Cloud Foundry: Design and Architecture
Derek Collison discusses the goals, the design premises and patterns employed in creating the architecture of Cloud Foundry, VMware’s open source PaaS, unveiling internal architectural details.
The content has been bookmarked!
There was an error bookmarking this content! Please retry.
Posted by Jon Arild Tørresdal on Mar 20, 2009

Expression Web SuperPreview allows developers to render web pages in different browsers simultaneously to detect layout issues. SuperPreview will be available as a standalone version as well as integrated into Expression Web. The standalone version will be made available for free and a trial version is available for download today, named Expression Web SuperPreview for Windows Internet Explorer.
About the same time as this new product was made available, Microsoft published an article describing the product and the motivation for creating it:
Today’s browser wars make the late 90’s look like a minor skirmish. In addition to Firefox and IE, we’ve got multi-platform versions of Safari, Opera, Chrome, and a wealth of mobile phone browsers. In addition, there are multiple versions of all these browsers, many of which have different rendering idiosyncrasies (I’m talkin’ about you, IE6/7/8).
They continue by listing common problems web developers have today:
- Most browsers can’t have multiple versions installed side-by-side. The newest version replaces older versions. So, you can’t have IE6 and IE7 on the same machine (unless you’re using virtual machines or unstable registry hacks).
- Many browsers support both Mac and Windows. Devs want to test in (at least) Mac Safari, which doesn’t render the same as Safari on Windows.
- The ergonomics of browser testing is awkward. Many devs load their site on a staging server and have a battery of machines running different browsers. They have to manually load a page in each machine and then walk to each individual machine to compare the different monitors.
SuperPreview promise to help web developers tackling these problems created by the industry by supporting the most common browsers available today.
In an interview at MIX 2009, Erik Saltwell, Group Program Manager on Expression Web, explains how SuperPreview works:
We look at your box and if you have a browser installed locally we give you an in-app experience of seeing that browser and being able to play with the rendering of that browser. For those cases where you want to look at browsers you don’t have installed, we are actually building out a cloud service where people can get renderings even of browsers they don’t have, like Safari on the Mac.
SuperPreview support multiple display modes. One possible view is the side-by-side view as seen in the screenshot below. In addition a transparent overlay is also supported, allowing developers to accurately see where elements on a page are off.

The preview version available today only works with IE 6, 7 and 8. IE6 is not available on Windows 7, IE7 only works if previously installed and IE8 only if its installed on the system. This version of the product will expire October 1, 2009.
Automating Error Reporting for .NET Applications
Troubleshoot Java/.NET performance while getting full visibility in production
Visual Studio vNext: ALM features for Agile Planning, Team Collaboration
In today’s hyper-competitive world, later may be too late to adopt Agile development and this Roadmap for Success will help you get started. Download "Agile Development: A Manager's Roadmap for Success" now!
Derek Collison discusses the goals, the design premises and patterns employed in creating the architecture of Cloud Foundry, VMware’s open source PaaS, unveiling internal architectural details.
Andrew Watson talks about the work of the OMG, where CORBA is alive and well (hint: in your car), UML and UML Profiles vs. custom Modeling languages, DDS and other middleware, and much more.
Sohil Shah discusses creating iPhone and Android enterprise mobile applications based on cloud services using the open source platform OpenMobster.
Paul Sanford presents the transformations supported by data throughout its life cycle, and how that can be better done with Splunk, an engine for monitoring and analyzing machine-generated data.
A common “best practice” for unit tests is to only write a one assertion in each test. I intend to question this advice by showing that multiple assertions per test are both necessary and beneficial.
John Rauser presents the architectural and technological evolution of Amazon retail websites starting with 1994 and ending with adopting Amazon Web Services.
Michael Stal discusses system architecture quality, how to avoid architectural erosion, how to deal with refactoring, and design principles for architecture evolution.
Every developer has had to integrate with another system, API or component. Tis article provides strategies to handle the change and for he separating system boundaries.
No comments
Watch Thread Reply