Busy, busy month for those of you keeping score, and I don’t mean the final gold medal count. But, now that I’ve nodded to the Olympics, congratulations to both team Canada and team USA on the best hockey game I’ve ever seen. Ever. And I’m from Boston, home of the sometimes brilliant Bruins. No, the game I’ve been watching is a tectonic shift of cloud ecosystem money moves toward application mobility... Put yourself in my place; It is exciting to see this broad swath of really, really smart people betting large on application mobility as a critical factor in the cloud market's evolution. Sand Hill investors, old-iron scavengers in search of a makeover, and virtualization royalty alike are rolling money at application mobility. And that's good news for me. Why? Because people will begin to ask questions such as, "Why not move the OS and the App in a VM? Doesn't OVF make this all work across VMs from Xen to VMware from KVM to Hyper-V? Has anyone heard a success reported?"

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Free your apps from the bugs and headaches of Java NIO. XNIO offers NIO capability but in a hassle-free manner and vastly simplifies the opening of channels with support for SSL and virtual channels within the same API. Learn more about this open source project from JBoss and how to integrate it into your applications.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whom most people know as an English poet, also wrote some very nice prose about words. For example he was the one who summed up poetry itself as being about, above all, choosing "the best possible words in the best possible order."

Another fellow who knew a thing or two about words was a predecessor of mine - by a few hundred years! - at Trinity College, Cambridge. His name was Archbishop Richard Chevenix Trench and he produced, among another things, a little volume call On The Study of Words. This was back in 1852.

At one point in this book, Trench is musing on the power of words and, in particular, the role that words play in paving the way for the public acceptance of ideas.

Some ideas, he notes, just don't seem to catch on until the right words are found to "nail" them down.

I was strongly reminded of Coleridge, and of Trench, when interviewing a technology CEO the other day about Cloud Computing. Because this particular CEO seemed to be a beacon of light amid the murky fog surrounding Cloud Computing. And what stuck in my mind particularly was his ability, just as Archbishop Trench noted, to "nail down" the essential value proposition of Cloud Computing.

One new term that he used and that struck me as particularly insightful was this: "Resource Cloud."

This term definitely resonates immediately with me as being one that will not just help, it will triumph. Instead of talking of hardware, of physical servers, what the world needs to do is think of there as existing a "Resource Cloud" in which providers of resources and consumers who use compute power are matched up.

"Those consumers don't need to know, and indeed don't care, where the resources are," said my CEO. "So let the providers with the hardware push it into the cloud while the consumers consume it by creating virtual machines."

He continued:
"'I need X terabytes of storage at this kind of performance level, let us say Grade A performance, and I need 30 CPU cores,' the consumer might say, and the providers will run the hardware necessary to supply that need. IT runs the hardware side, but it doesn't manage the virtual side. That is done by the customer at via their Virtual Data Center."
So this is his vision, the vision also known loosely as "Virtualization 2.0"

But to my ear, "Resource Cloud" is the stronger metaphor, with more likelihood of catching on. And in 21 days' time I will revisit this posting to add the name of the CEO concerned. He already has established himself as thought leader in the world of technology. I haven't a doubt that he will come very soon to be recognized too as the man who put datacenter virtualization on the map forever and for always with the introduction of this one colloquy: REsource Cloud."

What do you think? Is it the best term? Do you have a better one?

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The JDev11gPS1 New Features page lists a large amount of improvements, including something called the "Declaration Insight". The New Features blurb lists this feature as "When declaring local variables from method calls, declaration insight can automatically add the declaration and assignment code as well as completing the method call." Like us, if you're using JDev11gPS1 you've probably already stumbled upon this feature and not realized it. You'll be familiar with the traditional Completion Insight. Say in an EntityImpl you're implementing a method and within you want to call the super class method to get the database transaction. However you've forgotten the function name, is it getDBTransaction or getDatabaseTransaction? This is easily solvable by starting to type the function name "getD" then activating Completion Insight, either via pressing Ctrl-Space or the Source menu's same named option. The editor will show the Completion Insight popup in blue with all the functions starting with "getD" in the super class stack, including the method we’re interested in getDBTransaction.

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JSR-310 the Date and Time API inspired by Joda-Time, has entered Early Draft Review. Feedback is wanted!

In Part 1 of this tutorial, I showed how to set up a web project and connect to a database. In this step, you will use the Data Source Explorer to browse database artifacts. You may need to re-open the JPA perspective. In the Data Source Explorer, expand the nodes inside the New Oracle Database Connection node. You can view the individual tables and columns. Observe that the Data Source Explorer denotes which columns have been designated as primary keys. Note that the tables shown below are stored in the JPATUTORIAL schema. While browsing database artifacts, simply expand the tree to view columns, constraints, dependencies, indexes, triggers, and other relevant properties of the selected component. While browsing database artifacts, navigate up the tree to view columns, constraints, dependencies, indexes, triggers, and other relevant properties of the selected component.

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There's a good article by Ed Ort about deploying RIAs in mixed environments on the Sun Developer Network. It's worth a read as a reminder to always check to see if the application you've written has any specific requirements - does it need a certain version of the JRE? Does it need the latest plug-in? He focuses on using the deployment toolkit to setup an environment correctly for a rich internet application.

Consider the Environment When Deploying RIAs originally appeared on About.com Focus on Java on Thursday, March 4th, 2010 at 22:25:14.

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VeriSign, a provider of Internet infrastructure for the networked world, continues to gain traction with customers in driving the adoption of mobile phone-based security for online access. The VeriSign Identity Protection (VIP) Authentication Service is a cloud-based authentication service enabling secure online access for end users utilizing their mobile phones. Today, VeriSign supports both standalone mobile security applications as well as a Mobile Software Development Kit (SDK) for building security into mobile applications. The VIP Access for Mobile application is offered for free from VeriSign and transforms more than 500 different types of mobile devices into VIP credentials for strong authentication including the most popular handsets -- iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile and handsets supporting the most popular J2ME and BREW platforms. Strong authentication works by requiring each user to provide not just a username and password but also a unique, one-time six-digit security code generated by a user's VIP authentication credential.

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As we start this year, hope is mounting on a vibrant IPO market, better than last couple of years. This article lists 20 companies that are hot candidates for IPO. The list has some well-known names like Facebook, Skype, LinkedIn, Twitter, Digg, Yelp, LiveOps, and Tesla Motors. The less known names are - Associated Content, BrightCove, Chegg, Demand Media Etsy, Exact Target, Gilt Group, Glam Media, Rearden Commerce, Workday, and Zynga. Workday is the new company founded by Peoplesoft founder David Duffield. It's a SaaS-based HR and ERP company.

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Software metrics can help you find hidden design elements in your code, enabling them to emerge as idiomatic patterns. This installment of Evolutionary architecture and emergent design shows how intelligent use of metrics and visualizations lets you discover important code elements that are obscured by accidental complexity.

SYS-CON announced today that "Cloud Expo, Inc." has spun out of SYS-CON Events, Inc. as a startup events management company effective March 1, 2010. Carmen Gonzalez was named president & CEO of Cloud Expo, Inc. Carmen served as the co-founder, president, and chief operating officer of SYS-CON Media since 1994. In this capacity, Carmen was in charge of SYS-CON's sales and marketing functions. Under her leadership, the company was named by Inc 500 as among the fastest-growing 500 privately held companies in North America three years in a row.

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The way you acquire, manage and pay for software has changed. Now, companies have more choices – like SaaS, Cloud, and Virtual Appliances – to get the tools they need, instantly, and for much less than purchasing and owning software. With all these new terms and options it can be challenging to choose the right solution for your business. This Webcast provides an overview, definitions, and the pros and cons related to SaaS, Cloud, and Virtual Appliances. Plus, it highlights Presto Virtual Software Development Appliances by Black Diamond Software. Presto provides the right combination of IBM development tools engineered into easily consumable appliances, ready to use, with very low monthly pricing for small business.

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JNBridge, a provider of Java and .NET Framework-based interoperability tools, enabled developers at CambridgeSoft Corporation to easily integrate Java-based digital signature APIs into their .NET-based electronic lab notebook product. CambridgeSoft supplies discovery, collaboration, and knowledge enterprise solutions, desktop software, scientific databases and consulting services to the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and chemical industries. Using JNBridgePro, developers at CambridgeSoft now are easily able to integrate third-party Java-based digital signature technology into the .NET infrastructure of E-Notebook -- CambridgeSoft's electronic lab notebook software -- to quickly meet business and compliance requirements of a major pharmaceutical customer. "It takes an incredible amount of work to solve such a complex interoperability problem," said Alfred Nehme, director of application development at CambridgeSoft. "JNBridgePro provided a level of Java and .NET integration that otherwise would have been very difficult and time-consuming to do ourselves."

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Middleware vendor WSO2 recently released Cloud Identity, which the company said eliminates the need for internal software, dedicated hardware, and systems administrators in identity management. Instead, WSO2 provides enterprise identity management as a pay-as-you-go, hosted service that scales.

TechTarget has been working on a project to redesign TheServerSide.com. Updates to the site will be noticeable in the near future.

A recent blog on EBPML.ORG entitled “REST 2010 - Where are We?” very aggressively stated: “REST is just a "NO WS-*" movement.” The arguments presented are definitely interesting but the most compelling point made is in the way that REST APIs are constructed, namely that unlike the “ideal” REST API described where HTTP methods are used to define action (verb) and the path the resource (noun), practical implementations of REST are using a strange combination of both actions (verbs) and resources (nouns) in URIs. What this does is simulate very closely SOA services, in which the endpoint is a service (resource) upon which an action (method) is invoked. In the case of SOAP the action is declared either in the HTTP header (old skool SOAPaction) or as part of the SOAP payload. So the argument that most REST APIs, in practice, are really little more than a NO WS-* API is fairly accurate.

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NoSQL describes several database technologies for which the data stores don't need a fixed schema and often avoid join operations. Brian Aker gives a lightning talk (7 minutes) about NoSQL during the Nov 2009 OpenSQLCamp in Portland, Oregon.

gDev is an Austin, Texas-based outsourced services firm that leverages a global network of providers to deliver high-quality software development at the lowest cost and in the shortest time period possible. gDev maintains project scorecards for each provider and certifies them in particular services based on their delivery and acceptance track record. The gDev network of partners is comprised of approximately 4,000 developers from a number of countries, including China, Mexico, Ukraine and Vietnam, who serve as the ‘talent pool’ available to customers. At any time, there are about 1,500 developers actively working on various gDev projects. These projects are typically short-term contracts in comparison to traditional outsourced projects, which are typically several months or years. The average length of a project is one to two weeks and the longest project gDev provides is four weeks.

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In February, IBM announced the open beta of WebSphere Application Server feature packs for OSGi and JPA. The feature packs are product extensions that provide lightweight application frameworks for WebSphere V7.

One common comment we hear when talking about JRebel is that class updates should be implemented in the standard JVM. However the support for full schema change HotSwap would be in the next version of the JVM, JRebel would still be a worthwhile investment. Why?