InfoQ Homepage News
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Eclipse and Java 6u21 problems
Oracle recently released Java 6 update 21 which had a small but innocuous change in the way that the java.dll was created. Unfortunately, this change impacted Eclipse's startup; but a fix is on the way.
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Does the Cloud Need Server Virtualization?
Simeon Simeonov wrote an essay on the latest strategy of VMWare in the wake of the SpringSource Acquisition 12 months ago. He contends that if Server Virtualization was a key enabler of Cloud Computing, it's days might be counted as VMware CTO Steve Herrod explains “We are committed to making Spring the best language for cloud applications, even if that cloud is not based on VMware vSphere.”
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Managing the Agile Team Environment
It is a well known fact that people leave managers, not organizations. Though, Agile teams are known to have camaraderie amongst team members, however the relationship of the manager with the team members and the organizational ecosystem as a whole holds the key to being an successful Agile manager.
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Cius, Exadata, Itasca: more than a platform
The Cius tablet PC from Cisco and the Exadata machine from Oracle-Sun involve more than the simple introduction of a new enterprise technology - they also indicate a possible new (or accelerating) trend away from selling general purpose platforms and towards tightly integrated application systems.
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SAMbdas in Java
Since the initial Lambda proposal was released (and the in-depth InfoQ analysis), there has been a subsequent state of the lambda which has significantly moved the goalposts of the lambda project in JDK 7. Read on to find out what's new.
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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.