InfoQ Homepage News
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WebP’s Adoption Remains Unclear Despite New Improvements
Google has enhanced WebP, their open source image compressing format with higher image quality, progressive decoding, reduced pixelation along edges, and JNI support. Alpha channel support will be added soon, along with more speed improvements. The format is currently supported only by Google and Opera.
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Kanban Boards from Sys Admin to Sales
Mattias Skarin, co-author of InfoQ's popular mini-book on Kanban and Scrum, shares a set of kanban boards that can be used to visually manage anything from system administration, to development teams with multiple clients, to sales.
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Azul's Zing 4.1 Virtualisation System for Java Gets up to 80% Better Performance Than Zing 4.0
Azul Systems' Zing 4.1, shipping in the next week, is 80% more performant than the already impressive Zing 4.0, according to the vendor. InfoQ spoke to Vice President of Technology and CTO for Azul Systems, Gil Tene, to find out more about how this has been achieved.
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Mango, the Next Windows Phone, Is Packed with New Features
Microsoft has announced Mango, the upcoming version of Windows Phone, a mobile OS that wants to catch up with the competition by providing a plethora of new features: mobile hardware-accelerated IE, multitasking, integrated communication, Silverlight 4 and XNA support, additional sensors, VB.NET support, and others.
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Siwpas 1.0 - a Tomcat Based Server for EE6 Web Profile
MechSoft releases Siwpas, a lightweight application server based on Apache Tomcat that focuses exclusively on Web applications.
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OpenJDK Bylaws Delay JDK 8 Project, Slightly
Mark Reinhold introduced the second public draft of the OpenJDK Community Bylaws last week, clearing the way for OpenJDK 8 projects to begin.
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Gartner: Out of Necessity, Enterprise Architecture Begins to Align Closer with Business
In a recent report, Gartner revealed that only 9% of Enterprise Architecture (EA) endeavors are done in partnership with the business side of an organization. While the percentage of collaborative projects is expected to increase to 30% by 2016, to some this is still an alarmingly low level of involvement by EA teams who run the risk of being bypassed when business groups make technical decisions.
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An Introduction to D and Visual D
D is a systems programming language from Digital Mars that focuses on “combining the power and high performance of C and C++ with the programmer productivity of modern languages like Ruby and Python.” While still being a statically typed language that compiles directly to native code, the syntax looks very much like Java or C# but it has some interesting advances.
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SAP's Cloud Strategy Evolves With In-Memory Computing Appliance
SAP announced multiple cloud offerings at SAP Sapphire 2011 around High-Performance Analytic Appliance(HANA) which has occupied front stage in SAP's innovation and strategy over the past year. In this news item we cover basic questions around HANA's architecture, performance and future roadmap.
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PMI Agile Certification Pilot Starting
Early adopters who want to be among the first to earn the new PMI-Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP) designation can apply starting May 23rd for the PMI Agile Certification pilot. Those selected for the pilot will need to take and pass a multiple choice exam on Agile fundamentals to receive the PMI-ACP certification.
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Introducing the Entity Framework Power Tools
The introduction of a Code First option in Entity Framework has received quite a bit of praise. While it still has a long way to go before it unseats the reigning ORM, nHibernate, the progress Microsoft is making is quite astounding. In order to keep the momentum up Microsoft is releasing a set of power tools that will take an existing database and create a Code First representation.
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When to Cease Being an Agile Coach?
Agile coach Morgan Ahlström recently turned to the Agile Coach Support mailing list to ask how to deal with an organization that said they wanted the benefits of becoming more agile, but was behaving in ways contrary to that goal.
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The Future of the Web as Seen by Gartner
Gene Phifer, Managing VP in Gartner Research, and David Mitchell Smith, VP and Fellow in Gartner Research, recently held a webinar entitled How Web and Cloud Computing Will Drive Your IT Strategy (registration required), outlining some of the key characteristics of the future web as seen by Gartner, concluding with a number of recommendation for businesses that want to be prepared.
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Virtual Machine Test Harness (VMTH): Test Your Configuration Management
A Google search for “devops” yields tons of interesting postings and even a couple of manifestos. Refine the search further to “devops quality” and the results become less direct; “devops testing” simply doesn’t exist according to Google. That said, things are starting to change. In late April Greg Retkowski released Virtual Machine Test Harness (VMTH), for unit-testing infrastructure automation.
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Cloud Computing Is Here to Stay
Cloud computing has become a major priority for enterprises. 60% of CIOs see it as a priority, after BI, mobility and virtualization, while large enterprises have set aside for it 15% of their budged, according to some studies.