InfoQ Homepage News
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Polymath: a new IT job description
Is "polymath" a required job skill for IT professionals? The rise of cloud computing, "green" computing, ultra-large scale systems, and even SOA and SaaS suggest the answer is yes. A book by Vinnie Mirchandani has prompted a flurry of commentary on what it would mean to be an IT Polymath and why such a skill is desirable.
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The Top-Down vs Bottom-Up SOA Debate Revisited
A long standing debate in the SOA community about top down vs. bottom up approaches to SOA resurfaced recently, after open source ESB maker MuleSoft announced the release of a management console said to support their bottom-up approach to SOA management philosophy.
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Rackspace Has Open Sourced Its Cloud Platform
Rackspace has opened its cloud computing platform source code under Apache 2.0 license as part of OpenStack initiative. NASA is contributing with technology powering NASA Nebula Cloud Platform.
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Scrum In Schools
Scrum is gaining traction outside of information technology. The Scrum in Schools project is a grassroots effort to bring a free, age-appropriate Scrum curriculum to educators throughout the world.
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BigPipe at Facebook: Optimizing Page Load Time
Changhao Jiang, Research Scientist at Facebook, describes a technique, called BigPipe, that contributed to making the Facebook site, "twice as fast." BigPipe is one of several innovations, a "secret weapon," used to achieve the reported performance gains. Another innovation mentioned is architectural in nature, the structuring of Web pages as "pagelets."
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EF Feature CTP 4 Brings Code First Updates and Productivity Improvements
Entity Framework Feature CTP 4 recently released updates the Code First programming model with new code conventions and data annotations, and adds two new types, DbContext and DbSet<TEntity>, providing easy entity model setup using Code First.
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Facebook on Hadoop, Hive, HBase, and A/B Testing
The Hadoop Summit of 2010 included presentations from a number of large scale users of Hadoop and related technologies. Notably, Facebook presented a keynote and details information about their use of Hive for analytics. Mike Schroepfer, Facebook's VP of Engineering delivered a keynote describing the scale of their data processing with Hadoop.
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Developer Perception on Mobile Platforms Survey Results
Vision Mobile has published the Mobile Developer Economics 2010 and Beyond report, containing the results of a survey across +400 developers working on the most important eight mobile platforms. The survey shows what platform the developers prefer, what is the installed base and number of apps per platform, time needed to learn and debug on a platform, and others.
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Amazon Elastic MapReduce Updates from Hadoop Summit 2010
The Hadoop Summit of 2010 included a keynote from Peter Sirota, General Manager of Amazon Elastic MapReduce (EMR), which is a hosted Hadoop offering from Amazon that includes web-based management tools.
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Testing Techniques for Applications With Zero Tests
Agile techniques recommend having adequate unit and acceptance tests to build a robust test harness around the application. However, in the real world, not all applications are fortunate enough to have a test harness. In an interesting discussion on the Agile Testing group, members suggested ways to test applications which do not have any automated tests.
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App Inventor for Android
App Inventor is a beta release from Google labs allows drag and drop development of applications for Android phones. Instead of code, App Inventor allows you to visually design applications and use blocks to specify application logic.
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How RESTful Are Web Frameworks That Claim REST Support?
There are plenty of web services platforms/application frameworks available today that support RESTful services to varying degrees. In a recent post Stefan Tilkov puts out a list of criteria that can serve as a starting point in evaluating these frameworks and platforms.
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Microsoft is Planning to Allow Private Installations of Windows and SQL Azure
Along with partners HP, Dell, and Fujitsu, Microsoft is offering private installations of Windows Azure. The product will be offered in appliance format, meaning Microsoft will be selling the hardware and software as a bundle. While no pricing is set, the target audience is customers like eBay who can afford at least one thousand servers.
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Yahoo! Updates from Hadoop Summit 2010
The Hadoop Summit of 2010 started off with a vuvuzela blast from Blake Irving, Chief Product Officer for Yahoo. Yahoo delivered keynote addresses that outlined the scale of their use, technical directions for their contributions, and architectural patterns in how they apply the technology.
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Object Oriented Programming: The Wrong Path?
In a QCon London 2010 interview with Joe Armstrong, the original developer of Erlang, and Ralph Johnson, long associated with Smalltalk, OOP, and Patterns, the question of whther we've gone down the "wrong path" w.r.t. object orientation all these yearrs. Both interviewees suggest that we have, but this is due to flaws in the implementation of object ideas and not the ideas themselves.