The newest challenge in architecting systems is how to deal with the spectrum of platforms, from cloud computing to hand-held mobile devices. A new Developer Works article demonstrates both, by integrating Google's App Engine with iPhone.
"The Well Grounded Rubyist" is a new and rewritten version of the popular Ruby for Rails. Today InfoQ publishes a review and excerpts Chapter 15.
Chef, a new Ruby-based configuration and provisioning tool, has been announced. Chef offers integration with multiple tools and platforms across extended networks, using "cookbooks" to define how to install and update applications across large networks like large web server farms, or cloud-computing platforms.
Sun's OpenSolaris project has released the Java Enterprise Server as open source under the BSD license. The is largely the same as their commerical product, which descends from the Netscape Enterprise Server of the 90's.
Advances in "cloud computing", clustering, and general-purpose computing with commodity GPUs suggest compute power per dollar may increase significantly faster than Moore's Law predicts.
SSL-based security using X509 certificates from certain CA's opens a vulnerability to sites masquerading under a forged X509 certificate, even in a "secure" connection. This was demonstrated recently at the Chaos Conference in Berlin by spoofing a real certificate.
Sony's PS3 may be losing the market share war, but it has other uses. Does somebody want a supercomputer at home? That can be done by clustering PS3s running Linux. And the PS3s can still play Prince of Persia.
