Latest News from AJAX & RIA Journal

Visual WebGui to Reveal Cloud Application Platform

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 13:15:00 EST

Gizmox, the developer of Visual WebGui, today announced that it will reveal its application platform atop Windows Azure and its development framework, VWG platforms offers a push-button .NET desktop legacy application migration path to Windows Azure. With VWG enterprises will be able to migrate to Windows Azure, by reusing their existing Windows software code on Windows Azure without re-write or re-engineering.

Microsoft to Open Source the .NET Micro Framework

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 12:45:00 EST

Today, at the Microsoft Professional Developer Conference (PDC) here Los Angeles, Microsoft announced not only the release of version 4.0 of the.NET Micro Framework, but also that they are open sourcing the product and making it available under the Apache 2.0 license, which is already being used by the community within the embedded space. The .NET Micro Framework, [...] Related posts:

.NET Micro Framework for Embedded Developers Today at the Embedded Systems Conference Boston, Microsoft Corp. announced...
Microsoft Web Sandbox Goes Open Source We talked before about Microsoft’s web sandbox here. Web Sandbox is...
Open-Source Clouds Joyent Inc. today announced the signing of an agreement to acquire...

Google SPDY Protocol Would Require Mass Change in Infrastructure

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 09:15:00 EST

Google’s desire to speed up the web via a new protocol is laudable, but the SPDY protocol would require massive changes across networks to support

ArsTechnica had an interesting article on one of Google’s latest projects, a new web protocol designed to replace HTTP called SPDY.

SPDY uses a single SSL-encrypted session between a browser and a client, and then compresses all the request/response overhead. The requests, responses, and data are all put into frames that are multiplexed over the one connection. This makes it possible to send a higher-priority small file without waiting for the transfer of a large file that's already in progress to terminate. Compressing the requests is helpful in typical ADSL/cable setups, where uplink speed is limited. For good measure, unnecessary and duplicated headers in requests and responses are done away with. SPDY also includes real server push and a "server hint" feature.

Having recently emerged from a trip into the world of service-providers and its associated protocols, the description of SPDY immediately brought to mind other asynchronous, message-oriented protocols such as SIP and DIAMETER. It therefore made me seriously consider the kind of massive changes that would be required to support such a protocol across all data center components: security, load balancing, acceleration, web servers, application servers, caches. Basically any network intermediary based on the premise of a strict request-reply, synchronous behavior would likely need radical changes to its core protocol handling systems.

MAJOR DIFFERENCES BETWEEN SPDY and HTTP

SPDY, as described, is asynchronous and message-oriented. Like DIAMETER, SPDY would allow multiple requests per connection, effectively turning a single connection designed to be used and then closed into a long-lived connection. This is more along the lines of a SIP connection which is initiated and held open until the session is terminated.This is very different from the HTTP model in which connections are opened and closed within fairly short time intervals and are not expected to be held open for exceedingly long periods of time. SPDY thus eliminates the overhead associated with opening and closing many connections and the negative impact that has on application performance.

The current draft of the SPDY protocol states that “from the perspective of the server business logic or application API, nothing has changed”. But from the perspective of the infrastructure that needs to process the protocol, everything changes.

KEY CHANGES TO HTTP HEADERS

The following are directly from the draft of the SPDY protocol and document the changes from HTTP to SPDY

REQUEST CHANGES

The first line of the request is unfolded into name/value pairs like other HTTP headers. The names of the first line fields are method, url, and version. These keys are required to be present. The 'url' is the fully-qualified URL, containing protocol, host, port, and path.
HTTP request headers are compressed. This is accomplished by compressing all data sent by the client with gzip encoding.
Content-length is not a valid header.
Chunked encoding is no longer valid.

RESPONSE CHANGES

The response status line is unfolded into name/value pairs like other HTTP headers. The names of the status line are status and version. These keys are required to be present
Content-length is no longer valid.
Chunked encoding is no longer valid.

These changes would have a huge impact on infrastructure solutions, many of which rely on URI or HTTP headers (custom and standardized) to perform specific actions such as blocking, scanning, persistence (server affinity), or routing. The requirement that SPDY be transported via SSL has its own, well understood impact on infrastructure and is already dealt with by most devices, but SPDY also requires that headers are compressed via gzip. This means every intermediary requiring to perform some action based on the headers will need to decompress, process, and then likely recompress the headers before sending it on to the next hop. Coupling required compression with SSL would not only require support on all relevant infrastructure but will also likely reintroduce latency that could offset some of the performance gains claimed by testing of SPDY thus far.

SINGLE-CONNECTION: LONG LIVED SESSIONS

That all communication would essentially flow between the client and server over a single connection also poses a challenge for intermediaries that perform any kind of analysis or are required to act on the data exchanged. Load balancers, for example, are not generally designed to handle switching of messages in what becomes a 1:N connection:server scenario. The protocol could likely be supported as is by most load balancing solutions on a strictly layer 4 load balancing basis but advanced features that take advantage of application-aware capabilities such as message header and payload value routing (content-based routing) as well as egress functionality like Data Leak Prevention (DLP) would be much more difficult to implement, if not impossible for some solutions. This capability actually sounds a lot like HTTP pipelining on the request side.

The single, long-lived connection would have more of an impact on the overall architecture and capacity planning. In some respects it would be easier, as there would be an easy 1:1 ratio between users and connections. But because each user is effectively being handed dedicated compute resources, this would actually change the resource consumption model on servers and make it more difficult to support high volumes of users without building out a scalable infrastructure.

ASYNCHRONOUS EXCHANGE OF MESSAGES

Further complicating the ability of infrastructure solutions to handle SPDY is its definition as asynchronous. Essentially asynchronous protocols do not enforce order of replies. That means a client could send three requests in a row without waiting for a response and the server could send back the response in a completely different order. Again, from the draft SPDY protocol:

Because TCP provides a single stream of data on which SPDY multiplexes multiple logical streams, it is important for clients and servers to interleave data messages for concurrent sessions.

This may not sound like a problem, but for infrastructure that is optimized to handle HTTP and has been built around its implicit behavior this would require changes to the core networking stacks on most devices. In a typical HTTP scenario a request is received, the infrastructure solution processes any applicable ingress policies, and then initiates a connection to the appropriate server and waits for a response. It appears that with SPDY, like DIAMETER, the infrastructure still processes any applicable ingress policies and initiates a connection but does not necessarily wait for a reply as it might need to act upon the next incoming message.

This means a single network “session” would need to carefully track multiple incoming requests and outgoing responses at the same time on a per connection basis. This is not something most infrastructure is typically prepared to handle. Combined with the possibility that different requests may need to be routed to different servers within the infrastructure, this complicates the nature of application delivery and load balancing and could have a huge impact on the costs associated with cloud computing. Long lived sessions/connections initiated on secondary or tertiary servers launched to handle temporary capacity increases could hold open those connections long enough to incur excess charges that are unnecessary.

Also similar to DIAMETER is the inclusion of a “real server push” feature. The ability of a server to act like a client and vice-versa is inherent in DIAMETER and this reverse flow of traffic is not something most infrastructure is prepared to process.

THE IMPACT ON INFRASTRUCTURE

Any infrastructure solution that is heavily focused on application layer (HTTP) processing for any purpose would likely need to make radical changes to its core networking and processing engines. Some solutions, particularly those tasked with load balancing and scaling existing message-based protocols may already be capable of supporting a protocol like SPDY. Whether the solutions that support DIAMETER and SIP load balancing and scalability could support SPDY without modification is highly dependent on whether support for the service-provider focused protocols is based on an underlying generic message-based implementation [PDF] or a protocol-specific implementation. The latter would be difficult to adapt to a new protocol while the former would be more easily extended to specifically support the requirements of new message-oriented protocols.

But that’s only load balancing and scalability. There are many other infrastructure devices that are used to secure, monitor, accelerate, and otherwise manage HTTP that would need to be updated to handle such a new protocol. The upheaval across data centers would likely be on par with the anticipated challenges associated with mass migration from IPv4 to IPv6. Like that migration, however, support for both SPDY and HTTP could be achieved through the use of translating gateways; infrastructure capable of supporting both SPDY and HTTP or able to translate between the two could be utilized to enable a smoother transition.

While it’s a fascinating and exciting notion, the introduction of a completely new protocol to replace HTTP seems more academic than realistic. More realistic would be for gradual implementation through adaptation of SPDY’s core concepts into the next generations of HTTP until HTTP is indistinguishably from a protocol such as SPDY. Making modifications and improvements to HTTP would be an evolutionary step rather than the revolutionary change implied with SPDY that would be almost too disruptive to adopt.

That said, not everything that comes out of Google Labs is adopted as an industry wide solution. It’s an experimental environment and a good one at that. What may come out of the SPDY project may well in fact be changes to HTTP rather than the presentation of a new, radically different protocol. Regardless, SDPY and Google’s efforts have people talking about what’s wrong with HTTP and how it might be fixed and that conversation is one we’ve probably needed to have for quite some time now.

You can read more about the tools Google offers and general problems with web performance at Google’s “Let’s Make the Web Faster” site.

Related blogs & articles:

Technorati Tags: MacVittie,F5,Google,SPDY,HTTP,infrastructure,DIAMETER,protocols,web,internet,IPv4,IPv6,acceleration,security,load balancing,application delivery,application security,architecture

UN’s Internet Governance Forum Censors a Mild Mention of Censorship

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 08:55:00 EST

Holy cow! The Open Net Initiative, a group that monitors government filtering (= censorship) of the Internet held a book launch at the United Nations-sponsored Internet Governance Forum in Sharm El Sheik. A poster for the book — Access Controlled — contained the sentence: "The first generation of Internet ...

Zend Teams with Varien

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 15:30:00 EST

Zend has gotten Varien, apparently a hot e-commerce platform, to ship the free Community Edition of Zend Server, the PHP web application server with the free Community Edition of its open source Magento e-commerce software. Varien, in turn, will contribute a number of native e-commerce features such as payment gateways and shipping calculation modules to the open source PHP framework, Zend Framework, which is an integrated part of Zend Server.

Cloud, Standards, and Pants

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 14:30:00 EST

These three things have a lot more in common than you might think and all three tend to evoke similar levels of frustration.

A very real problem women face when shopping is this: no two brands define a size the same. If you usually wear a size 8 in “Brand X” you might actually wear a size 10 or 6 in “Brand Y”, depending on how the brand decided to define its sizing. Customers, women in this case, cannot count on consistency in sizes across brands. This makes shopping annoying because every time you change brands you’re never quite sure what you need and if the size increases across brands, well, it becomes obvious that perhaps brand lock-in is in part the reasoning behind these differences in sizing.

Now, consider the differences in the definition of “The Cloud”. We have IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service). We have PaaS (Platform as a Service). We have SaaS (Software as a Service). All three have very different definitions of what makes it “a cloud” and there is very little consistency across those definitions. Oh, there are vague similarities: elasticity, automation, easy provisioning. But those are nebulous terms that are about as useful as slapping a “Size 8” on a pair of jeans and expecting a woman to know what that means. She doesn’t, and neither does the consumer of “cloud.”

Dig into “cloud computing” and “intercloud” and standards efforts and you’ll see this is true at the infrastructure layer, as well. The challenge of defining standards around intercloud computing and cloudbalancing and just collaboration within a single cloud computing environment is made infinitely more challenging because infrastructure Vendor X “size 8” doesn’t match up with Vendor Y “size 8.” Features, naming, resource models, capabilities – all different. Yet all must be able to communicate and collaborate to not only provide the basic foundation for a cloud computing environment, but to be able to migrate from one provider to another.

API versus RESOURCE MODEL

This is what’s going to make defining standards more challenging than ever: we’ve got to not only standardize protocols but common industry and market definitions as well. The former will likely turn out to be much easier than the latter because it’s more abstract; it’s about management and control without regard to implementation. It is the resource model that will be difficult to nail down.

William Vambenepe writes in Separating model from protocol in Cloud APIs:

Things become a lot more sensitive when you touch the resource model, which reflects the actual capabilities of the Cloud management infrastructure. How much flexibility in the network setup? What kind of application provisioning? What affinity/anti-affinity control level? Can I get block-level storage? Etc. Having to implement the other guy’s interface in these matters is not just a matter of glue code, it’s a major product feature. As a result, the resource model is a much more strategic control point than the protocol.

William nails the problem with his assessment of the differences between the resource model and protocols. Given his obviously intimate knowledge of web services standards and thus SOA, this is no surprise. One of the core tenets of SOA is the separation of these two very different but very vital components. The interface should be separate from the implementation. In InterCloud, we must separate resource model (data protocol implementation) from interface (command and control protocol) in order to achieve standardization.

Interestingly enough at the last Infrastructure 2.0 Working Group, which is focusing on this problem, Vint Cerf mentioned out of hand that the separation of IP from routing “in the beginning” was actually accidental. If you read the IP RFC you’ll note that it ends up being just a “resource model”; it describes the format of information being exchanged and mentions how packets should flow across internetworks, but it defines no API-style protocol for doing so. It offers only minimal guidance on the higher level interfaces that might be used to transmit and receive Internet Datagrams. That accidental omission turned out to be the best thing since sliced bread. Routing protocols have come and gone since then, but IP remains at the heart of the Internet. Basically we need to duplicate that, but at a higher layer in the stack.

Any InterCloud protocol will almost certainly be easier to develop than the resource model. While there already exists some commonality across components and concepts in the infrastructure, still there are many more resources for which every vendor has their own definition. It is that disparity that needs to be addressed independently and codified in a common set of resource models that at the same time allows for extensibility on a per vendor basis to account for uncommon resources.

This is no easy task. Consider a very simple example – persistence in load balancing solutions. Persistence is a commonly implemented feature in all load balancers that can be achieved in a number of ways. Among the most common are: source IP, destination IP, Cookie, and SSL session ID. Now take a look at the difference in definition of these - from a purely naming standpoint – between Citrix Netscaler and F5 BIG-IP:

Citrix Netscaler XML API “Size 8”	F5 BIG-IP iControl “Size 8”

Looking at both implementations – and remember this is just naming – you’ll notice that the most common methods of persistence exist in both solutions, but use very different naming conventions. Netscaler defines source IP-based persistence as “SOURCEIP” while F5 uses “PERSISTENCE_MODE_SOURCE_ADDRESS_AFFINITY”; same concept, different terminology. Once you get beyond the common methods you find even more disparity and it becomes more difficult to map between the two without a firm foundation of knowledge of both systems. For example, is the Citrix “CALLID” the same as the “PERSISTENCE_MODE_SIP” definition? Perhaps they are, perhaps they aren’t. You can imagine that at the operation level, the API, the naming conventions used there are so drastically difference that attempting to map the two would drive even the most experienced integration developer a bit insane.

STANDARDS TAKE TIME

Just as cloud computing providers continue to roll out new services over time, behaving in a manner similar to Web 2.0 applications that never quite come out of beta, so, too, will the standards of InterCloud need to evolve. It’s going to take a lot of comparisons, discussions, and mappings to figure out what is an acceptable common resource model for each infrastructure component and in the process we’re going to have to abstract quite a bit. Less challenging will be the need for a common namespace for this resource model across all infrastructure components. After all, an IP address is the same whether it’s used by a virtual machine, an IPS, a load balancer, or a firewall. But these are easier to discover and define than elements unique to a particular solution space and once we get the ball rolling one can hope that the momentum keeps it rolling.

The Internet wasn’t built in a day – really, it took the ‘founding fathers’ quite a bit of discussion and hard work to get the standards defined that allowed mass interoperability and collaboration. But I am willing to bet that we’ll see InterCloud standards long before the fashion industry decides to standardize its sizing for women.

Long before then, I’m sure.

Technorati Tags: MacVittie,F5,cloud,cloud computing,resource model,API,integration,standards,InterCloud,infrastructure 2.0,William Vambenepe,SOA,Web 2.0

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Inheritance Patterns in JavaScript:

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What Could You Do With Your Code in 20 Lines or Less?

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 13:12:00 EDT

What could you do with your code in 20 Lines or Less? That's the question I ask (almost) every week for the devcentral community, and every week I go looking to find cool new examples that show just how flexible and powerful iRules can be without getting in over your head.

Well we made it to 30 editions of the 20LoL. Soon we’ll break 100 iRule examples that are under 21 lines of code each. Pretty neat stuff, if you ask me. This week is the hoolio show, it seems. The guy is just a monster in the forums, what can I say? I sure am glad he’s on our side. I’ve got three examples that I randomly pulled from the forums because I thought they were cool. Only later did I realize that he had penned them all. So big thanks yet again to Aaron and all his hard work to better the community.

Pre-loaded searches based on host name

http://devcentral.f5.com/Default.aspx?tabid=53&forumid=5&postid=86016&view=topic

This cool little example is a neat spin on a simple HTTP redirect. The basic idea is to redirect to a given search site and set the search parameter to be the original host name of the request. So I could request bobschickenshack.com and be redirected to a search for bobschickenshack on the search page of my choosing. Very cool idea, and darn easy to implement.

 
 when HTTP_REQUEST { 

    # Rewrite the host header to www.yahoo.com and the
    # uri to /search?q=$host where $host is the originally requested hostname 
    HTTP::header replace "www.yahoo.com" 
    HTTP::uri "/search?q=[HTTP::host]" 
 }

More fun with nested switch

http://devcentral.f5.com/Default.aspx?tabid=53&forumid=5&postid=85807&view=topic

I know we’ve covered switch before, but this is yet another good use of it and I really like the idea of selecting snatpools based on which server the request is going to end up going to. I trimmed this one down a little but only by removing a few of the possible snatpool options, all logic is the same, even though it’s just an excerpt of the overall solution provided.

 when LB_SELECTED { 
    switch [LB::server addr] { 
       222.35.42.126 { 
          switch [IP::client_addr] { 
             192.168.3.11 { snatpool snat_crt_test2 } 
             default { snatpool snat_crt_pool } 
          } 
       } 
       221.218.248.155 { 
          switch [IP::client_addr] { 
             192.168.3.11 { snatpool snat_uni_test2 } 
             default { snatpool snat_uni_pool } 
          } 
       } 
       default { snat automap } 
    } 
 }

Updating referrers

http://devcentral.f5.com/Default.aspx?tabid=53&forumid=5&postid=85807&view=topic

Hoolio does a good job of not only pointing out the inherent problem with trying to replace referrer headers with hostnames from requests, but giving an option that works as desired even if it’s a little bit different direction than the OP was headed. This is a good example of in-line string replacement with string map, too, which is an often under used command that’s worth a look.

 
 when HTTP_REQUEST { 

    log local0. "[IP::client_addr]:[TCP::client_port]: New [HTTP::method] request to [HTTP::host][HTTP::uri]\ 
       with Referer [HTTP::header Referer]" 

    if {[HTTP::header exists "MyHeader"]} {  
       log local0. "[IP::client_addr]:[TCP::client_port]: Updating Referer to\ 
          [string map -nocase {http:// https://} [HTTP::header Referer]" 
       HTTP::header replace Referer "[string map -nocase {http:// https://} [HTTP::header Referer]" 
    } 
 } 
 when HTTP_REQUEST priority 501 { 
    log local0. "[IP::client_addr]:[TCP::client_port] (501): Current Referer [HTTP::header Referer]" 
 }

There you have it, 3 more iRules to show off just how much you can do in only 20 lines of code. Next time we’ll break past the 100 examples mark. See ya then.

Technorati Tags: 20 lines or less,20LoL,DevCentral,F5,iRules,Colin Walker

#Colin

DCGS Worldwide Conference 2009

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Selecting Your Data Center - Part 2 – Geography and Location

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 09:30:00 EDT

Data center selection is an exercise in compromise. Everybody would like to have the best of all worlds, with a highly connected facility offering 24x7 smart hands support, impenetrable security, protection from all natural and man-made disasters, in addition to service level agreements offering 5-Nines power availability at $.03/kW. Not likely we will be able to hit all those desired features in any single facility.

A Bard Approach to Learning Technology

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 04:59:00 EDT

In Shakespeare's 'Twelfth Night', Malvolio receives a letter containing the words: 'Be not afraid of greatness. Some are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon them.' Substitute 'e-learning', in all its forms, for 'greatness' and you have a similarly apt observation on technology-delivered learning. Some organisations take to e-learning as though they were born to it.

Cloud Analytics: Dataflow versus Databases

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 16:34:00 EDT

As the need for realtime analytics grows we will continue to see a migration away from databases and towards more scalable parallel dataflow architectures for analytics. For twenty years, analytics has been viewed as just one specific area within the broader relational database industry. So, analytics has meant databases. Today that view is changing. Over the past year or so, a new movement, the "NoSQL" movement has emerged promoting the advantages of doing a variety of kinds of analytics without using any relational database technologies at all.

Ralph Folz Joins WordStream Board of Directors

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 18:00:00 EDT

WordStream, Inc., a provider of search marketing tools for continuously optimizing and expanding pay-per-click (PPC) and search engine optimization (SEO) efforts involving large numbers of keywords, announced today that Ralph J. Folz has joined the WordStream Board of Directors. Folz is the Global Chief Operating Officer of Isobar, one of the largest digital marketing agencies in the world with over 3,500 people in 40 different countries. It is part of London-based Aegis Media. Folz also cofounded Molecular, a digital marketing consulting firm that designs and builds sophisticated Internet-based solutions. Folz was responsible for building Boston-based Molecular into one of the most respected digital marketing consulting firms in the United States, leading to its 2005 acquisition by Isobar.

Why Cloud is at the Top of the CIO's Priorities

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 14:30:00 EDT

In the most difficult economic climate in decades, CIOs are reevaluating their strategies and looking for new ways to reduce data center costs and overhead while improving responsiveness to business requirements. Cloud computing has emerged as a much more agile and efficient approach than what companies have done in the past: adding more compute, storage and networking capacity or trying to get more out of what they already own. Cloud computing did not emerge from a vacuum, but has its origins in three technology "megatrends" that most CIOs are already familiar with. These developments were all born out of the same need -- to drive down costs, simplify data center operations and allow IT to be as agile as possible. As these megatrends have become pervasive, they've helped put the cloud in the CIO's strike zone.

Convio Expands Open Platform

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 11:00:00 EDT

Convio today announced expansion of its Open Platform which is helping nonprofit organizations tap the power of technology and the Internet to better reach, engage and move people to support their cause. The company is introducing Convio Web Services, a new set of standard interfaces for building client applications that retrieve and synchronize data with Convio. The company has also delivered several new APIs and launched a new developer version of its Open website which offers improved documentation as well as access to more than 60 APIs (application programming interfaces) at www.open.convio.com.

Kapow Technologies Earns Accreditation for IBM Information On Demand

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 10:15:00 EDT

Kapow Technologies, the leader in web data services for business applications, today announced that the Kapow Web Data Server has been tested and validated to work on hardware supported by IBM DB2 data server software and Kapow has been awarded IBM Information On Demand Specialty. This accreditation means lower deployment and data migration costs for customers using Kapow to create best-in-class web data services built on IBM Information Management software. To demonstrate this, Kapow will debut a mashup application built on IBM Lotus Mashups for attendees at the IBM Information On Demand Conference being held from Oct. 25th - 29th at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Convention Center in Las Vegas.

Moyea DVD4Web Converter V2.0 Converts DVD to FLV Fast and Synchronously with Watermarks

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 02:16:00 EDT

In order to be faster, stronger and accurater, new Moyea DVD4Web Converter V2.0 comes out with fast conversion speed, user-customized watermarks and stable, synchronous conversion process. Shenzhen P.R.C – Oct, 26th, 2009 - Moyea Software Co., Ltd. (http://www.moyeamedia.com): a rising developer of flash applications for the internet and multimedia software, today officially debuts the newest V2.0 [...]

Mojarra 2.0.1 Has Shipped

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 02:27:00 EDT

Just a short post to note that we've now shipped Mojarra 2.0.1. This version fixes a very serious bug when running on Tomcat. You can pick up the files from the usual places, see the release notes for more information. If you're using GlassFish, and already running 2.0.0 (you leading edge adopter!), there's probably no reason to upgrade - though the new v3 (b69) has the updated jar, and it will be propagated via the usual Update Center distribution.

Rhomobile to Announce Production Release of RhoHub at 4th Cloud Expo

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 08:45:00 EDT

SYS-CON Events announced today that Rhomobile, Inc., the makers of the Rhodes smartphone development framework, will be Exhibiting at the 4th International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo, taking place November 2-4, 2009 at the Santa Clara Convention Center, Santa Clara, CA. At the event, Rhomobile will be announcing the Production Release of RhoHub, the world’s first development-as-a-service offering for the mobile industry. RhoHub provides a web-based service for both smartphone app development and hosting of mobile applications, making native mobile applications easier to build, deploy and run on all smartphones including BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Android, Symbian and iPhone. RhoHub allows developers to generate, compile and run smartphone applications through the web giving them flexibility in their build environment. No SDK (Software Developer Kit) is required, making the build process faster and more affordable. Developers can write code online from the RhoHub website anywhere.

Life with Qlogic’s 5802V

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 17:03:00 EDT

If you follow me on Twitter at all, you’ll know that I’m a big fan of Qlogic. I appreciate the functional simplicity of what Qlogic designs encompass as well as the “get business done” attitude that they bring to their switches, HBAs, NICs, and CNAs. Imagine my happiness, then, when I got ahold of one of their latest “edge” fibre channel switches, the SANbox 5802V. The SANbox 5802V follows the typical edge-switch formula: 20 SFP ports for either 4Gb/s SFPs or 8Gb/s SFP+, 4 stacking ports that default at 10Gb/s Fibre Channel connection and can be upgraded to 20Gb/s FC when additional bandwidth is needed, a serial and IP-based management port setup, and dual redundant power supplies (the 5802V ships with 2 PSUs; the 5800V model ships with only 1).

Adobe May Cooperate with Apple to Transplant Flash Player to iPhone

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 22:51:00 EDT

According to the CEO of Adobe America, Adobe company is planning to transplant its flash player to iPhone. Adobe CEO indicated that Adobe may cooperate with Apple to ensure the smooth flash player application on iPhone in Adobe company’s first quarter performance conference early this week. These comments were made when he was asking about the [...]

Russia Hates Apple Big Time

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 22:50:00 EDT

I never liked online forums where comments to the original posts could be rated (+ or - 1) by other readers. But today, I changed my mind. These negative ratings can tell you a lot. There is a Web site www.habrahabr.ru popular among software developers in Russia. Today, someone posted an information about newly released hardware by Apple. You'd say, "No biggies. Apple has a steady and growing group of followers and often releases well designed hardware"

LTE vs. WiMAX. Duel to the Death or Different Strokes for Different Purposes?

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 14:13:00 EDT

The truth is, 4G wireless technology evolution isn't a "Betamax vs VHS" winner-take-all competition. In fact, it's not, properly speaking, a competition at all. It's an engineering question. And like all engineering questions, choosing technology depends on not just on technical factors. A simplistic answer is that WiMAX is from Mars - data - and LTE is from Venus - voice. And just as both Mars and Venus have their essential place in the scheme of things, so LTE and WiMAX, too, have their respective places in meeting business goals - from profitability and customer retention, to business expansion and changing market demands.

CEO Claims Green IT Benefits Must Make it the Norm, Not a Trend

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 12:31:00 EDT

Navot Peled, CEO of Gizmox, challenged the “Green IT trend” with the announcement this week that its product, Visual WebGui, has been successfully providing energy and environmental benefits to enterprises, with its solutions that dually cut costs for hardware and software.

Brocade For Sale: WSJ

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 17:56:00 EDT

Much, much smaller Cisco rival Brocade Communications Systems, which has gotten a lot more popular with OEMs like IBM and Dell since Cisco went into the server business, is supposedly thinking selling itself off, or so said an unconfirmed piece in the Wall Street Journal Monday. The paper claims HP and maybe Oracle (think Sun) are interested but that nothing is imminent and in fact nothing may ultimately come of the notion.

Positive Word of Mouth and Your Brand, Part 5

Sun, 04 Oct 2009 14:00:00 EDT

This is part five of a five part series of the importance of personal branding in garnering positive word of mouth. In our hyper-connected society, word of mouth has become “world of mouth” and recommendations truly craft your online and...

Cloud Security on Ulitzer: Cloud Computing and Self-Service Security

Sat, 03 Oct 2009 14:30:00 EDT

So here’s the rub, if MSSP’s/ISP’s/ASP’s-cum-Cloud operators want to woo mature enterprise customers to use their services, they are leaving money on the table and not fulfilling customer needs by failing to roll out complimentary security capabilities which lessen the compliance and security burdens of their prospective customers. While many provide commoditized solutions such as anti-spam and anti-virus capabilities, more complex (but profoundly important) security services such as DLP (data loss/leakage prevention,) WAF, Intrusion Detection and Prevention (IDP,) XML Security, Application Delivery Controllers, VPN’s, etc. should also be considered for roadmaps by these suppliers.

SOA and Cloud Computing Funding Dilemma

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 16:04:00 EDT

Lately, and primarily among government users, I’ve been hearing about a potential clash of bureaucracy meets technology when it comes to funding shared services. It seems that the current government procurement and funding processes do not favor strategic sharing of software services as an outgrowth of a single development effort. I imagine that this issue might also arise in some large organizations where the business units are funding development using a self-funded IT organization, but I have yet to hear any specific stories coming from the private sector regarding this issue.

Mixing Ajax and Full Requests in JSF 2.0

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 13:30:00 EDT

JSF 2.0 makes ajax pretty easy - but it can't hide everything from you... It's tempting to just add a few ajax tags into your page, and not worry too much about interactions - here's one example of a problem you may run into.