next for the SPDX group?
Odence: Each of our three teams has a clear, going forward focus. The Business Team needs to drive broader adoption across, as well as up and down supply chains. The Technical Team wrestles with evolving the spec to support hierarchy in an intuitive and simple way. The Legal Team has a real gem in the standard license list we developed; they are polishing that up and defining a process to expand it.
Literally our next step after the Collaboration Summit is the Forum we are running in San Jose on Friday, April 6. We welcome any locals who want an in-depth introduction to join us.
Google Summer of Code: Contribute to Open Source, Make Money
Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier - Tue, 27 Mar 2012 17:49:33 +0100
If you're a post-secondary student, 18 years or older, you have a golden opportunity this Summer. Contribute to an open source project that you care about, and get paid to do it. Once again, it's Google Summer of Code (GSoC) time, and open source organizations are beating the bushes to find the best ideas and applicants.
openSUSE Tumbleweed status for the week of March 26, 2012
Greg KH - Mon, 26 Mar 2012 20:44:00 +0100
It's been about a year since I did a status report of what's going on in the openSUSE:Tumbleweed repo, let me know if you find this actually useful or not so that I can determine if I should keep it up. As everyone knows, Tumbleweed is running on top of openSUSE:12.1, the transition to 12.1 was rocky for some people who thought that Tumbleweed was somehow a "full" distro, and not just an add-on on top of a stable openSUSE release. To make things easier for future updates of the base openSUSE release, please point to the "current" repo, not the explicitly numbers repo. For more details...
Disorganized? Get Tracks on Linux
Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier - Mon, 26 Mar 2012 19:48:01 +0100
Feeling a bit disorganized? Looking to take control of your projects? Take a look at Tracks, an open source Web-based application built with Ruby on Rails. Tracks can help you get organized and Get Things Done (GTD) in no time.
Scientific Linux, the Great Distro With the Wrong Name
Carla Schroder - Fri, 23 Mar 2012 17:21:22 +0100
Scientific Linux is an unknown gem, one of the best Red Hat Enterprise Linux clones. The name works against it because it's not for scientists; rather it's maintained by science organizations. Let's kick the tires on the latest release and see what makes it special.
The Cloud, KVM and NYSE Star at Our Upcoming Enterprise End User Summit
Amanda McPherson - Thu, 22 Mar 2012 22:55:45 +0100
Today I am happy to announce the program and speakers for The Linux Foundation's Enterprise End User Summit (https://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/enterprise-end-user-summit). This is one of our most unique events, bringing together the biggest and most technically advanced Linux users with the vendor and Linux kernel communities. And, this year's event is really special for a variety of reasons: first, we learned earlier this year from our annual enterprise end user trends survey and report (http://www.linuxfoundation.org/publications/linux-foundation/linux-adopt...) that the world's largest companies are adding more Linux over the next 12 months to support cloud computing and "Big Data." There is much to discuss and work to advance in these areas at this year's Summit. Second, we're meeting at the office of NYSE Technologies, and an amazing party is...
The Compiler That Changed the World Turns 25
Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier - Thu, 22 Mar 2012 19:06:47 +0100
Last year, Linux celebrated its 20th anniversary. The kernel that Linus Torvalds started as a hobby project helped the Internet bloom, challenged proprietary operating system dominance, and powers hundreds of millions of devices. From hacker toys like the dirt-cheap Raspberry Pi to most of the Top 500 Supercomputers, Linux dominates the computing industry. But it wouldn't have been possible without GCC, which turns 25 today.
Bodhi Linux, the Beautiful Configurable Lightweight Linux
Carla Schroder - Wed, 21 Mar 2012 19:20:30 +0100
Bodhi Linux is gorgeous, functional, and very customizable. It just so happens that's what grumpy old Linux nerds like me think Linux is always supposed to be. Let's take this Linux newcomer for a spin and learn what sets it apart from the zillions of other Linux distributions.
What's New in Linux 3.3?
Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier - Tue, 20 Mar 2012 18:54:29 +0100
Sunday, Linus Torvalds released the 3.3 Linux kernel. In the latest installment of the continuing saga of kernel development, we've got more progress towards Android in the kernel, EFI boot support, Open vSwitch, and improvements that should help with the problem of Bufferbloat.
Greg KH Readies for Collaboration Summit, Talks Raspberry Pi
Jennifer Cloer - Tue, 20 Mar 2012 17:18:50 +0100
Linux kernel maintainer and Linux Foundation Fellow Greg Kroah-Hartman will be moderating the highly-anticipated Linux kernel panel at the Collaboration Summit in a couple short weeks. He was generous enough to take a few moments recently to answer some questions about what we might hear from the Linux kernel panel, as well as some details on his recent work and projects. Oh, and we couldn't resist asking him about the new Raspberry Pi.
You will be moderating the Linux Kernel panel at the upcoming Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit. These are big attractions for attendees. What do you anticipate will be on the kernel panel's mind during that first week in April?
Kroah-Hartman: Odds are we will all be relaxing after the big merge window for the 3.4-rc1 kernel. Also, the Filesystem and Memory management meetings will have just happened, so lots of good ideas will have come out of that.
This panel moderation role comes after two Q&A-style keynote sessions with Linus last year to celebrate 20 years of Linux. How does moderating a panel of developers differ from interviewing Linus on stage?
Kroah-Hartman: I will need to bring more than just one bottle of whisky :)
Seriously, it's much the same, but instead of just one person answering questions, there are three different viewpoints being offered, which can result in the conversation leading places you never expect. An example of this would be the kernel panel that happened last year at LinuxCon Japan, where the developers on stage got into a big technical argument with the kernel developers in the audience, much to the amusement of the rest of the audience. If done well, it can show the range of ideas the the kernel developer community has, and how while we don't always agree with each other, we work together to create something that works well for everyone.
You recently released Linux kernel 2.6.32.58 but cautioned that you would no longer be maintaining version 2.6.32 and recommended folks switch to Linux 3.0. Is there anything else you'd like to say about people moving to Linux 3.0?
Kroah-Hartman: For a longer discussion on the history of the 2.6.32 kernel, please see the article I posted recently. Almost no end user will be building their own kernel and need to know the differences here; their distro handles this for them automatically. But, for the technical user, they know how to build their own kernels, and moving to the 3.0 kernel release should provide no problem at all. If it does, please contact the kernel developers on the linux-kernel mailing list with their problems and we will be glad to work through it with them.
Kroah-Hartman: There's nothing new going on with the Device Driver project other than we are continuing to create drivers for companies that ask for them. I know of at least two new drivers going into the 3.4 kernel release that came from this process, and if any company has a need for a Linux driver, they should contact us to make this happen.
LTSI is continuing forward as well. Our kernel tree is public, and starting to receive submissions for areas that users are asking for. I've been working with a number of different companies and groups after meeting with them at ELC 2012 to refine how LTSI can best work for their users. There will be a report at LinuxCon Japan 2012 in June about what is happening with LTSI since the last public report at ELC.
Have you seen the Raspberry Pi? Sold out in a day. Any chance you've gotten your hands on one? If so, what's your reaction?
Kroah-Hartman: I have not seen one in person, but will be trying to get one (I signed up for one as soon as it went on sale, but was too late.) It looks like a great project, much like the BeagleBone and Pandaboard, both of which I have here and use for kernel testing. Hopefully the Raspberry Pi developers can get their kernel patches into the mainline kernel.org release soon, so that it is easier for users to take advantage of their hardware.
A Peek Behind the Curtain at Puppet Labs
Rikki Endsley - Mon, 19 Mar 2012 16:10:04 +0100
In this interview, Luke Kanies, CEO and founder of Puppet Labs, explains why the Puppet configuration management tool is a huge hit with sys admins, and tells us what to expect next from the popular open source project.
Weekend Project: Take a Look at Wine 1.4
Nathan Willis - Fri, 16 Mar 2012 17:15:35 +0100
The Wine project has released stable version 1.4 of its Windows-compatibility service for Linux (and other non-Microsoft OSes), the culmination of 20 months' worth of development. The new release adds a host of new features, including new graphics, video, and audio subsystems, tighter integration with existing Linux, and improvements to 3D, font support, and scripting languages.
As Data Grows, So Grows Linux
Jim Zemlin - Thu, 15 Mar 2012 18:41:13 +0100
IDC recently announced its numbers for 2011 Q4 servers sales: overall server revenues are up for the year 5.8 percent, and shipments are up 4.2 percent. As The Reg reports, these shipment numbers are back to pre-recession levels.
What’s more interesting, though, is the trends that emerge from the very latest reporting quarter, Q4. Linux was the only operating system that saw a revenue increase in servers Q4, with a 2.2 percent rise. Windows lost 1.5 percent and Unix 10.7 percent.
IDC attributes some of that Linux success to its role in what the analyst firm calls “density-optimized” machines, which are really just white box servers, and are responsible for a lot of the growth in the server market. These machines have gained popularity in a space still squeezed on budget and that continues to be commoditized. But there are other factors at play for Linux’s success over its rivals.
Coming out of the recession, Linux is in a very different position than it was 10 years ago when we emerged from the last bubble. Today it's mature, tried, tested and supported by a global community that makes up the largest collaborative development project in the history of computing.
Our latest survey of the world’s largest enterprise Linux users found that Total Cost of Ownership, technical superiority and security were the top three drivers for Linux adoption. These points support Linux’s maturity and recent success. Everyone is running their data centers with Linux. Stock exchanges, supercomputers, transportation systems and much more are using Linux for mission-critical workloads.
Also helping Linux’s success here is the accelerated pace by which companies are migrating to the cloud. Long a buzzword, the cloud is getting real, right now. While there is still work to do for Linux and the cloud, there is no denying its dominant role in today’s biggest cloud companies: Amazon and Google to name just two.
The mass migration to cloud computing has been quickened due, in part, to the rising level of data: both the amount of data enterprises are dealing with but the also how fast that data is growing. IDC this week predicted that the “Big Data” business will be worth $16.9B in three years. There is a huge opportunity here for Linux vendors. Our Linux Adoption Trends report, shows that 72 percent of the world’s largest Linux users are planning to add more Linux servers in the next 12 months to support the rising level of data in the enterprise. Only 36 percent said they would be adding more Windows servers to support this trend.
The enterprise server market is a strong area for Linux, but it’s an incredibly competitive market. Together we’ll continue to advance Linux to win here. In fact, we’ll be meeting at the NYSE offices in April at our Annual Linux Foundation Enterprise End User Summit where some of the world’s largest companies will talk in depth about exactly the things I’ve touched on here.
Yet again we are seeing market winners are born from collaboration. And we have the numbers to back it up.
Can you give us a bit of a teaser on your keynote presentation and tell us how NYSE Technologies identified an opportunity to open source its messaging API and help create the OpenMAMA project?
O'Sullivan: We considered open sourcing our Middleware Agnostic Messaging API for a number of years before finally making it happen late last year. One of the major reasons to do so was to allow our community of users to help develop the additional middleware 'bridges' we wanted to support faster than we could on our own. Of course, we were concerned about losing control of the process and, quite frankly, about opening our revenue generating Market Data Platform to increased competition.
The change came around January 2011 when we first presented the idea to our Technical Advisory Group. We proposed it as part of our overall strategy of building a community around an open infrastructure platform with common standards for capital markets participants. The idea received unanimous support and a level of enthusiasm that took even us by surprise. What it told us is that the industry suffered from 'vendor lock-in' due to proprietary APIs, which stifle both competition and innovation, as well as increasing total cost of ownership.
OpenMAMA returns choice to the user, forcing vendors to compete on features and value, which is better for everyone.
What is your biggest lesson learned that you can share with others who might be considering open sourcing technology?
O'Sullivan: Our biggest lesson learned was not to try to go it alone! When we first engaged The Linux Foundation, we had little experience in open sourcing software. We quickly learned that for OpenMAMA to be successful it needed the neutrality and credibility of being a truly open source project. That isn't as simple as it sounds; had we chosen the wrong license, or hosted OpenMAMA on a server in one of our data centers, it would have seriously undermined the project. Without the benefit of The Linux Foundation's experience, we wouldn't have known any better until it was too late. What do you consider the advantages of open sourcing this technology?
O'Sullivan: OpenMAMA's true value lies in its agnostic architecture, which allows developers to code to a single API while enabling administrators to switch between supported middleware platforms to meet the requirements of the environment where the application is deployed. However, before being open sourced, MAMA only supported middleware platforms that made commercial sense for NYSE Technologies to develop. This meant leaving out other valuable middleware platforms because we didn't have the time or resources to support each one. Open sourcing unlocks the full potential of the API by giving control to the end users. Ultimately, OpenMAMA will make NYSE Technologies' clients happier and our products more functional. How is the OpenMAMA project doing? Can you give us some updates?
O'Sullivan: So far, the OpenMAMA project has demonstrated a level of success that even we are finding hard to believe. Our approach was to open the C portion of the API at the launch in October 2011 and then contribute the remaining functionality in April 2012. In parallel we formed the OpenMAMA Steering Committee comprised of users, vendors and direct competitors, to govern the project. This gives the committee time to form a cohesive group and set the direction of the project, while in parallel giving the technical working groups time to evaluate the code and decide what their priorities are for the roadmap. On April 30, when we contribute the final pieces of the API, and when everyone gathers for The Linux Foundation's Enterprise End User Summit (which we are hosting at the New York Stock Exchange this year), the community will be fully prepared to take this project forward.
We're definitely looking forward to visiting your space in April! Can you tell us more about your decision to host this year's Enterprise End User Summit and why the event is a priority for your organization?
O'Sullivan: We at NYSE Technologies have always been keen users of open source technology. Furthermore, it is well known that the entire capital markets community heavily depends on Linux and other open source initiatives. So we see this as the perfect venue to release the final pieces of the OpenMAMA stack and to continue advocating its value proposition to all interested participants.
Thunderbird 11 Released: Lots of Fixes, Frustratingly Few New Features
Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier - Wed, 14 Mar 2012 16:56:44 +0100
Though it gets much less attention than its browser sibling, Thunderbird is still plugging away. Since it's on the rapid release cycle, it's also pushing out releases pretty regularly, with fewer new features per release. With Thunderbird 11, it's a very short list of new goodies but a long list of fixes.
Patents, Legal Collaboration and our Legal Summit
Amanda McPherson - Tue, 13 Mar 2012 23:28:45 +0100
Unfortunately legal issues, specially patents lawsuits, are much in the news. From Yahoo suing Facebook to the ongoing battles surrounding Apple and other mobile device providers, my RSS and social media feeds seem to have more and more articles about legal issues everyday.
He writes: "I thought I was giving them a shield, but turns out I gave them a missile with my name permanently engraved on it." This case, among other similar ones, points out the need quite urgently for reform of our software patent system. When companies struggle, especially large ones, it's often easier to litigate than innovate.
But amid the patent wars there has been some good news. OIN last week announced they are expanding their patent pool to cover other important projects such as KVM, Git and others projects.
As SVN writes: "Patents owned by Open Invention Network are available royalty-free to any company, institution or individual that agrees not to assert its patents against the OIN’s broad Linux Definitions." Keith Bergelt of OIN will be speaking at our upcoming CollaborationSummit on this Linux definition. Keith will take people through the changes in the definitions, as well as the updating of the 1000s of packages already included in their coverage. This is important stuff and I'm very happy to feature Keith as a speaker.
We are continuing our active role in the legal landscape by marshaling the power of collaboration with our members. Before next month's Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, we will be holding our Linux Foundation Legal Summit, where counsels and attorneys from our members come together with our legal experts and others from around the industry to plot the best defense for Linux and free software. There is power in collaboration; certainly with software but also with legal issues. It's a core part of our mission to enable this legal collaboration and spear head programs, like our Open Compliance program, that simplify and improve legal matters in our community. And as mentioned above, we also have a track on legal and compliance issues at the Collaboration Summit. This year Bradley Kuhn was kind enough to assist me in creating the track and I'm happy to say we have a who's who of leaders in the open source legal industry.
We are featuring -- Aaron Williamson of the SFLC on the Evolving Form of Free Software Organization -- Bradley from the Software Freedom Conservancy on GPL Compliance -- Richard Fontana from REd Hat will talk about the Decline of the GPL and what to do about it -- Karen Sandler from the GNOME Foundation will talk about real world trademark management for free software projects
And on day one of Collaboration Summit we will have a keynote on the SPDX project, one of the best examples of collaborative legal issues. You can read details about full the schedule of Collab Summit.
I hope to see many of you there.
Can Linux Win in Cloud Computing?
Jennifer Cloer - Tue, 13 Mar 2012 20:15:20 +0100
Gerrit Huizenga is Cloud Architect at IBM (and fellow Portland-er) and will be speaking at the upcoming Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit in a keynote session titled "The Clouds Are Coming: Are We Ready?" Linux is often heralded as the platform for the cloud, but Huizenga warns that while it is in the best technical position to warrant this title, there is work to do to make this a reality.
Huizenga took a few moments earlier this week to chat with us as he prepares for his controversial presentation at the Summit.
You will be speaking at The Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit about Linux and the cloud. Can you give us a teaser on what we can expect from your talk?
Huizenga: Clouds are on the top of every IT departments list of new and key technologies to invest in. Obviously high on those lists are things like VMware and Amazon EC2. But where is the open source community in terms of comparable solutions which can be easily set up and deployed? Is it possible to build a cloud with just open source technologies? Would that cloud be a "meets min" sort of cloud, or can you build a full fledged, enterprise-grade cloud with open source today? What about using a hybrid of open source and proprietary solutions? Is that possible, or are we locked in to purely proprietary solutions today? Will Open Standards help us? What are some recommendations today for building clouds?
Linux is often applauded as the "platform for the cloud." Do you think this is accurate? If not, what still needs to be done? If so, what is it about Linux that gives it this reputation?
Huizenga: Linux definitely has the potential to be a key platform for the cloud. However, it isn't there yet. There are a few technology inhibitors with respect to Linux as the primary cloud platform, as well as a number of market place challenges. Those challenges can be addressed but there is definitely some work to do in that space.
What are the advantages of Linux for both public and private clouds?
Huizenga: It depends a bit about whether you consider Linux as a guest or virtual server in a cloud, or whether it is the hosting platform of the cloud. The more we enable Linux as a guest within the various hypervisors, and enable Linux to be managed within the cloud, the greater the chance of standardizing on Linux as the "packaging format" for applications.
This increases the overall presence of Linux in the market place and in some ways simplifies ISV's lives in porting applications to clouds. As a hosting platform, one of the biggest advantages for cloud operators is the potential cost/pricing model for Linux and the overall impact on the cost of operating a cloud. And, the level of openness that Linux provides should simplify the ability to support the cloud infrastructure and over time increase the number of services that can be provided by a cloud. But we still have quite a bit of work to do to make Linux a ubiquitous cloud platform.
What is happening at the Linux development level to support the rapidly maturing cloud opportunity? What does the community need from other Linux users and developers to help accelerate its development and address these challenges?
Huizenga: I'll talk about some of the KVM technologies that we need to continue to develop to enable cloud, as well as some of the work on virtual server building & packaging, DevOps, Deployment, and Management. There are plenty of places for the open source community to contribute and several talks at the Collaboration Summit should dive further into the details as well.
Many Linux distributions specialized for multimedia distributions have come and gone. Some were pretty good, but Dream Studio has outshone them all. Musician and maintainer Dick Macinnis has just released Dream Studio 11.10, based on Ubuntu Oneiric Ocelot. Dream Studio 11.04 is a tough act to follow – is it worth upgrading to 11.10?
Brewtarget: Hop into Beer Brewing with Open Source
Rikki Endsley - Mon, 12 Mar 2012 16:11:12 +0100
If you've always wanted to brew your own beer, you'll be glad to know there's an app for that. Created by Philip Lee, Brewtarget is an open source application that helps home brewers create and manage beer recipes. We talk to Lee about Brewtarget's history, its features, and its future.
Weekend Project: Take a Look at Cron Replacement Whenjobs
Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier - Fri, 09 Mar 2012 16:16:26 +0100
The cron scheduler has been a useful tool for Linux and Unix admins for decades, but it just might be time to retire cron in favor of a more modern design. One replacement, still in heavy development, is whenjobs. This weekend, let's take a look at whenjobs and see what the future of scheduling on Linux might look like.
Linux Training Opportunities at Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit
Advanced Linux Performance Tuning is a deep dive into proven tools and methods used to identify and resolve performance problems, resulting in system that is better optimized for specific workloads. This is particularly for those who write or use applications that have unusual characteristics, that behave differently than kernel performance heuristics anticipate. It is a hands-on course that assume some familiarity with basic performance tools. This course is offered on Monday, April 2nd. Overview of Open Source Compliance End-to-End Process is for any company that is redistributing Linux or other open source code. It provides a thorough discussion of the processes that should be in place to ensure that all open source code is being tracked and that licensing obligations are being met. This is a very practical course designed to give your company the ability to design your own internal process. This course is offered on Sunday, April 1st.
Practical Guide to Open Source Development is not a course on coding. Rather, it is about maximizing the effectiveness of your contributions. It is structured to give you a thorough understanding of the characteristics that make the open source model work well for corporate develoment organizations, and covers best practices when joining an external open source project, when launching your own, and when open sourcing proprietary code. This course is offered on Monday, April 2nd.
Random Linux Tips: Making KDE4 Behave, Thwacking Those Weirdo U3 Partitions on USB Sticks
Carla Schroder - Thu, 08 Mar 2012 17:55:32 +0100
Sometimes, we have little tips and tricks that make life easier – but don't quite take up a full article. So today I've bundled a few practices that many Linux.com readers might find helpful. You'll learn how to control window behavior in KDE4, and make Nepomuk and Strigi be useful; and remove those silly proprietary U3 partitions from USB sticks.
Making Short Work of Image Conversions with Converseen
Nathan Willis - Wed, 07 Mar 2012 13:17:48 +0100
Thanks to my photography background, I tend to equate "image manipulation" with "photo adjustment and retouching" – but of course that is just one task. For a lot of jobs, image manipulation means dull work like repeatedly converting, resizing, and compressing images for output – fitting them to the proper size for a post on the Web site, converting to the right format for print, and many other similar, repetitive tasks. You can use tools like GIMP and Krita for this class of work, but you would usually be better off firing up a dedicated batch conversion tool – saving yourself considerable time and mental energy. A comparatively young tool called Converseen is a good place to start.
5 Tips and Tricks for Using Yum
Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier - Tue, 06 Mar 2012 16:41:14 +0100
If you're using one of the Fedora/Red Hat derived Linux distributions, odds are you spend some time working with Yum. You probably already know the basics, like searching packages and how to install or remove them. But if that's all you know, you're missing out on a lot of features that make Yum interesting. Let's take a look at a few of the less commonly used Yum features.
How Pinweel Uses Linux to Power Group Photo Sharing
Rikki Endsley - Mon, 05 Mar 2012 19:48:08 +0100
Pinweel, a group photo sharing service, launched in February 2012. Lead back-end developer Michael De Lorenzo explains how Pinweel is different than other photo sharing services and how Linux and open source are built into the backend.
Slideshow: Five Years of Linux Collaboration
Jennifer Cloer - Fri, 02 Mar 2012 18:21:48 +0100
{lfnews}One of our most special events of the year is just a month away, the Annual Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit. This Summit is unique because it's the first event we ever hosted (2007 on the Google campus) and aims to bring together Linux Foundation members with other distinguished community members to work on very specific opportunities for Linux. This year, the event will be at the Hotel Nikko from April 3-5.
As we prepare for the Collaboration Summit, we wanted to share with you a little trip down memory lane. This year is the sixth annual event, so this slideshow shares pictures from five years of Linux collaboration. From Google's campus to Austin, Texas to Hotel Kabuki, come with us as we remember why this event continues to be so amazing.
Weekend Project: Take a Tour of Open Source Eye-Tracking Software
Nathan Willis - Fri, 02 Mar 2012 15:04:38 +0100
Right this very second, you are looking at a Web browser. At least, those are the odds. But while that's mildly interesting to me, detailed data on where users look (and for how long) is mission-critical. Web designers want to know if visitors are distracted from the contents of the page. Application developers want to know if users have trouble finding the important tools and functions on screen. Plus, for the accessibility community, being able to track eye motion lets you provide text input and cursor control to people who can't operate standard IO devices. Let's take a look at what open source software is out there to track eyes and turn it into useful data.
Why the Next Steve Jobs Needs a Raspberry Pi, Not Patents
Jim Zemlin - Thu, 01 Mar 2012 18:25:22 +0100
Nicholas Negroponte is always ahead of his time. When he envisioned One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), the average price for a PC was still hundreds of dollars. The industry rallied around his vision for a low-cost PC that anyone could use but couldn’t fathom innovative technology at the $100 price point he claimed he could hit.
Computing for everyone, starting with children, was the idea behind OLPC. And while the Raspberry Pi does target students, which is the most admirable of goals, it also puts a lot of computing power into the hands of anyone looking to create something interesting. $25 for a computing device is just incredible.
So why does this matter? Because it is showing just how well Moore's law is at work and how consequently important free software is to the world of computing. For the price of four Raspberry Pi's, you can't even get a copy of Windows 7 at Best Buy. And that is just for the upgrade version.
Innovation is happening because the next Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg can grab free software and low cost hardware and DO SOMETHING. Zuckerberg even took the time to point out the power of the hacker way as he filed one of the biggest IPO’s of the decade. The next technology innovator doesn't have to spend a fortune prototyping ideas or taking out licenses with everybody under the sun. With $25 and free software you can get started building something cool.
In fact, the only thing holding back this form of innovation is the billion dollar price of patents these days. This speaks miles to the power of getting the tools of innovation into the hands of many and the sad state of our current patent system. The only thing that holds back the next Steve Jobs is being sued by the company started by the late Steve Jobs.
Unknown Bash Tips and Tricks For Linux
Carla Schroder - Thu, 01 Mar 2012 15:23:13 +0100
Familiarity breeds ennui, and even though Bash is the default Linux command shell used daily by hordes of contented users, it contains a wealth of interesting and useful features that don't get much attention. Today we shall learn about Bash builtins and killing potential.
Kicking the Tires on Pinwheel and Talking to Founder Caterina Fake
Rikki Endsley - Wed, 29 Feb 2012 17:51:41 +0100
On February 16, Flickr cofounder Caterina Fake announced private beta testing for Pinwheel, an online "Flickr for Places" type of service. Fake sent me an invitation to try out Pinwheel and answered a few questions about her new project, which is built and powered by Linux and open source solutions.
The Greatness of Git
Jim Zemlin - Tue, 28 Feb 2012 17:10:01 +0100
When Linus Torvalds says he is going to work on a side project he doesn't think small and he doesn’t work slowly.
When he created “Git,” the software source control and collaboration system that runs Linux kernel development, he started writing code on a Sunday (April 3, 2005) and emerged just a few days later with a new revision control system that today is regarded as one of the best pieces of software ever written (second, at least, to Linux, of course).
Software Freedom Law Center Founder and co-author of the GPL Eben Moglen said during a keynote panel at LinuxCon last August: “Linus was presented with a nasty weekend once upon a time and out of it came Git. Another brilliant achievement, you understand. A work of superb design that is going to change the software industry and the world...because one man had one itch one weekend that was really biting, and he had to invent something. And he’s a brilliantly inventive man and scored another hole in one.”
Git had to be great in order to support the unmatched rate of development that Linux requires. Today, the Linux community applies more than five patches per hour to the kernel and to date has written more than 15 million lines of code. The sheer size of Linux development has made the project one from which others have borrowed both collaborative development lessons and and tools - like Git. Today Git is used by the Linux community, as well as developers working on projects that range from Ruby on Rails to Android to Perl and Eclipse, and many more.
The popularity of Git is also resulting in it becoming part of the technology vernacular, with businesses based on Git flourishing.
Consider GitHub. This is an amazing code repository that uses the Git revision control system and has become one of the most popular places to host and collaborate on software. This service is being used by more than a million people to store over two million code repositories.
“GitHub was originally designed for software developers...But nowadays, it’s also being used to oversee stuff outside the programming world, including DNA data and Senate bills that may turn into laws and all sorts of other stuff you can put into a text file, such as, well, a Wired article.”
He might have gotten a little more than he bargained for with all the collaboration, but his experiment demonstrates its power.
GitHire is another new online application and service that builds upon Git for finding the world’s best programmers. GitHire will crawl Git repositories, find and rank programmers based on their code and reputation and provide employers with a short list of the world’s best talent most relevant to their needs. If you’re a software developer and doubted it before, code is most definitely the new resume.
There are a number of other examples, as well as native Git for Windows, Git implementations in other languages, tutorial businesses based on Git, and more.
The measure of truly great software development is use. When others use it and build new projects and/or businesses from it, you know it’s truly great. This is the essence of Linux and open source software development. By writing the best code and sharing it with the world, everything gets better, faster, and there becomes even more new ways to collaborate and share.
Educate Users About security with Mozilla's Watchdog
Nathan Willis - Mon, 27 Feb 2012 16:59:06 +0100
Much of Mozilla's engineering effort goes into direct enhancement of the contemporary Web-browsing and email experience: Firefox and Thunderbird, standards support, new APIs, etc. But some of its value is indirect, such as the Mozilla Watchdog initiative, which aims to better equip Web users to protect themselves against fraud. The Watchdog tools help you protect your passwords and make you more aware of threats to your security – which is certainly valuable for individuals, and even more so for organizations.
Why Linux Is a Model Citizen of Quality Code
Rikki Endsley - Fri, 24 Feb 2012 18:47:25 +0100
Coverity's 2011 Open Source Integrity Report gives kudos to Linux for its high-quality code.
Tizen Conference Announced
Brian Warner - Fri, 24 Feb 2012 18:37:58 +0100
Just in case you missed it, the first Tizen conference has been announced! It will be held at the Hyatt Regency in San Francisco, from May 7-9.
The 2012 Tizen Conference will be a good opportunity for developers and device builders to learn more about the platform, where it's going, and how to make best use of it when building products. In addition, there will be a special Tizen hosted hands-on lab for developers, prior to the conference - register early to save your spot.
The call for papers is now open. We're expecting conference tracks to include: ◦ Application development and deployment ◦ Device/Product development ◦ Platform development ◦ Tizen project, process, and progress
The Tizen project also welcomes submissions on any other Tizen related topics, so be creative! The call for papers is open until midnight on March 8th, and sessions will be announced March 12th.
Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier - Thu, 23 Feb 2012 18:01:11 +0100
As one of the GNOME users who's still fond of the old-school GNOME desktop, the recent release of Cinnamon 1.3.1 caught my eye. While it's not exactly GNOME 2.x, it's close enough that most users with a fondness for the 2.x days will feel right at home.
Expert Tips and Tricks With Kate and Konsole
Carla Schroder - Wed, 22 Feb 2012 19:23:53 +0100
The Kate graphical text editor and Konsole graphical terminal emulator are chock-full of advanced features and time-saving shortcuts. They work nicely together to make the lives of system administrators, writers, users, and programmers easier. Here is a look at some of the ways to make these power tools work for you.
The Ever-Changing Linux Skillset
Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier - Tue, 21 Feb 2012 18:05:28 +0100
Just because you had what it takes for a good Linux-related job a decade ago, it doesn't mean that you have what it takes today. The Linux landscape has changed a lot, and the only thing that's really stayed constant is that a love of learning is a requirement.
What Greg Does
Greg KH - Tue, 21 Feb 2012 00:32:00 +0100
With my recent job change, I'm starting to run into a bunch of people asking "What exactly are you going to be doing now?"
How to Kickstart an Open Source Music Revolution with CASH Music
Rikki Endsley - Mon, 20 Feb 2012 16:37:33 +0100
On February 10, 2012, CASH Music launched a Kickstarter campaign and raised more than 70% of their $30,000 goal in about 24 hours. What is CASH Music? And why does it already have vocal support from musicians, Firefox, and even Neil Gaiman? Jesse von Doom, Co-Executive Director of CASH Music, explains the inspiration behind the project and the big role Linux plays in it.
Weekend Project: Get Started with Tahoe-LAFS Storage Grids
Nathan Willis - Fri, 17 Feb 2012 19:08:06 +0100
Here's an axiom for every major organization to memorize: if you have data, then you have a data storage problem. But while the cloud service players are happy to compete for your business, you may not need to purchase a solution. A number of open source projects offer flexible ways to build your own distributed, fault-tolerant storage network. This weekend, let's take a look at one of the most intriguing offerings: Tahoe LAFS.
Oracle Headlines
Best Practices to Optimize Your Data Center at Every Layer of the Stack
Mon, 16 May 2012 17:45:00 PST
Date: May 31, 2012 Time: 1 PM EST
Organizations are reaping the benefits of simplifying IT, lowering costs and dramatically improving transactional throughput by deploying optimized application-to-disk solutions. These pre-tuned, tested solutions encompass a wide variety of applications and use cases. Hear from industry experts, and IT executives, how these full-stack solutions can achieve three times faster deployment times and up to 75% reductions in acquisition and operational costs.
Customers are rapidly realizing the benefits of integrated, application-to-disk solutions that are fully optimized, pre-tuned and tested. Join this virtual event to hear:
Gartner research highlights how pre-tested solutions are important to today's data centers
How Oracle Software Runs Best on Oracle Hardware: Application-to-Disk Use Cases from Oracle experts
Your data center can be fast, highly productive and very economical. Register today and find out how.
Move Your Applications to the Cloud
Mon, 14 May 2012 10:45:00 PST
Attend the Webcast series to hear best practices from customers and industry leaders.
Are your enterprise applications slow to respond and costly to maintain? Are you dealing with infrastructure silos? If so, and you're ready to rethink your application architecture and cloud computing, this Webcast series is for you.
In this Webcast series, we'll explore best practices for simplifying IT operations while delivering the application performance that the business needs. You'll learn from Gartner about the convergence of cloud-based application infrastructure and fabric computing. You'll also hear best practices from Oracle product experts and customers.
Please select the sessions you are interested in attending and then complete the registration form below.
Register for Virtual Developer Day: Database!
Thu, 8 May 2012 10:00:00 PST
Learn the key tools, frameworks, techniques, and best practices for building database-backed applications through presentations and hands-on labs demonstrating innovative and performance-enhancing methods. Oracle database application development experts will answer your questions via real-time moderated chat. Enjoy post-event benefits such as advanced lab content downloads.
Americas - Tuesday May 15th, 2012
9:00 am - 1:00 pm PDT
12:00 pm - 4:00 pm EST
1:00 pm - 5:00 pm BRT
Oracle Releases Java SE 7 Update 4 and JavaFX 2.1
Thu, 3 May 2012 10:00:00 PST
The Oracle Java teams have delivered update releases for Java SE and Java FX.
Java SE 7 Update 4
This is the first time Oracle is delivering both the JDK and JavaFX SDK for Mac OS X
Oracle has continued to work on merging JRockit and HotSpot JVMs to leverage the best features in each.
Java SE 7 Update 4 features includes the next-generation Garbage Collection algorithm Garbage First (G1).
New JVM (Java HotSpot Virtual Machine, version 23) features JRockit JVM feature convergence. Some of the value-add features of the JRockit JVM are re-implemented in the HotSpot JVM.
Java SE 7 Update 4 is the first consumer release of the Java 7 JRE that will be made available as the default version on Java.com.
Java FX
The JavaFX 2.1 release includes the JavaFX Software Development Kit (SDK) for the Windows and Mac OS X platforms. The JavaFX SDK provides the tools and technologies for developing JavaFX applications with these new features:
Playback support for digital media stored in the MPEG-4 multimedia container format containing H.264/AVC video and Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) audio.
New Webview support for JavaScript to Java method calls, which allows a user to render HTML/JavaScript and let JavaScript (in WebView) make calls to Java APIs to offload specific operations to Java.
The JavaFX 2.1 release adds the ability to use Windows-style LCD sub-pixel rendering. All the JavaFX UI controls will be LCD-text enabled by default on Windows, as will WebView, the Webkit-based node for rendering Web content. Applications can also opt-in to use LCD text on the low-level scenegraph text node by a new API.
Additional user interface enhancements in JavaFX 2.1 include: controls for combo box, stacked chart and application-wide menu bar.
JavaFX Scene Builder 1.0 Early Access - a visual layout tool for the JavaFX platform. The JavaFX Scene Builder enables designing UI screens by simply dragging and positioning objects.
Oracle is #1 in the Application Server Market Segment for 2012
Mon, 30 Apr 2012 17:00:00 PST
Oracle is again the #1 vendor in the Application Server category with a market share of 43.1% based on revenue, according to the most recent Gartner "Market Share: All Software Markets, Worldwide 2011" report.
With a strong growth rate of 18.4%, higher even than in 2010, Oracle continues to lead the application server category with a total market share (based on revenue) greater than the next three competitors combined and almost 10 points higher than its nearest competitor.
Saving the Earth -- Every Day
Thu, 19 Apr 2012 13:00:00 PST
Oracle meets its environmental goals with products we design for sustainability -- find out how you can too.
Oracle sees sustainability as a natural extension of how its business operates. The same sustainability solutions and environmental best practices that are embedded in our normal business operations are also available to our customers. Whether through measurement accounting, waste reductions, the elimination of hazardous materials, or optimizations, Oracle is in the unique position of being able to provide sustainability solutions for customers that span the entire spectrum of IT and business requirements.
Learn how to achieve environmental best practices with products designed to help you meet your sustainability goals.
Oracle Beats Sybase in Database Manageability Costs by 71%
Thu, 19 Apr 2012 12:00:00 PST
Oracle Database 11g Release 2 exceeds SAP Sybase in DBA productivity.
A recent ORC International cost comparison study found that Oracle Database 11g Release 2 far exceeded SAP Sybase ASE 15.7 in DBA productivity and helped to significantly lower database management costs.
The study concluded Oracle Database 11g allowed IT organizations and DBAs to:
Perform administrative tasks 71% faster
Take 43% fewer steps for the same set of standard routine functions
Save up to US$85,200 per year, per DBA by increasing productivity
Register to download the study and find out how Oracle offers more performance, more automation, and more control than Sybase--all at a lower cost.
Solaris 11 is the First Cloud OS
Thu, 12 Apr 2012 16:00:00 PST
Find out how Solaris 11 will revolutionize your cloud and support your mission-critical applications.
The demands placed on IT organizations to increase performance, reduce complexity and lower costs are putting a strain on constantly shrinking budgets. Moving to the cloud can be a solution, but complications surrounding security and manageability can make the transition daunting.
Join the Online Forum on the 25th April to hear both customers and Oracle experts, including Markus Flierl, Vice President of Oracle Solaris Engineering, explain how the latest developments to Oracle Solaris 11 since its launch in November can help revolutionize your cloud adoption and transform your data center.
You'll discover how Oracle Solaris 11 can help you:
Improve Performance and Simplify the Management and Deployment of over 11,000 third-party Applications
Maximize Systems Utilization
Protect Your Data
Enhance Business Agility
Boost Productivity
With live online chat available for all sessions you'll be able to ask the experts the questions that are important to you on Oracle Solaris.
Oracle Achieves 18% Database Market Share Growth
Mon, 9 Apr 2012 11:00:00 PST
Oracle is #1 in the RDBMS Sector for 2011
Gartner has published their market share numbers for 2011 based on total software revenues. According to Gartner, Oracle
Is #1 in worldwide RDBMS software revenue share
Holds more revenue share than its seven closest competitors combined
Grew at 18.0 percent, exceeding both the industry average (16.3 percent) and the growth rates of its closest competitors.
Learn About the Latest in Oracle's Business Analytics Strategy
Fri, 6 Apr 2012 11:00:00 PST
Oracle's Mark Hurd delivers IT simplification strategy and emphasizes business analytics strategy.
Oracle Business Analytics can change the way you do business. Harness exploding volumes of data to forecast and plan at the speed of business, deliver real-time intelligence to your mobile workforce, and accelerate your financial close and reporting process. Place analytics into the hands of every one of your decision-makers -- so they can see more, think smarter, and act faster.
Breakout Sessions:
Achieving Predictable Performance with Oracle Hyperion Enterprise Performance Management
Explore All Relevant Data -- Introducing Oracle Endeca Information Discovery
Run Your Business Faster and Smarter with Oracle Business Intelligence Applications on Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine
Analyzing and Deciding with Big Data
Simplify Storage Management
Wed, 4 Apr 2012 16:00:00 PST
Simplify Storage Management with Oracle's Latest Software
Event Date: Tuesday, April 10, 2012
Time: 10:00 a.m. PT
Tape monitoring solutions have been very expensive and require risky deployments directly into your data path, leaving critical data insecure. With Oracle's new StorageTek Tape Analytics software, you proactively capture library, drive, and media performance metrics, getting the insight to ensure the health of your global tape environment.
Join this webcast to hear Jim Cates, Vice President of Hardware Development and Michael O'Donnell, Director of Hardware Development at Oracle give an overview of the new, exciting Oracle StorageTek Tape Analytics Software.
Speakers:
Jim Cates, Vice President, Hardware Development, Oracle
Michael O'Donnell, Director, Hardware Development, Oracle
Tom Wultich, Director, Tape Systems Product Management, Oracle
Oracle's x86 Systems -- Optimize Your Data Center for Highly Virtualized and Private Cloud Deployments
Mon, 2 Apr 2012 15:55:00 PST
The Industry's Best x86 Platform for Running Oracle Enterprise Applications
Event Date: Tuesday, April 10, 2012
Time: 9 a.m. PT
Join us on April 10 for an important launch Webcast. You'll hear how Oracle is enhancing the Sun x86 server family. This new generation of x86 servers provides enhanced performance and security, improved virtualization tools, and reduced costs -- all with no change to your existing software environment.
Watch this Webcast and learn how you can have improved reliability, better performance, and power efficiency, plus:
Enhanced virtualization for consolidation and improved server utilization
Reduced licensing costs with 0.5 core factors for Oracle per core-priced software
Unparalleled reliability and availability for enterprise environments
Increased visibility and efficiency with Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center and expert 24/7 support
Ongoing protection for your existing software and training investments
You can increase data center performance and security while you decrease complexity and realize better overall TCO. Join us on April 10 and find out more.
Assembled for Super Power
Mon, 2 Apr 2012 11:00:00 PST
Oracle engineered systems, storage, and analytics support the Avengers.
With extreme performance in mind, S.H.I.E.L.D. Chief Systems Administrator John Smith assembled an integrated private cloud on a foundation of Oracle engineered systems and business analytics software. Individually, each system component delivers extreme performance. Together, the systems support even more information for deeper analysis and some of the most important decisions in the history of humankind.
Pella Builds Competitive Advantage with Integrated IT
Mon, 2 Apr 2012 11:00:00 PST
Oracle Customer Showcase at Pella Corporation
Event Date: April 24-25, 2012
Location: 102 Main Street, Pella, IA 50219
Pella Corporation is an award-winning supply chain innovator, leveraging LeanSigma principles to enhance and refine every aspect of their business. Superior customer insight and tight alignment between their business and IT strategies have created tremendous competitive advantage for Pella, even during the current economic downturn.
Oracle and Pella invite you to join us for a two-day exploration of the principles and IT best practices that propel the Pella's relentless focus on product quality, business efficiency, and customer satisfaction.
Discussions will focus on:
The business imperative for partnership between IT and executive leadership
Strategic integration of Business Intelligence and Supply Chain applications for manufacturing insight
Advanced CRM implementation to support a corporate culture of superior customer service
The ROI of creating and sustaining a deep, collaborative relationship with Oracle
This intimate, interactive event will include a variety of presentations from Pella, Oracle and industry experts; roundtable discussions, Solution Pavilion, plant tours and networking activities. A separate track for CIOs and IT executives will be offered. Organizations are encouraged to send multiple people to maximize your learning experience.
Total Cloud Control Keeps Getting Better
Mon, 30 Mar 2012 20:00:00 PST
Total Cloud Control for Systems
Event Date: Thursday, April 12, 2012
Time: 9 a.m. PT / 12 p.m. ET / 4 p.m. GMT or 12 noon GMT / 4 p.m. MSK / 8 p.m. CST
Join Oracle Vice President of Systems Management Steve Wilson and a panel of Oracle executives to find out how your enterprise cloud can achieve 10x improved performance and 12x operational agility. Only Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center 12c allows you to:
Accelerate mission-critical cloud deployment
Unleash the power of Solaris 11, the first cloud OS
Simplify Oracle engineered systems management
You'll also get a chance to have your questions answered by Oracle product experts and dive deeper into the technology by viewing our demos that trace the steps companies like yours take as they transition to a private cloud environment.
Customers Drive Engineered Systems Revenue Growth Up 139%
Tue, 20 Mar 2012 16:00:00 PST
Oracle's Third Quarter Fiscal Year 2012 Earnings
Results were announced on March 20, 2012.
Join us on April 4 for a Webcast--chat live with business analytics experts.
Event Date: Wednesday, April 04, 2012
Time: 9 a.m. PT / 12 p.m. ET / 4 p.m. GMT or 12 noon GMT / 4 p.m. MSK / 8 p.m. CST
Join Mark Hurd and Balaji Yelamanchili as they unveil the latest advances in Oracle's strategy for placing analytics into the hands of every one of your decision-makers -- so that they can see more, think smarter, and act faster.
Learn about the latest developments in business intelligence technology and applications, advanced analytics, performance management applications, and engineered systems. You'll find out how you can harness the exploding volumes of data being generated inside your organization -- and beyond the firewall -- to:
Deliver real-time intelligence to your mobile workforce globally
Forecast and plan at the speed of business
Accelerate your financial close and reporting process
Don't miss this opportunity to see and hear how Oracle Business Analytics can change the way you do business.
Oracle Linux Online Forum
Fri, 16 Mar 2012 14:00:00 PST
Learn Why Oracle Linux Is the Best Linux for Enterprise Computing
Event Date: Tuesday, March 27, 2012
Time: 9:30 a.m. PT / 12:30 p.m. ET
Join us for a series of information-rich Webcasts and "Live Online Chat" with some of the most knowledgeable Linux experts. Fresh off Oracle's launch of Oracle Linux with the latest Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 2, we'll cover a host of key technology and strategic developments.
Agenda:
Leading Innovations in Enterprise Linux hosted by Oracle Executives
Customer Presentation: How Oracle Helps Reduce Cost and Improve Performance of Database Applications at Progressive Insurance
What's New in Oracle Linux
Get More Value from your Linux Vendor
Smarter. Faster. More Efficient.
Tue, 14 Mar 2012 11:00:00 PST
Get Ahead with an Oracle Hardware Refresh
Successful organizations no longer see IT as just an internally-focused cost center. They are improving the bottom line with more efficient technologies and processes, and investing those savings into innovative new technologies that drive top line growth. By simplifying IT with modern technologies, organizations can maximize application investments and optimize resources. Get started by refreshing older server and storage hardware with the latest generation of faster, more efficient equipment to reduce cost and gain competitive advantage.
Learn more about the benefits of upgrading:
SPARC Servers
SPARC SuperCluster
x86 Servers
Blade Systems
Disk Storage
Tape Storage
Oracle and RightNow Power Great Customer Experiences
Mon, 13 Mar 2012 10:00:00 PST
Across industries, executives are realizing that we have entered a new era. It's the era of the empowered consumer, where success can only be achieved by delivering great customer experiences.
View the Webcast replay with Oracle President, Mark Hurd and senior executives from Oracle and RightNow to learn more about our strategy and combined, best-in-class solutions that will transform the way organizations deliver great customer experiences across every channel to achieve sustainable business advantage.
Together, Oracle and RightNow will:
Enable unified, personalized and relevant customer experiences across all channels and customer touchpoints along the entire customer journey.
Offer a best-in-class customer service cloud that delivers exceptional experiences across the web, social networks and contact centers.
Help organizations accelerate the acquisition of new customers, maximize customer retention, and improve operational efficiency.
Speakers:
Mark Hurd, President, Oracle
Thomas Kurian, Executive Vice President, Product Development, Oracle
Greg Gianforte, Chief Executive Officer and Founder, RightNow
Wayne Huyard, Senior Vice President and General Manager, RightNow Global Business Unit
Introducing the Oracle Communications Service Availability Machine
Mon, 12 Mar 2012 13:00:00 PST
Rapid Application Development for "Zero Downtime" Telecommunication Applications
Event Date: Tuesday, March 20, 2012
Time: 9 a.m. PT/12 noon ET
The telecommunications market is changing fast -- does your organisation have the agility to keep up? Without seamless integration across the hardware and software stack, developing applications that require service availability can be slow, expensive, and risky.
The Oracle Communications Service Availability Machine is an integrated package of hardware and software optimised for service availability. Fully tested and rapidly deployed, it allows you to develop applications faster and more predictably than ever before -- and maintain your competitive advantage.
Join our live Webcast on Tuesday, 20 March to discover how you can:
Deliver superior application and service availability with real-time fault management and stateful failover with session integrity
Drive revenue with streamlined project lifecycles and faster application deployment
Minimise risk with a proven, standards-based solution optimised for service availability
SQL Server Customers -- Lower Your Database TCO by Up to 96%
Thu, 8 Mar 2012 08:00:00 PST
Try the MySQL TCO calculator -- find out how much you can save!
The MySQL TCO Savings Calculator is intended to provide an example of your potential savings based on input of your current system configuration.
Extreme Analytics for Your Business
Fri, 2 Mar 2012 16:00:00 PST
Analytics at the Speed of Thought
Event Date: Wednesday, March 7, 2012
Time: 9 a.m. PT/12 noon ET
What if you could run financial and operational planning cycles 10 times faster? Or monitor and adjust marketing campaigns in real time? What if you could instantly visualize how a price change would impact the profitability of thousands of products?
Join this interactive online event and learn how you can manage your business smarter and faster with the Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine - an industry first. In this exclusive briefing, you'll find out how organizations like yours are embracing Oracle Exalytics to plan, monitor, and make decisions at unprecedented speed.
You'll gain valuable information and practical tips on how to:
Support exponentially growing data volumes and user populations
Run business intelligence and analytic applications faster than ever before
Enable business users to interact with data, visualize it, and discover new insights
Forecast and plan more frequently, and at greater levels of detail
Enable mobile intelligence across your organization
Speakers: Balaji Yelamanchili - Senior Vice President of Analytics and Performance Management, Oracle
Paul Rodwick - Vice President, Product Management, Oracle Business Intelligence, Oracle
Register today for this complimentary Webcast.
Oracle Hardware -- the Extreme Performance Tour
Thu, 23 Feb 2012 11:00:00 PST
Join Oracle Hardware Systems on The Extreme Performance Tour to see the future of enterprise hardware—and discover how you can get it today. Learn about the future of enterprise hardware and how every Oracle system is engineered to deliver extreme, industry-leading performance—driving reduced complexity, higher productivity, and igniting faster innovation.
At this high-octane event, discover how Oracle hardware and software are optimized to deliver extreme performance across your IT infrastructure.
Get the inside track on Oracle's hardware strategy and product roadmap from the people who know Oracle hardware best. And be sure to meet our global experts in the Extreme Performance exhibition area.
Coming to a city near you.
Follow the conversation on Twitter. Use hashtag #oraclehardware
Attention Red Hat Enterprise Linux Customers
Wed, 22 Feb 2012 16:00:00 PST
Oracle Offers Free Trial of Innovative Ksplice Zero-Downtime Updates to Red Hat Customers
News Facts
Oracle today introduced a 30-day free trial of Oracle's Ksplice zero-downtime kernel update technology for Red Hat Enterprise Linux customers.
Oracle is the only enterprise Linux provider that can offer zero-downtime updates that enable customers to apply security updates, diagnostic patches and critical bug fixes without rebooting.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux customers can experience the benefit of Ksplice zero-downtime kernel updates for the kernels they have installed today without any system reconfiguration.
Access the 30-day free Ksplice trial here. Terms, conditions and restrictions apply.
Oracle also announced that Ksplice zero-downtime kernel updates for Oracle's Red Hat Compatible Kernel are now available to Oracle Linux Premier Support customers. Zero-downtime updates for Oracle's Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel have been available since September 2011.
Additionally, Oracle extended the support lifecycle for Oracle Linux from eight to ten years, further enhancing the industry's most comprehensive and low-cost Linux support program.
Oracle's Linux support program has distinguished itself from the start by offering more value to customers through lifetime support policies, premier backporting, comprehensive legal indemnification, best practices for deployment, and lower cost.
COLLABORATE 12 -- a Forum for the Oracle Community
Tue, 21 Feb 2012 16:00:00 PST
The word is out. There is one event that delivers the full spectrum of Oracle Technology and Applications education that you need to boost results and drive efficiency all year long. Designed and delivered by users just like you, COLLABORATE 12: Technology and Applications Forum for the Oracle Community offers:
Sessions, interactive panel discussions and hands-on learning opportunities packed with first-hand experiences, case studies and practical "how-to" content
Breaking product news and insider information from Oracle executive management and developers
Ample opportunities to build your personal and professional networks, including special interest group (SIG) meetings, geographic networking events and receptions
Informative and inspiring keynotes
An exhibitor showcase packed with products and solutions providers who can help you solve your specific challenges
Unique events such as the Women in Technology Forum- connect with key women who are examples of success in a fast-changing environment
Get information tailored to your needs through our three participating user groups.
COLLABORATE is a big event, but you can find just what you need with help from one of our three participating users groups. Submit your presentation or register with the group that best meets your needs to receive:
Special access to events based on your Oracle product investments
Event communications that keep you in the loop and help identify what you should be watching for at COLLABORATE
Advance access to proceedings for the sessions you plan to attend
Introducing MySQL Cluster 7.2
Fri, 17 Feb 2012 14:00:00 PST
Delivers up to 70x More Performance for Complex Queries
News Facts
Continuing to drive MySQL innovation, Oracle today announced the general availability of MySQL Cluster 7.2.
For highly demanding Web-based and communications products and services, MySQL Cluster is designed to cost-effectively deliver 99.999% availability, high write scalability and very low latency.
With SQL and NoSQL access through a new Memcached API, MySQL Cluster represents a "best of both worlds" solution allowing key value operations and complex SQL queries within the same database.
With MySQL Cluster 7.2, users can also gain up to a 70x increase in performance on complex queries, and enhanced multi-data center scalability.
MySQL Cluster 7.2 is also certified with Oracle VM. The combination of its elastic, on-demand scalability and self-healing features, together with Oracle VM support, makes MySQL Cluster an ideal choice for deployments in the cloud.
Also generally available today is the latest release of the MySQL Cluster Manager, version 1.1.4, further improving the ease of use and administration of MySQL Cluster.
Engineered Systems Power the Smart Grid Data Explosion
Wed, 15 Feb 2012 14:00:00 PST
Attend the free Webcast to find out how to manage massive data volumes efficiently.
Date: Tuesday, February 21, 2012
Time: 10 a.m. PT / 1 p.m. ET
Smart meters and smart grids can dramatically improve utility operations and customer interactions—but only if utilities manage the massive data volumes efficiently.
Oracle Engineered Systems—Exadata and Exalogic, plus Oracle's unique business and mission-critical applications—can:
Process data at unprecedented rates
Turn data into real intelligence
Improve efficiency across every department
In this webcast we will explore the ways utilities of all sizes can take advantage of Oracle Engineered Systems to maximize the value of advanced metering and grid modernization programs.
Hear our compelling results—including lower total cost of ownership obtained when Oracle Engineered Systems run meter-to-cash business processes
We'll discuss in detail how we can help you convert the data deluge into actionable information and business value
Attend this webcast to learn how you can lower your cost and risk and simplify your operations with Oracle Engineered Systems for utilities.
Oracle Buys Taleo
Thu, 9 Feb 2012 05:30:00 PST
On February 9, 2012, Oracle announced that it has entered into an agreement to acquire Taleo Corporation, a leading provider of cloud-based talent management. The proposed transaction is subject to Taleo stockholder approval, certain regulatory approvals, and customary closing conditions and is expected to close mid-year 2012. Until the deal closes, each company will continue to operate independently, and it is business as usual.
Taleo's Talent Management Cloud helps organizations attract, develop, motivate and retain human capital to improve performance and drive growth.
Together, Oracle and Taleo expect to create a comprehensive cloud offering for organizations to manage their Human Resource operations and employee careers. The combination is expected to empower employees and managers to effectively manage careers throughout their entire employment, enable organizations to retain talent and optimize costs, and improve the employee experience through faster on boarding and better collaboration with team members via social media.
Oracle Beats NetApp and EMC in Storage Magazine Quality Awards for NAS
Oracle's Sun ZFS Storage Appliances Earn Highest Ratings for Enterprise and Midrange NAS Systems
News Facts:
Oracle today announced its Sun ZFS Storage Appliances earned the highest overall scores in the six-year history of Storage magazine's Quality Awards for NAS, for both enterprise and midrange NAS.
Oracle bested the competition in initial product quality, features, reliability, technical support and received high marks for sales force competence.
In its analysis of the results, Storage magazine noted, "Oracle Corp. storage users are apparently the most satisfied among the legions of NAS users," and reported that 97 percent of Oracle enterprise NAS users surveyed would buy again.
Oracle's Sun ZFS Storage Appliances deliver enterprise-class NAS capabilities to more than 3,000 customers and are ideal for enterprise applications, virtualization, cloud, storage consolidation, and data protection.
Oracle's Sun ZFS Storage Appliances are the only NAS products engineered together with Oracle Applications, Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle Database, and Oracle's SPARC SuperCluster T4-4, and are optimized for Oracle VM and the Oracle Exadata Database Machine. Engineered integration enables Oracle software to run fastest and most efficiently on Oracle storage.
The Storage magazine Quality Awards are designed to identify and recognize products that have proven their quality and reliability in actual use. The results are derived from a survey of qualified Storage/SearchStorage.com readers who assessed products in five categories: initial product quality, features, reliability, technical support and sales force competence.
Put Your Big Data to Work
Wed, 1 Feb 2012 17:30:00 PST
Big Data Online Forum – Big Data Essentials: What You Need to Know
Date: Thursday, February 16, 2012
Time: 10:00 a.m. PT – 1:30 p.m. PT / 1:00 p.m. ET – 4:30 p.m. ET
Big data is big news these days. But you don't base IT investment decisions on magazine headlines.
Join us for the Big Data Online Forum to learn the essentials of big data - from the technology underlying it to real-world use cases. Oracle Senior Technical Architect Tom Kyte, Cloudera CEO Mike Olson, and other industry thought leaders will be on hand to explain how big data can deliver revolutionary insight and competitive advantage.
You'll get answers to tough questions surrounding big data, including:
What business insight can big data uncover?
How do you manage big data?
How do you integrate big data and decision-making?
Register today for this half-day online event featuring live Q&A with big data experts.
Oracle and RightNow Power Great Customer Experiences
Wed, 25 Jan 2012 17:30:00 PST
Join Oracle for a live Webcast
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
9:00 a.m. PT / 12:00 p.m. ET
Across industries, executives are realizing that we have entered a new era. It's the era of the empowered consumer, where success can only be achieved by delivering great customer experiences.
Join Oracle President, Mark Hurd and senior executives from Oracle and RightNow to learn more about our strategy and combined, best-in-class solutions that will transform the way organizations deliver great customer experiences across every channel to achieve sustainable business advantage.
Together, Oracle and RightNow will:
Enable unified, personalized and relevant customer experiences across all channels and customer touchpoints along the entire customer journey.
Offer a best-in-class customer service cloud that delivers exceptional experiences across the web, social networks and contact centers.
Help organizations accelerate the acquisition of new customers, maximize customer retention, and improve operational efficiency.
MySQL Embedded Online Forum:
Tuesday, January 31, 2012 9:00AM PST - 12:00 PM PST
MySQL is even better than you think. According to the experts, it's easier to use and it's more capable than most ISVs / OEMs realize, and by taking a few tried-and-tested steps before shipping your MySQL-embedded products, you can lower your product's costs and increase its performance.
Join our expert-created and delivered MySQL Embedded Online Forum to learn:
Why MySQL is a great embedded database for startups as well as the largest software, hardware, and appliance vendors in the world, and how its features ensure costs remain low throughout an application's life cycle
MySQL installation options that require minimal or zero end user effort and how to easily build them into your application
How to secure MySQL embedded in applications, appliances, and devices
Tips to simplify your integration with MySQL using the most popular MySQL Connectors and guidance on selecting the settings that will maximize your application's performance
Why MySQL delivers excellent performance and how to go beyond the default settings to optimize MySQL's queries, reporting, and search capabilities
Register now or click the tabs (to the right) to learn more about the agenda, sessions, and speakers.
Identify the Cloud Strategy That's Right for Your Enterprise
Fri, 13 Jan 2012 08:00:00 PST
Your Strategy. Your Cloud. Your Choice.
With all the cloud deployment choices available today—public, private, and hybrid—and all the service choices—software as a service, platform as a service, and infrastructure as a service—how do you determine the right mix for your IT and business needs? Attend this conference and we'll help you find the cloud strategy that's right for your enterprise.
Oracle's cloud experts will show you how to:
Choose the right public and private deployment models that best fit your enterprise usage
Transform your data center to a private cloud model, plus add self-service, autoscaling, and metering/chargeback
Select from Oracle's private and public cloud services to provide efficient, flexible enterprise cloud services for your business applications
Whether you are transitioning to the cloud or advancing to the next level, this event offers practical insights that can help you make the most of your cloud computing choices.
Learn about modern, lightweight development with Java EE 6 and Coherence
Java Developers and Architects will learn about Java EE6, WebLogic Server, Coherence, Eclipse, NetBeans, Maven and Hudson in hands on labs and sessions while interacting with Oracle product experts in live, moderated chats.
Oracle Enterprise Management Online Forum: Gain Total Control of Enterprise Clouds
Date: Wednesday, January 25, 2012
Time: 10:00 a.m. PT – 1:30 p.m. PT / 1:00 p.m. ET – 4:30 p.m. ET
Join Oracle executives and product experts for this complimentary, half-day online forum and live chat to learn about the different phases of the cloud lifecycle, challenges associated with each phase and the Oracle cloud management solution that keeps you in total control of your cloud services every step of the way.
You'll hear from business and IT experts on how to:
Justify your cloud initiative based on proven best practices
Manage the entire cloud lifecycle from planning, provisioning, deployment through monitoring, maintenance, and upgrades using a single console
Deliver integrated management of the entire cloud stack from applications to disks to maximize IT agility while minimizing the complexity and costs associated with IT management
Create a business driven cloud with deep insight into applications, business services and transactions
Attend this interactive online event and find out how you can fast-track your business to the cloud.
Oracle Online Systems Forum: Oracle Accelerates Your Business with Breakthrough Application to Disk Solutions
Event Date: 01/11/2012 10:00 AM Pacific Standard Time
Join us for this online event and learn how Oracle Optimized Solutions help businesses lower their TCO, mitigate risk, and improve productivity while accelerating innovation across the entire technology stack. This event for information technology professionals features an executive keynote, breakout sessions with analyst insights, and customer case studies.
Please join us on December 1, as Hasan Rizvi unveils the next generation of the industry's #1 application server and cornerstone of Oracle's cloud application foundation—Oracle WebLogic Server 12c.
Now is the time to find out why Oracle WebLogic Server is outperforming competitors with higher speed, lower TCO with simplified management, and accelerated time to market with developer efficiency innovations. Join fellow IT managers, architects, and developers to hear how the new release of Oracle WebLogic Server is:
Designed to help you seamlessly move into the public or private cloud with an open, standards-based platform
Built to drive higher value for your current infrastructure and significantly reduce development time and cost
Optimized to run your solutions for Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE); Oracle Fusion Middleware; and Oracle Fusion Applications
Enhanced with transformational platforms and technologies such as Java EE 6, Oracle'sActive GridLink for RAC, Oracle Traffic Director, and Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder
See the latest demos and hear from our leading developers on how this new release dramatically improves your deployment of applications for the cloud. In addition, you can participate in a developer-focused deep-dive session at 11 a.m. where experts will answer live chat questions on Oracle WebLogic Server 12c.
Build Your Next-Generation Datacenter in the Cloud
Join Oracle executives Mark Hurd and John Fowler at the Oracle Solaris 11 launch event in New York, and learn how you can build your infrastructure with Oracle Solaris 11 to:
Accelerate internal, public, and hybrid cloud applications
Optimize application deployment with built-in virtualization
Achieve top performance and cost advantages with Oracle Solaris 11–based engineered systems
The launch event will also feature exclusive content for our in-person audience including a session led by the VP of core Solaris development and his leads on Solaris 11 and a customer insights panel during lunch. We will also have a technology showcase featuring our latest systems and Solaris technologies. The Solaris executive team will also be there throughout the day to answer questions and give insights into future developments in Solaris.
Don't miss the Oracle Solaris 11 launch in New York on November 9.
On October 24, 2011, Oracle announced that it has entered into an agreement to acquire RightNow Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: RNOW), a leading provider of cloud-based customer service. RightNow's Customer Service Cloud helps organizations deliver exceptional customer experiences across call centers, the web and social networks.
Oracle is moving aggressively to offer customers a full range of Cloud Solutions including sales force automation, human resources, talent management, social networking, databases and Java as part of the Oracle Public Cloud. Together, Oracle and RightNow can enable a superior customer experience at every contact and across every channel.
On October 18, 2011, Oracle announced it has entered into an agreement to acquire Endeca, a leading provider of unstructured data management, web commerce and business intelligence solutions. The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions and is expected to close before the end of 2011.
After the transaction closes, Oracle with Endeca plans to create a comprehensive technology platform to process, store, manage, search and analyze structured and unstructured information together enabling businesses to make stronger and more profitable decisions. The combination of Oracle ATG Commerce with Endeca's InFront web commerce solutions is expected to enhance cross-channel commerce, merchandising, and online customer experiences. Adding Endeca Latitude software to Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBI EE) is expected to provide a single unified user interface for analysis of structured and unstructured data.
Welcome to San Francisco and Oracle OpenWorld! This is an extraordinary week filled with learning, networking, hands-on demo and exhibit experiences, and fun. If you find your free time is at a premium, then all is going as planned. Enjoy the conference and the city, and thanks for joining us.
This is an extraordinary week filled with learning, networking, hands-on demo and exhibit experiences, and way too much to do. If you find your free time is at a premium, then all is going as planned. Enjoy the conference and the city, and thanks for being a part of the worldwide Java community.
Come learn why Oracle offers the broadest, most complete integrated offerings for enterprise cloud computing. Unlike other companies that narrowly define the cloud as public software as a service or server virtualization, Oracle provides a comprehensive strategy that includes both private and public clouds, and all cloud layers—software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and infrastructure as a service (IaaS).
Now, you can get the inside scoop about Oracle's comprehensive cloud roadmap. Register now for your Oracle Powers the Cloud Pass and be there as we reveal breakthrough cloud news on Thursday, October 6, at Oracle OpenWorld.
You'll get access to:
More than 25 cloud sessions and 15 cloud demos
The cloud keynote with Robert Shimp, Group Vice President, Product Marketing, Oracle
And It's a Wrap! closing event, sponsored by Tsingtao, with musical guests Berlin, featuring Terri Nunn, and The Five Hundreds
Come see why Oracle is the foundation for many of the world's public and private clouds—and why Larry Ellison says "Oracle is the technology that powers the cloud."
Get your Oracle Powers the Cloud Pass today to learn more about Oracle's latest cloud offerings!*
*Oracle OpenWorld full-conference registrants get automatic access to Oracle Powers the Cloud activities.
Larry Ellison Unveils Next-Generation SPARC Servers
Thu, 22 Sep 2011 19:20:00 PDT
Live Webcast: Oracle SPARC SuperCluster Announcement
When extreme innovation happens, it's called a revolution. Watch it take place when Oracle reveals the SPARC SuperCluster T4-4, the first engineered system from a new generation of high-performance Oracle SPARC servers.
Join Larry Ellison and John Fowler on September 26 at this live event to learn how the breakthrough SPARC SuperCluster T4-4—powered by Oracle's SPARC T4 processor and running Oracle Solaris—will redefine the IT industry.
Oracle Executives Share an Important Oracle Database Product Update
Don't miss this important event where Oracle executives will share plans for a new product that will offer customers and partners a faster path to take advantage of the world's #1 database.
Presented by Oracle executives Mark Hurd, Andy Mendelsohn, and Judson Althoff
Wednesday, September 21, 2011 - 10:00 a.m. PT / 1:00 p.m. ET
Virtualization that makes applications easier to deploy, manage, and support.
As enterprises embrace cloud computing and pressure mounts to serve global businesses around the clock, traditional server consolidation-focused virtualization is no longer sufficient. Virtualization needs to focus on making applications easier to deploy, manage, and support.
Watch these Webcasts and learn about the newly released Oracle VM 3.0 to discover how your organization can benefit from application-driven virtualization.
We are pleased to invite you to a discussion with SquareTwo Financial who will share their experience with Oracle Exalogic. Please click on the register button to confirm your attendance.
In this informal reference call, participants will have the opportunity to speak firsthand with SquareTwo Financial. The call will open with a brief overview, followed by candid discussion and an open question and answer session. Please allow one hour for the call.
You're invited to our live Webcast series where you can ask questions and get advice from Oracle experts on how to use Oracle Exadata—the world's fastest database machine—to transform your business.
Welcome to Java Magazine, one of Oracle's newest and most significant investments in the continuing health and growth of the Java technology ecosystem. This publication, which is designed from the ground up to fulfill the full reader-engagement promises of digital publishing, is an essential source of knowledge about Java technology, the Java programming language, and Java-based applications for people who rely on them in their professional careers, or who aspire to.
That's an ambitious goal, and we'd never be able to, or even desire to, reach it on our own. Rather, the entire Java community is directly and transparently involved in the editorial process; in fact, only a minority of authors and contributors will be Oracle employees. Every lineup will contain an all-star list of contributors from across the ecosystem. So although there are other examples of publications that bring you news from the world of Java, there are no other examples that combine the voice of the Java "steward" (Oracle) with the voices of the rest of the community (developers, ISVs, device manufacturers, users, and students) in an innovative, all-digital package. And we wouldn't want it any other way.
Oracle WebCenter Transforms Your Organization Into A Social Business.
Now available on demand. Originally broadcast July 13, 2011
Access this on demand webcast to hear key executives discuss how Oracle is committed to delivering the user engagement platform to connect people and information and how Oracle will continue to deliver on and expand the most complete, open, integrated, and best-of-breed solutions to transform your organization into a social business.
Hasan Rizvi, Senior Vice President, Oracle Fusion Middleware and Java, Oracle
Kumar Vora, Senior Vice President of Development, Oracle
Andy MacMillan, Vice President of Product Management, Oracle
Oracle WebLogic Server Tops All Major Performance Benchmarks
The Oracle WebLogic 11g application server product line is the industry's most comprehensive Java platform for developing, deploying, and integrating enterprise applications. It provides the foundation for application grid, which is an architecture that enables enterprises to outperform their competitors while minimizing operational costs.
Outperform your competition—Fast, scalable systems enable IT to change as the business grows
Lower operational costs—Superior manageability with automation reduces the time and expense of keeping systems up and running
Best for Oracle portfolio—The product line is well integrated with the rest of Oracle's portfolio and has excellent support for interoperability with other systems
Webcast Date: Tuesday, July 19, 2011 Webcast Time: 8:00 a.m. PT / 11:00 a.m. ET
STEP 1: Please complete the registration form below to take part in the Live Oracle Webcast event.
Oracle recently acquired Datanomic, a leading provider of enterprise customer data quality solutions. The combination of Datanomic technology and Oracle's data integration and master data management products, will deliver a complete, integrated and best-of-breed solution for data quality.
Hear how you can apply the combination of Datanomic technology and Oracle's Product Data Quality solutions to:
Ensure data integrity across your enterprise while reducing the manual effort required to resolve customer, product and other data issues
ldentify a single view of your customer data for better segmentation and analysis
Improve compliance screening for regulations such as Anti-Money Laundering legislation, Politically Exposed Persons, and other government mandates
Ensure effective business improvement with a single data quality platform that includes specialized capabilities for different data types
Attend this webcast to learn about Oracle's strategy and product plans and how the new products acquired from Datanomic will impact Oracle's Applications, Oracle Data Integration, and Oracle Master Data Management.
Deliver a Superior Customer Experience with Oracle CRM
Thu, 7 Jul 2011 16:30:00 PDT
Learn tips and techniques from Oracle experts, talk back through live chat.
Join us for the Oracle CRM & Commerce Online Forum, where analysts, customers and Oracle executives will come together to share why it's more important than ever to deliver an engaging and consistent experience that sets your business apart.
If you manage your company's strategy for marketing, sales, service, or commerce, the Oracle CRM & Commerce Online Forum offers you the unique opportunity to learn about key market trends. Event highlights offer you the chance to:
Hear Anthony Lye, Oracle's senior vice president of CRM, discuss six CRM transformations that are driving innovation and increasing customer effectiveness
Learn how leading companies are using Oracle CRM and commerce solutions to deliver a superior customer experience that sets their business apart
See what's new in the latest release of Oracle CRM On Demand, including more mobile, enhanced cloud-based multi-channel communications, deeper industry support, and increased collaboration
Register now to learn more about the agenda, sessions, and speakers.
Introducing Java 7
Tue, 5 Jul 2011 14:00:00 PDT
Find out how Oracle is working with the Java community to move Java forward.
Join us for a global gathering of the Java community on July 7, when Oracle will host multiple events and a Webcast to celebrate Java 7. With contributions from Java users around the world, Java 7 is a testament to the vibrancy of the Java community and to Oracle's ongoing commitment to the language and technology. Come see what Java 7 can do for you and how we're moving Java forward together.
Get an update on Oracle Storage and news about Oracle and Pillar
Oracle Agrees to Buy Pillar Data Systems.
Please join Mark Hurd and John Fowler for an update on Oracle's storage strategy, including more information on Oracle's agreement to acquire Pillar Data Systems.
Oracle is changing the face of IT by providing the world's most complete, open, and integrated business software and hardware systems.And we're about to redefine storage. Join us on June 30 to find out how you will benefit.
Japanese Telco got 8 times the performance at 1/10th the energy consumed
Softbank Mobile Corporation, a fast growing mobile telecommunications provider based in Tokyo, Japan, has gained eight times the data warehouse processing capacity while replacing 36 Teradata racks with just three Oracle Exadata racks. The new data warehouse running on Oracle Exadata is connected to the company's customer care and billing system and has resulted in these benefits:
150% increase in storage capacity
Reduced database running costs by 50%
Reduced operational costs by more than half
Accelerated analysis of billions of call records by more than 300%
SoftBank Mobile initially considered updating its existing Teradata warehouse but decided it would be too costly. The company then compared five solutions before selecting Oracle Exadata Database Machine.
Give your users the dashboards, customizable processes, and self-service reporting they need.
Live Webcast
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
9:00 a.m. – 10:00 a.m.
Extend Your Oracle Applications: Meet Business-User Demands While Satisfying Business Objectives
It's all about combining the right applications with the right business-oriented tools.
Are your business users asking for role-based dashboards, customizable business processes, and self-service reporting?
Business users have become a lot more savvy about analysis and data - and they want fast results at their fingertips. You need to create complete user experiences for your applications that include:
Contextual, personalized user interfaces
Agile, decision-centric business processes
Self-service reporting and analysis
Are you concerned about customizations that may not be sustainable or scalable?
Oracle has the tools that let you easily configure your applications to meet changing business needs. Make the changes you want without relying on heavy coding. Open, standards-based, business-driven tools align with your current IT portfolio - without adding more complexity. This kind of extensibility gives business users greater control while increasing their productivity, improving their ability to respond to changing business conditions, and lowering total cost of ownership.
Get up to speed on Oracle's application-extensibility tools.
Join Steve Miranda, SVP of Oracle Applications Development, as he hosts a conversation with two senior Oracle executives in applications product development: Ted Farrell, chief architect and SVP; and Paul Rodwick, VP of product management.
Develop Your Strategy and Roadmap for Cloud Computing
The cost and speed advantages of cloud computing are clear and compelling. But how do you actually move to cloud computing? To discover practical approaches to building your cloud foundation, join us for our four-part webcast series.
Cloud experts will share real-world best practices, reference architectures, detailed customer case studies, and more. You will learn how to transform your IT into a superior service provider with a strategy and roadmap for building, deploying, and managing your enterprise cloud.
Attend the webcast series to learn how to:
Build a state-of-the-art cloud architecture
Leverage your existing IT investments
Optimize your IT management processes
Whether you are considering a move to cloud computing or have already adopted a cloud model, the cloud computing webcast series offers you the insights you need to take full advantage of cloud computing.
Registration is required to attend these events. Please register now to attend any, and all, of the complimentary Webcasts.
May 5, 2011 9:00 AM PT - The Roadmap to Enterprise Cloud Computing
May 12, 2011 9:00 AM PT - Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud: Revolutionizing Data Center Consolidation
May 19, 2011 9:00 AM PT - Private Cloud Database Consolidation
May 26, 2011 9:00 AM PT - Planning a Cloud Implementation
Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud simplifies management and maintenance.
Webcast: Date: Thursday, April 28, 2011 Time: 10 a.m. PT/1 p.m. ET
Simplify Your Oracle Application Infrastructure
Many IT organizations have adopted do-it-yourself application infrastructure models, creating multiple infrastructure silos and the need for multiple vendors. As a result, managing and maintaining the infrastructure has become a costly and time-consuming task, hindering business. Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud simplifies all of this for you.
Join us for this Webcast and hear about the industry's first engineered enterprise application consolidation platform.
You'll discover how to:
Consolidate your Oracle applications such as Oracle E-Business Suite, Siebel, PeopleSoft, and JD Edwards on Oracle Exalogic
Build cloud-enabling elastic capacity in your Oracle application infrastructure
Expedite time to market for your Oracle applications
Get the Technical Know-how to Succeed with the World's Most Popular Open Source Database
MySQL is the world's most popular open-source database, and powers websites and applications of numerous leading and fast-growing organizations.
The OTN Developer Day MySQL is a one-stop shop for you to learn all the essential skills about MySQL. In this free, one-day seminar, we will cover everything you need to know to successfully design, develop, and manage your MySQL databases. You'll also learn the guidelines and best practices in performance tuning and scalability.
Attend this event and gain the knowledge to:
Develop your new applications cost-effectively using MySQL
Improve performance of your existing MySQL databases
Manage your MySQL environment more efficiently
Don't miss this exclusive opportunity to network with your peers, and hear the tips and tricks from the MySQL experts at Oracle. No matter you're a DBA or a developer, come find out how you can make the best of MySQL in your IT infrastructure.
Virtual Developer Day for Rich Enterprise Applications
Thu, 14 Apr 2011 09:30:00 -0800
FREE, Online, Live, Expert-Driven Sessions and Labs
Many enterprises are reducing travel, conference, and training budgets for their developers without any change in expected results demanded of those developers. How can you keep up?
Join us for a new breed of online, FREE developer events at Oracle Technology Network's Virtual Developer Day.
Come join us and learn how Rich Enterprise Applications, powered by Oracle Application Development Framework (Oracle ADF), can be developed faster than ever. Learn how to extend Oracle Fusion Applications and Oracle Fusion Middleware with rich user interfaces and Web 2.0 functionality. Create multichannel capable applications delivering desktop quality, highly interactive user experiences that are pre-integrated to enterprise class server technology.
You will learn how Oracle's REA solution, built on Oracle ADF Faces and Oracle WebCenter, which uniquely delivers:
Rich Data Visualization
Integrated Enterprise 2.0 services
Business Process Integration
Dynamic Rendering: Flash, Mobile, Ajax
Oracle is the Leader in Application Servers
Thu, 14 Apr 2011 07:30:00 -0800
Oracle WebLogic Server tops all major performance benchmarks.
The Oracle WebLogic 11g application server product line is the industry's most comprehensive Java platform for developing, deploying, and integrating enterprise applications. It provides the foundation for application grid, which is an architecture that enables enterprises to outperform their competitors while minimizing operational costs.
Outperform your competition—Fast, scalable systems enable IT to change as the business grows
Lower operational costs—Superior manageability with automation reduces the time and expense of keeping systems up and running
Best for Oracle portfolio—The product line is well integrated with the rest of Oracle's portfolio and has excellent support for interoperability with other systems
Access new resources on Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g and see all the latest innovations.
Compare Oracle WebLogic to IBM WebSphere and you'll see why Oracle is the top choice. Not only does Oracle WebLogic lead IBM WebSphere in performance, it is also significantly less expensive to own and operate.
Oracle WebLogic is the industry's most comprehensive Java platform for developing, deploying, and integrating enterprise applications. With Oracle WebLogic Server as your foundation, you can outperform your competitors, get the most complete platform for the cloud, and keep your costs under control.
Join this Webcast and learn how Oracle WebLogic outperforms IBM WebSphere:
In total cost of ownership, by up to 58%
In performance, according to SPECj benchmarks
In cloud readiness, as the power behind Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud
Next-Generation Software for HR in the Cloud
Thu, 07 Apr 2011 10:10:00 -0800
Introducing Oracle Fusion Human Capital Management: New SaaS Applications from the Leader in HCM
It's time to rethink the business of HR.
Are you getting the best from your people?
Talent-driven innovation is the top source of competitive advantage in today's global knowledge economy. The resulting pressure on HR professionals has never been more acute. Against this backdrop, it's no surprise that next-generation human capital management (HCM) solutions and software as a service (SaaS) are generating intense interest among HR executives.
Do you have all the relevant information?
You may be evaluating your HCM technology investments today or you might simply be gathering information on the available options. Your best opportunity is to understand how Oracle has rethought the business of HR to provide value to every person in the organization—from HR professionals to employees and managers.
Two Webcasts designed to bring you up to speed
Join your host Steve Miranda, SVP of Oracle Applications Development, for two executive Webcasts featuring special guests from the Principal Financial Group, a customer using Oracle Fusion Human Capital Management (Oracle Fusion HCM).
Register Now for Oracle Fusion HCM: Rethink the Business of HR, April 19, 9:00–10:00 a.m. PDT. Hear directly from HR executives about the value that modern HCM applications bring, and discover the innovations delivered in Oracle Fusion HCM.
Register Now for Oracle Fusion HCM: Next-Generation Technology for HR in the Cloud, April 20, 9:00–10:00 a.m. PDT. Hear a CIO's perspective on the key considerations for HR in the cloud, and explore the technology that powers Oracle Fusion HCM.
The Power of GlassFish Server 3.1
Wed, 06 Apr 2011 08:45:00 -0800
Get an insider look at powerful new capabilities for Java EE 6
Live Webcast:
Tuesday, April 12, 2011, 10:00 am PT / 1:00 pm ET / 19.00 CET
With the latest release of GlassFish, developers can now enjoy the power and elegance of Java EE 6 development combined with extensive support for clustering in the administration console.
Join engineering for a deep dive into these new capabilities of Oracle GlassFish Server 3.1. Developers, Architects and IT Management will learn about:
The Most Advanced Gateway for Fast, Secure, and Scalable Connectivity to SOA and the Cloud
Free Webcast:
Thursday, April 14, 2011, 10 a.m. PT/1 p.m. ET
The new Oracle Enterprise Gateway solution makes it easy to secure, accelerate, integrate, and route XML and other types of data in your enterprise and beyond. By joining this Webcast you will learn why Oracle Enterprise Gateway is the one-stop shop for all of your SOA and cloud security management needs. Maneesh Joshi and Jyothi Swaroop of Oracle will discuss product benefits of Oracle Enterprise Gateway such as:
DMZ-class security and comprehensive threat defense system for SOA and cloud environments
Ultrafast XML processing, allowing SOA and cloud applications to offload resource-intensive, XML-based operations
Open and standards-based, certified on Oracle Fusion Middleware and non-Oracle technologies
Oracle to Spotlight Business-Ready Storage Solutions at SNW Spring 2011
Storage portfolio enables customers to lower IT cost and accelerate performance
SNW Spring 2011: April 4-7, Santa Clara, California
Oracle is proud to be a platinum sponsor at SNW Spring 2011, the world's largest storage, data center, and IT infrastructure conference. While at SNW Spring 2011, please visit booth #306 and learn about Oracle's complete portfolio of business-ready storage solutions.
Oracle will demonstrate key elements of its storage products and solutions portfolio, including Oracle's ZFS Storage Appliance, its record-setting Flash technologies, and the recently announced StorageTek T10000C tape drive, the industry's fastest, highest capacity tape drive.
Oracle storage experts will also present on a range of topics including protecting, replicating, and de-duplicating databases, cloud backup and recovery, and the impact of PCI Express on storage architectures and the data center. For more information on Oracle's sessions at SNW, visit Oracle's SNW events page.
The Oracle Exadata Database Machine is the fastest selling new product in Oracle history—with a growing community of satisfied users and a strong sales pipeline. Here what analysts, the media, and, most importantly, Oracle customers are saying about Oracle Exadata.
Oracle's rich portfolio of cloud offerings includes Oracle On Demand, which provides software as a service, as well as hosted and managed alternatives to on-premise deployment. For enterprises that are building private clouds and for service providers that are building public clouds, Oracle offers comprehensive solutions for platform as a service and infrastructure as a service.
Talk to Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g experts, hear how companies are improving service quality and lowering costs.
Register to attend one or more of the upcoming Oracle Enterprise Manager Webcasts, presented by Oracle experts. Each Webcast will include an interactive Q&A session and is scheduled for 60 minutes.
Registration is required to attend the Webcasts. Please select each Webcast you are interested in attending and then complete the registration form below.
Event Date: 03/24/2011 10:00 AM Pacific Daylight Time
Choose the Best Integrated Service-Oriented Architecture Platform for Your Business
Oracle SOA delivers increased agility and lowers total cost of ownership in the most heterogeneous environments while addressing a broad range of complex integration requirements.
Attend this Webcast to gain a solid understanding of:
The difference between the Oracle and IBM approach to comprehensive SOA
How Oracle reduces complexity and costs while achieving faster time to market for your business
Oracle SOA Suite technology that gives your business a competitive edge
Live Webcast: 03/09/2011 10:00 AM Pacific Standard Time
Mainframe Migration with Oracle Technologies: a Low-Cost, Low-Risk Choice
Attend this Webcast to learn how technologies such as Oracle Tuxedo, Oracle Coherence, and Oracle GoldenGate, enable businesses to quickly and safely migrate away from their IBM mainframe environments. Oracle customers can run their applications on standards-based open systems, significantly cutting their time to market and costs.
Join us for this Webcast and see what Oracle technologies can do for your business:
Oracle Tuxedo rehosting tools and techniques can provide automated migration coverage for more than 95% of mainframe application assets, at a fraction of the cost
Oracle GoldenGate can migrate data from mainframe systems to open systems, eliminating risks associated with the data migration
Oracle Coherence hosts transactional data in memory providing mainframe-like data performance and linear scalability
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We are building out our content management system and community support to be launched here shortly. In the meantime this infrastructure and our editorial content can still be found at Java.net.
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Find out why the world's most popular open source database is even better on Windows.
Live Date/Time: March 16, 2011 | 9:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m. US Pacific Time
Join our Online Forum and discover how you can win with MySQL on Windows. Oracle's MySQL Vice President of Engineering Tomas Ulin will kick off a comprehensive agenda of presentations enabling you to better understand:
Why the world's most popular open source database is extremely popular on Windows, both for enterprise users and ISVs
How MySQL fits into the Windows environment, and what are the upcoming milestones to make MySQL even better on the Microsoft platform
What are the visual tools at your disposal to effectively develop, deploy and manage MySQL applications on Windows
How you can deliver highly available business critical Windows based MySQL applications
Why Security Solutions Provider SonicWall selected MySQL over Microsoft SQL Server, and how they successfully deliver MySQL based solutions
Additionally, Oracle experts will be on live chat throughout the event to answer your toughest questions.
Charting Your Course with Oracle Applications is a global event series designed to help business and IT executives assess the impact of new inflection points on their business and applications roadmap: changing workforces, shifting customer and constituent bases, and increased volatility.
Learn how innovations ranging from new deployment models like cloud computing to the introduction of social applications and smart devices are delivering results across all areas of business and industry.
The new Oracle WebCenter Suite 11g is like no other portal or social computing solution. We've consolidated the best of our industry-leading portal products and technologies into one exceptional modern user experience platform. Developers can quickly build and business users can easily customize portals, Websites, and composite applications with integrated social and collaborative services—all on a comprehensive content management infrastructure.
Oracle WebCenter Suite 11g helps improve business productivity by giving employees, customers, and partners access to contextual information in a personalized, social, and collaborative work environment.
Event Date: Thursday, February 24, 2011
Event Time: 10:00 a.m. PT / 1:00 p.m. ET
Financial institutions are faced with a new normal. Their IT departments are revisiting strategies to enhance customer service, reduce costs, and cater to a complex regulatory environment—all while differentiating their financial institution. Attend a new Oracle Webcast to see how these strategies are achieved with Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud.
Oracle Exalogic offers an IT solution that is highly scalable for growth and reliable for maximum customer service. Easy to maintain at the lowest cost and with minimal downtime, Exalogic allows your IT department to maximize the utilization of hardware resources and help lower transaction costs.
Oracle Exalogic—with the world's #1 application server, Oracle WebLogic Server—is the perfect fit for your financial institution delivering extreme Java performance for mission-critical, latency-sensitive applications.
Join us for this Webcast and learn more about the benefits of Oracle Exalogic for your financial organization:
Rapid deployment of financial Java applications on a standardized, pre-engineered platform
Highly tuned engineered systems that provide extreme Java performance with low latency
Unmatched reliability and scalability with Oracle WebLogic Server
Cloud-enabled elastic capacity to help you manage and expand your business
Develop Your Strategy and Roadmap for Cloud Computing The cost and speed advantages of cloud computing are clear and compelling. But how do you actually move to cloud computing? To discover a practical approach to building your cloud foundation, join us for the Oracle Enterprise Cloud Summit.
During this full-day event, cloud experts will share real-world best practices, reference architectures, detailed customer case studies, and more. You'll learn how to transform IT into a superior service provider with a strategy and roadmap for building, deploying, and managing an enterprise cloud.
Attend the Oracle Enterprise Cloud Summit to learn how to:
Build a state-of-the-art cloud architecture
Leverage your existing IT investments
Optimize your IT management processes
Whether you are considering a move to cloud computing or have already adopted a cloud model, this event offers you the insights you need to take full advantage of cloud computing.
Watch "fireside chats" with experts about new tools, technologies, and trends in application development. Includes live Q&A, bring your questions!
Next Show (subject to change):
Feb. 15 @ 10am PT: Java and Oracle, One Year Later (with Ajay Patel)
Join us for a special live conversation with Ajay Patel, VP of Product Development for Application Grid Products about the changes that have come to Java and Oracle since the Sun acquisition, just over a year ago.
Capture More from Data Integration: Why You Get More Value from Oracle than IBM
Event Date: Thursday., February 10, 2011
Time: 11 a.m. PT/2 p.m. ET
Oracle has best-of-breed technology in every category of information management. And the same holds true for data integration.
Oracle Data Integration products, which include Oracle Data Integrator Enterprise Edition and Oracle GoldenGate, provide complete, open, and integrated solutions and deliver more value than IBM. Compare the solutions offered by the two companies and you'll find Oracle provides:
Lower cost of ownership
Higher performance in both bulk data movement and real-time data replication
Easier and faster development and management
Rock-solid reliability for data delivery and integrity
A unified offering under Oracle Fusion Middleware
Join us in this live Webcast and discover why customers choose Oracle over IBM in data integration projects and how Oracle delivers flexible and robust solutions for the enterprise.
Presented by:
Irem Radzik - Director of Product Marketing, Data Integration, Oracle Dain Hansen - Director, Product Marketing, Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle
Coming to your town soon is a full day of real world database performance with:
Tom Kyte, author of the ever popular AskTom Blog,
Andrew Holdsworth, head of Oracle's Real World Performance Team, and
Graham Wood, renowned Oracle Database performance architect.
These Oracle experts will debate, discuss and delineate the best practices for designing hardware architectures, deploying Oracle databases, and developing applications that deliver the fastest possible performance for your business.
During open Q&A you'll get your most pressing performance questions answered, and hear how IOUG members and Oracle customers leverage Tom, Andrew and Graham's best practice guidelines.
Live Date/Time: February 24, 2011 | 9:00 a.m. - 1:00 p.m. Pacific Standard Time
Join us for the Oracle Security Online Forum, where leading industry executives and Oracle product experts will come together to discuss security trends, best practices, and proven solutions for your business.
Security professionals, IT executives, IT architects, identity management and database specialists, data architects, IT administrators and auditors will all benefit. Don't miss this unique opportunity to hear:
Mary Ann Davidson, Oracle's Chief Security Officer-onindustry-leading standards, technologies, and practices that ensure that Oracle products-and your entire system-remain as secure as possible.
Jeff Margolies, Partner, Accenture's Security Practice-on key security trends and solutions to prepare for in 2011 and beyond.
Vipin Samar, Vice President of Oracle Database Security solutions-on new approaches to protecting data and database infrastructure against evolving threats.
Tom Kyte, Senior Technical Architect and Oracle Database Guru-on how you can safeguard your enterprise application data with Oracle's Database Security solutions.
Nishant Kaushik, Oracle's Chief Identity Strategist-on how organizations can look to Oracle Identity Management solutions to help them reduce fraud and streamline compliance.
Additionally, Oracle security solution experts will be on live chat throughout the event to answer your toughest questions.
Attend this online event and find out how you can take a proactive approach to secure your enterprise.
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at org.jboss.portal.portlet.impl.jsr168.api.FilterChainImpl.doFilter(FilterChainImpl.java:159)
at org.jboss.portlet.filter.JBossPortletFilter.doFilter(JBossPortletFilter.java:79)
at org.jboss.portal.portlet.impl.jsr168.api.FilterChainImpl.doFilter(FilterChainImpl.java:159)
at org.jboss.portal.portlet.impl.jsr168.api.FilterChainImpl.doFilter(FilterChainImpl.java:80)
at org.jboss.portal.portlet.impl.jsr168.PortletContainerImpl.dispatch(PortletContainerImpl.java:505)
at org.jboss.portal.portlet.container.ContainerPortletDispatcher.invoke(ContainerPortletDispatcher.java:42)
at org.jboss.portal.portlet.PortletInvokerInterceptor.invoke(PortletInvokerInterceptor.java:82)
at org.jboss.portal.core.aspects.portlet.TransactionInterceptor.org$jboss$portal$core$aspects$portlet$TransactionInterceptor$invokeNotSupported$aop(TransactionInterceptor.java:97)
at org.jboss.portal.core.aspects.portlet.TransactionInterceptor$invokeNotSupported_N6922078035659651697.invokeNext(TransactionInterceptor$invokeNotSupported_N6922078035659651697.java)
at org.jboss.aspects.tx.TxPolicy.invokeInNoTx(TxPolicy.java:66)
at org.jboss.aspects.tx.TxInterceptor$NotSupported.invoke(TxInterceptor.java:112)
at org.jboss.portal.core.aspects.portlet.TransactionInterceptor$invokeNotSupported_N6922078035659651697.invokeNext(TransactionInterceptor$invokeNotSupported_N6922078035659651697.java)
at org.jboss.aspects.tx.TxPolicy.invokeInNoTx(TxPolicy.java:66)
at org.jboss.aspects.tx.TxInterceptor$NotSupported.invoke(TxInterceptor.java:102)
at org.jboss.portal.core.aspects.portlet.TransactionInterceptor$invokeNotSupported_N6922078035659651697.invokeNext(TransactionInterceptor$invokeNotSupported_N6922078035659651697.java)
at org.jboss.portal.core.aspects.portlet.TransactionInterceptor.invokeNotSupported(TransactionInterceptor.java)
at org.jboss.portal.core.aspects.portlet.TransactionInterceptor.invoke(TransactionInterceptor.java:58)
at org.jboss.portal.portlet.PortletInvokerInterceptor.invoke(PortletInvokerInterceptor.java:82)
at org.jboss.portal.core.aspects.portlet.HeaderInterceptor.invoke(HeaderInterceptor.java:49)
at org.jboss.portal.portlet.PortletInvokerInterceptor.invoke(PortletInvokerInterceptor.java:82)
at org.jboss.portal.portlet.aspects.portlet.EventPayloadInterceptor.invoke(EventPayloadInterceptor.java:196)
at org.jboss.portal.portlet.PortletInvokerInterceptor.invoke(PortletInvokerInterceptor.java:82)
at org.jboss.portal.portlet.aspects.portlet.RequestAttributeConversationInterceptor.invoke(RequestAttributeConversationInterceptor.java:119)
at org.jboss.portal.portlet.PortletInvokerInterceptor.invoke(PortletInvokerInterceptor.java:82)
at org.jboss.portal.portlet.PortletInvokerInterceptor.invoke(PortletInvokerInterceptor.java:82)
at org.jboss.portal.core.aspects.portlet.SignOutInterceptor.invoke(SignOutInterceptor.java:43)
at org.jboss.portal.portlet.PortletInvokerInterceptor.invoke(PortletInvokerInterceptor.java:82)
at org.jboss.portal.core.aspects.portlet.AjaxInterceptor.invoke(AjaxInterceptor.java:49)
at org.jboss.portal.portlet.PortletInvokerInterceptor.invoke(PortletInvokerInterceptor.java:82)
at org.jboss.portal.core.aspects.portlet.BackwardCompatibilityInterceptor.invoke(BackwardCompatibilityInterceptor.java:46)
at org.jboss.portal.portlet.PortletInvokerInterceptor.invoke(PortletInvokerInterceptor.java:82)
at org.jboss.portal.portlet.bridge.BridgeInterceptor.invoke(BridgeInterceptor.java:49)
at org.jboss.portal.portlet.PortletInvokerInterceptor.invoke(PortletInvokerInterceptor.java:82)
at org.jboss.portal.portlet.aspects.portlet.PortletSessionSynchronizationInterceptor.invoke(PortletSessionSynchronizationInterceptor.java:82)
at org.jboss.portal.portlet.PortletInvokerInterceptor.invoke(PortletInvokerInterceptor.java:82)
at org.jboss.portal.portlet.aspects.portlet.ContextTrackerInterceptor.invoke(ContextTrackerInterceptor.java:48)
at org.jboss.portal.portlet.PortletInvokerInterceptor.invoke(PortletInvokerInterceptor.java:82)
at org.jboss.portal.portlet.aspects.portlet.ContextDispatcherInterceptor.access$001(ContextDispatcherInterceptor.java:49)
at org.jboss.portal.portlet.aspects.portlet.ContextDispatcherInterceptor$1.doCallback(ContextDispatcherInterceptor.java:123)
at org.jboss.portal.web.command.CommandDispatcher$CallbackCommand.execute(CommandDispatcher.java:74)
at sun.reflect.GeneratedMethodAccessor839.invoke(Unknown Source)
at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:25)
at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:597)
at org.jboss.portal.web.command.CommandServlet.doGet(CommandServlet.java:130)
at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:690)
at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:803)
at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.internalDoFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:290)
at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.doFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:206)
at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationDispatcher.invoke(ApplicationDispatcher.java:654)
at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationDispatcher.doInclude(ApplicationDispatcher.java:557)
at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationDispatcher.include(ApplicationDispatcher.java:481)
at org.jboss.portal.web.command.CommandServlet.include(CommandServlet.java:79)
at org.jboss.portal.web.command.CommandDispatcher.include(CommandDispatcher.java:50)
at org.jboss.portal.web.jboss.JBossWebContext.include(JBossWebContext.java:66)
at org.jboss.portal.web.impl.DefaultServletContainer.include(DefaultServletContainer.java:190)
at org.jboss.portal.portlet.impl.spi.AbstractServerContext.dispatch(AbstractServerContext.java:69)
at org.jboss.portal.portlet.aspects.portlet.ContextDispatcherInterceptor.invoke(ContextDispatcherInterceptor.java:77)
at org.jboss.portal.portlet.PortletInvokerInterceptor.invoke(PortletInvokerInterceptor.java:82)
at org.jboss.portal.portlet.aspects.portlet.SecureTransportInterceptor.invoke(SecureTransportInterceptor.java:69)
at org.jboss.portal.portlet.PortletInvokerInterceptor.invoke(PortletInvokerInterceptor.java:82)
at org.jboss.portal.portlet.aspects.portlet.ValveInterceptor.invoke(ValveInterceptor.java:75)
at org.jboss.portal.portlet.PortletInvokerInterceptor.invoke(PortletInvokerInterceptor.java:82)
at org.jboss.portal.portlet.container.ContainerPortletInvoker.invoke(ContainerPortletInvoker.java:116)
at org.jboss.portal.portlet.PortletInvokerInterceptor.invoke(PortletInvokerInterceptor.java:82)
at org.jboss.portal.portlet.state.producer.ProducerPortletInvoker.invoke(ProducerPortletInvoker.java:221)
at org.jboss.portal.core.impl.portlet.state.ProducerPortletInvoker.org$jboss$portal$core$impl$portlet$state$ProducerPortletInvoker$invoke$aop(ProducerPortletInvoker.java:53)
at org.jboss.portal.core.impl.portlet.state.ProducerPortletInvoker$invoke_N8654503705355129869.invokeNext(ProducerPortletInvoker$invoke_N8654503705355129869.java)
at org.jboss.aspects.tx.TxPolicy.invokeInCallerTx(TxPolicy.java:126)
at org.jboss.aspects.tx.TxInterceptor$Required.invoke(TxInterceptor.java:195)
at org.jboss.portal.core.impl.portlet.state.ProducerPortletInvoker$invoke_N8654503705355129869.invokeNext(ProducerPortletInvoker$invoke_N8654503705355129869.java)
at org.jboss.aspects.tx.TxPolicy.invokeInCallerTx(TxPolicy.java:126)
at org.jboss.aspects.tx.TxInterceptor$Required.invoke(TxInterceptor.java:195)
at org.jboss.portal.core.impl.portlet.state.ProducerPortletInvoker$invoke_N8654503705355129869.invokeNext(ProducerPortletInvoker$invoke_N8654503705355129869.java)
at org.jboss.portal.core.impl.portlet.state.ProducerPortletInvoker.invoke(ProducerPortletInvoker.java)
at org.jboss.portal.portlet.federation.impl.FederatedPortletInvokerService.invoke(FederatedPortletInvokerService.java:145)
at org.jboss.portal.portlet.federation.impl.FederatingPortletInvokerService.invoke(FederatingPortletInvokerService.java:149)
at org.jboss.portal.core.model.instance.InstanceInvoker.invoke(InstanceInvoker.java:42)
at org.jboss.portal.portlet.PortletInvokerInterceptor.invoke(PortletInvokerInterceptor.java:82)
at org.jboss.portal.portlet.aspects.portlet.PortalSessionSynchronizationInterceptor.invoke(PortalSessionSynchronizationInterceptor.java:93)
at org.jboss.portal.portlet.PortletInvokerInterceptor.invoke(PortletInvokerInterceptor.java:82)
at org.jboss.portal.core.model.instance.InstanceSecurityInterceptor.invoke(InstanceSecurityInterceptor.java:93)
at org.jboss.portal.portlet.PortletInvokerInterceptor.invoke(PortletInvokerInterceptor.java:82)
at org.jboss.portal.portlet.aspects.portlet.ConsumerCacheInterceptor.invoke(ConsumerCacheInterceptor.java:162)
at org.jboss.portal.core.impl.model.instance.InstanceContainerImpl.org$jboss$portal$core$impl$model$instance$InstanceContainerImpl$invoke$aop(InstanceContainerImpl.java:408)
at org.jboss.portal.core.impl.model.instance.InstanceContainerImpl$invoke_N8654503705355129869.invokeNext(InstanceContainerImpl$invoke_N8654503705355129869.java)
at org.jboss.aspects.tx.TxPolicy.invokeInCallerTx(TxPolicy.java:126)
at org.jboss.aspects.tx.TxInterceptor$Required.invoke(TxInterceptor.java:195)
at org.jboss.portal.core.impl.model.instance.InstanceContainerImpl$invoke_N8654503705355129869.invokeNext(InstanceContainerImpl$invoke_N8654503705355129869.java)
at org.jboss.aspects.tx.TxPolicy.invokeInCallerTx(TxPolicy.java:126)
at org.jboss.aspects.tx.TxInterceptor$Required.invoke(TxInterceptor.java:195)
at org.jboss.portal.core.impl.model.instance.InstanceContainerImpl$invoke_N8654503705355129869.invokeNext(InstanceContainerImpl$invoke_N8654503705355129869.java)
at org.jboss.portal.core.impl.model.instance.InstanceContainerImpl.invoke(InstanceContainerImpl.java)
at org.jboss.portal.core.impl.model.instance.AbstractInstance.invoke(AbstractInstance.java:231)
at org.jboss.portal.core.impl.model.content.InternalContentProvider.renderWindow(InternalContentProvider.java:294)
at org.jboss.portal.core.impl.model.content.generic.InternalGenericContentProvider.renderWindow(InternalGenericContentProvider.java:267)
at org.jboss.portal.core.cms.content.InternalCMSContentProvider.renderWindow(InternalCMSContentProvider.java:105)
at org.jboss.portal.core.model.portal.command.render.RenderWindowCommand.execute(RenderWindowCommand.java:100)
at org.jboss.portal.core.controller.ControllerCommand$1.invoke(ControllerCommand.java:68)
at org.jboss.portal.common.invocation.Invocation.invokeNext(Invocation.java:131)
at org.jboss.portal.core.aspects.controller.node.EventBroadcasterInterceptor.invoke(EventBroadcasterInterceptor.java:124)
at org.jboss.portal.core.controller.ControllerInterceptor.invoke(ControllerInterceptor.java:40)
at org.jboss.portal.common.invocation.Invocation.invokeNext(Invocation.java:115)
at org.jboss.portal.core.aspects.controller.PageCustomizerInterceptor.invoke(PageCustomizerInterceptor.java:134)
at org.jboss.portal.core.controller.ControllerInterceptor.invoke(ControllerInterceptor.java:40)
at org.jboss.portal.common.invocation.Invocation.invokeNext(Invocation.java:115)
at org.jboss.portal.core.aspects.controller.PolicyEnforcementInterceptor.invoke(PolicyEnforcementInterceptor.java:78)
at org.jboss.portal.core.controller.ControllerInterceptor.invoke(ControllerInterceptor.java:40)
at org.jboss.portal.common.invocation.Invocation.invokeNext(Invocation.java:115)
at org.jboss.portal.core.aspects.controller.node.PortalNodeInterceptor.invoke(PortalNodeInterceptor.java:81)
at org.jboss.portal.core.controller.ControllerInterceptor.invoke(ControllerInterceptor.java:40)
at org.jboss.portal.common.invocation.Invocation.invokeNext(Invocation.java:115)
at org.jboss.portal.core.aspects.controller.BackwardCompatibilityInterceptor.invoke(BackwardCompatibilityInterceptor.java:48)
at org.jboss.portal.core.controller.ControllerInterceptor.invoke(ControllerInterceptor.java:40)
at org.jboss.portal.common.invocation.Invocation.invokeNext(Invocation.java:115)
at org.jboss.portal.core.aspects.controller.ControlInterceptor.invoke(ControlInterceptor.java:56)
at org.jboss.portal.core.controller.ControllerInterceptor.invoke(ControllerInterceptor.java:40)
at org.jboss.portal.common.invocation.Invocation.invokeNext(Invocation.java:115)
at org.jboss.portal.core.aspects.controller.NavigationalStateInterceptor.invoke(NavigationalStateInterceptor.java:42)
at org.jboss.portal.core.controller.ControllerInterceptor.invoke(ControllerInterceptor.java:40)
at org.jboss.portal.common.invocation.Invocation.invokeNext(Invocation.java:115)
at org.jboss.portal.core.controller.ajax.AjaxInterceptor.invoke(AjaxInterceptor.java:55)
at org.jboss.portal.core.controller.ControllerInterceptor.invoke(ControllerInterceptor.java:40)
at org.jboss.portal.common.invocation.Invocation.invokeNext(Invocation.java:115)
at org.jboss.portal.core.aspects.controller.ResourceAcquisitionInterceptor.invoke(ResourceAcquisitionInterceptor.java:50)
at org.jboss.portal.core.controller.ControllerInterceptor.invoke(ControllerInterceptor.java:40)
at org.jboss.portal.common.invocation.Invocation.invokeNext(Invocation.java:115)
at org.jboss.portal.common.invocation.Invocation.invoke(Invocation.java:157)
at org.jboss.portal.core.controller.ControllerContext.execute(ControllerContext.java:134)
at org.jboss.portal.core.model.portal.command.render.RenderWindowCommand.render(RenderWindowCommand.java:80)
at org.jboss.portal.core.model.portal.command.render.RenderPageCommand.execute(RenderPageCommand.java:222)
at org.jboss.portal.core.controller.ControllerCommand$1.invoke(ControllerCommand.java:68)
at org.jboss.portal.common.invocation.Invocation.invokeNext(Invocation.java:131)
at org.jboss.portal.core.aspects.controller.node.EventBroadcasterInterceptor.invoke(EventBroadcasterInterceptor.java:124)
at org.jboss.portal.core.controller.ControllerInterceptor.invoke(ControllerInterceptor.java:40)
at org.jboss.portal.common.invocation.Invocation.invokeNext(Invocation.java:115)
at org.jboss.portal.core.aspects.controller.PageCustomizerInterceptor.invoke(PageCustomizerInterceptor.java:134)
at org.jboss.portal.core.controller.ControllerInterceptor.invoke(ControllerInterceptor.java:40)
at org.jboss.portal.common.invocation.Invocation.invokeNext(Invocation.java:115)
at org.jboss.portal.core.aspects.controller.PolicyEnforcementInterceptor.invoke(PolicyEnforcementInterceptor.java:78)
at org.jboss.portal.core.controller.ControllerInterceptor.invoke(ControllerInterceptor.java:40)
at org.jboss.portal.common.invocation.Invocation.invokeNext(Invocation.java:115)
at org.jboss.portal.core.aspects.controller.node.PortalNodeInterceptor.invoke(PortalNodeInterceptor.java:81)
at org.jboss.portal.core.controller.ControllerInterceptor.invoke(ControllerInterceptor.java:40)
at org.jboss.portal.common.invocation.Invocation.invokeNext(Invocation.java:115)
at org.jboss.portal.core.aspects.controller.BackwardCompatibilityInterceptor.invoke(BackwardCompatibilityInterceptor.java:48)
at org.jboss.portal.core.controller.ControllerInterceptor.invoke(ControllerInterceptor.java:40)
at org.jboss.portal.common.invocation.Invocation.invokeNext(Invocation.java:115)
at org.jboss.portal.core.aspects.controller.ControlInterceptor.invoke(ControlInterceptor.java:56)
at org.jboss.portal.core.controller.ControllerInterceptor.invoke(ControllerInterceptor.java:40)
at org.jboss.portal.common.invocation.Invocation.invokeNext(Invocation.java:115)
at org.jboss.portal.core.aspects.controller.NavigationalStateInterceptor.invoke(NavigationalStateInterceptor.java:42)
at org.jboss.portal.core.controller.ControllerInterceptor.invoke(ControllerInterceptor.java:40)
at org.jboss.portal.common.invocation.Invocation.invokeNext(Invocation.java:115)
at org.jboss.portal.core.controller.ajax.AjaxInterceptor.invoke(AjaxInterceptor.java:55)
at org.jboss.portal.core.controller.ControllerInterceptor.invoke(ControllerInterceptor.java:40)
at org.jboss.portal.common.invocation.Invocation.invokeNext(Invocation.java:115)
at org.jboss.portal.core.aspects.controller.ResourceAcquisitionInterceptor.invoke(ResourceAcquisitionInterceptor.java:50)
at org.jboss.portal.core.controller.ControllerInterceptor.invoke(ControllerInterceptor.java:40)
at org.jboss.portal.common.invocation.Invocation.invokeNext(Invocation.java:115)
at org.jboss.portal.common.invocation.Invocation.invoke(Invocation.java:157)
at org.jboss.portal.core.controller.ControllerContext.execute(ControllerContext.java:134)
at org.jboss.portal.core.model.portal.PortalObjectResponseHandler.processCommandResponse(PortalObjectResponseHandler.java:80)
at org.jboss.portal.core.controller.classic.ClassicResponseHandler.processHandlers(ClassicResponseHandler.java:78)
at org.jboss.portal.core.controller.classic.ClassicResponseHandler.processCommandResponse(ClassicResponseHandler.java:53)
at org.jboss.portal.core.controller.handler.ResponseHandlerSelector.processCommandResponse(ResponseHandlerSelector.java:70)
at org.jboss.portal.core.controller.Controller.processCommandResponse(Controller.java:315)
at org.jboss.portal.core.controller.Controller.processCommand(Controller.java:303)
at org.jboss.portal.core.controller.Controller.handle(Controller.java:261)
at org.jboss.portal.server.RequestControllerDispatcher.invoke(RequestControllerDispatcher.java:51)
at org.jboss.portal.common.invocation.Invocation.invokeNext(Invocation.java:131)
at org.jboss.portal.core.cms.aspect.IdentityBindingInterceptor.invoke(IdentityBindingInterceptor.java:47)
at org.jboss.portal.server.ServerInterceptor.invoke(ServerInterceptor.java:38)
at org.jboss.portal.common.invocation.Invocation.invokeNext(Invocation.java:115)
at org.jboss.portal.server.aspects.server.ContentTypeInterceptor.invoke(ContentTypeInterceptor.java:68)
at org.jboss.portal.server.ServerInterceptor.invoke(ServerInterceptor.java:38)
at org.jboss.portal.common.invocation.Invocation.invokeNext(Invocation.java:115)
at org.jboss.portal.core.aspects.server.PortalContextPathInterceptor.invoke(PortalContextPathInterceptor.java:45)
at org.jboss.portal.server.ServerInterceptor.invoke(ServerInterceptor.java:38)
at org.jboss.portal.common.invocation.Invocation.invokeNext(Invocation.java:115)
at org.jboss.portal.core.aspects.server.LocaleInterceptor.invoke(LocaleInterceptor.java:96)
at org.jboss.portal.server.ServerInterceptor.invoke(ServerInterceptor.java:38)
at org.jboss.portal.common.invocation.Invocation.invokeNext(Invocation.java:115)
at org.jboss.portal.core.aspects.server.UserInterceptor.invoke(UserInterceptor.java:196)
at org.jboss.portal.server.ServerInterceptor.invoke(ServerInterceptor.java:38)
at org.jboss.portal.common.invocation.Invocation.invokeNext(Invocation.java:115)
at org.jboss.portal.server.aspects.server.SignOutInterceptor.invoke(SignOutInterceptor.java:98)
at org.jboss.portal.server.ServerInterceptor.invoke(ServerInterceptor.java:38)
at org.jboss.portal.common.invocation.Invocation.invokeNext(Invocation.java:115)
at org.jboss.portal.core.impl.api.user.UserEventBridgeTriggerInterceptor.invoke(UserEventBridgeTriggerInterceptor.java:65)
at org.jboss.portal.server.ServerInterceptor.invoke(ServerInterceptor.java:38)
at org.jboss.portal.common.invocation.Invocation.invokeNext(Invocation.java:115)
at org.jboss.portal.core.aspects.server.IdentityCacheInterceptor.invoke(IdentityCacheInterceptor.java:68)
at org.jboss.portal.server.ServerInterceptor.invoke(ServerInterceptor.java:38)
at org.jboss.portal.common.invocation.Invocation.invokeNext(Invocation.java:115)
at org.jboss.portal.core.aspects.server.TransactionInterceptor.org$jboss$portal$core$aspects$server$TransactionInterceptor$invoke$aop(TransactionInterceptor.java:49)
at org.jboss.portal.core.aspects.server.TransactionInterceptor$invoke_N5143606530999904530.invokeNext(TransactionInterceptor$invoke_N5143606530999904530.java)
at org.jboss.aspects.tx.TxPolicy.invokeInOurTx(TxPolicy.java:79)
at org.jboss.aspects.tx.TxInterceptor$RequiresNew.invoke(TxInterceptor.java:253)
at org.jboss.portal.core.aspects.server.TransactionInterceptor$invoke_N5143606530999904530.invokeNext(TransactionInterceptor$invoke_N5143606530999904530.java)
at org.jboss.aspects.tx.TxPolicy.invokeInOurTx(TxPolicy.java:79)
at org.jboss.aspects.tx.TxInterceptor$RequiresNew.invoke(TxInterceptor.java:262)
at org.jboss.portal.core.aspects.server.TransactionInterceptor$invoke_N5143606530999904530.invokeNext(TransactionInterceptor$invoke_N5143606530999904530.java)
at org.jboss.portal.core.aspects.server.TransactionInterceptor.invoke(TransactionInterceptor.java)
at org.jboss.portal.server.ServerInterceptor.invoke(ServerInterceptor.java:38)
at org.jboss.portal.common.invocation.Invocation.invokeNext(Invocation.java:115)
at org.jboss.portal.server.aspects.LockInterceptor$InternalLock.invoke(LockInterceptor.java:69)
at org.jboss.portal.server.aspects.LockInterceptor.invoke(LockInterceptor.java:130)
at org.jboss.portal.common.invocation.Invocation.invokeNext(Invocation.java:115)
at org.jboss.portal.common.invocation.Invocation.invoke(Invocation.java:157)
at org.jboss.portal.server.servlet.PortalServlet.service(PortalServlet.java:252)
at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:803)
at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.internalDoFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:290)
at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.doFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:206)
at org.jboss.web.tomcat.filters.ReplyHeaderFilter.doFilter(ReplyHeaderFilter.java:96)
at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.internalDoFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:235)
at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.doFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:206)
at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardWrapperValve.invoke(StandardWrapperValve.java:230)
at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContextValve.invoke(StandardContextValve.java:175)
at org.jboss.web.tomcat.security.SecurityAssociationValve.invoke(SecurityAssociationValve.java:182)
at org.apache.catalina.authenticator.AuthenticatorBase.invoke(AuthenticatorBase.java:432)
at org.jboss.web.tomcat.security.JaccContextValve.invoke(JaccContextValve.java:84)
at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardHostValve.invoke(StandardHostValve.java:127)
at org.apache.catalina.valves.ErrorReportValve.invoke(ErrorReportValve.java:102)
at org.jboss.web.tomcat.service.jca.CachedConnectionValve.invoke(CachedConnectionValve.java:157)
at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardEngineValve.invoke(StandardEngineValve.java:109)
at org.apache.catalina.connector.CoyoteAdapter.service(CoyoteAdapter.java:262)
at org.apache.coyote.http11.Http11Processor.process(Http11Processor.java:844)
at org.apache.coyote.http11.Http11Protocol$Http11ConnectionHandler.process(Http11Protocol.java:583)
at org.apache.tomcat.util.net.JIoEndpoint$Worker.run(JIoEndpoint.java:446)
at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:662)
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