Gartner is now projecting 19.7% growth in worldwide PC shipments this year. That would mean 366.1 million units with tablets accounting for 10.5 million. Gartner expects revenues to increase 12.2% to $245 billion, which is way more than the measly 1.9% increase it was projecting in December. That was when it was only figuring on 13.3% growth in demand before HP and Dell’s early results turned more upbeat. All the action of course is in the mobile space. Gartner figures mobile PC growth will be up 90% over the next three years. Mobile is expected to account for 70% of demand this year, up from 55% last year.

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Mike Taylor writes two insightful essays about programming today. Are we stuck in a tedious loop of gluing APIs together? What happened to the creative aspects of programming? Check out these thought-provoking essays!

From Java EE to Google App Engine to GigaSpaces, developing against a middleware or "infrastructure" API is well established in the Java world.<br>With the (re-)advent of virtualization, it is now becoming feasible to work with custom environments.<br>We'll look at the state of cloud and middleware deployment tooling and examine possible future developments.

The objective of The Single Page Interface Manifesto is to promote the progressive disappearance of the use of pages not only in web applications also in dynamic web sites with SEO, bookmarking and page based requisites in general.

The NetCAT program is back for Netbeans 6.9 and looking for volunteer testers. All you need is a spare four hours a week until June 2010, the scheduled date for the final release. For more information, read the NetCat program FAQs .

There's also a chance to contribute code through the NetFIX program. It's looking for Java developers who fancy fixing some of the bugs highlighted by the NetCAT program.

Help Test NetBeans 6.9 originally appeared on About.com Focus on Java on Thursday, March 11th, 2010 at 22:00:53.

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As James Gosling points out, if you were thinking of submitting a proposal for a paper you want to present at JavaOne, you'd better be quick. The submission process ends on March 14th.

For those looking to find out more about what's going to happen at JavaOne this year, keep an eye on the official website. The conference will run from September 19-23, 2010 in San Francisco as part of Oracle OpenWorld.

Call For JavaOne Submissions Closing Soon originally appeared on About.com Focus on Java on Thursday, March 11th, 2010 at 22:00:28.

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Virtualization is the topic du jour in IT today. The technology is cool, the attributes are slick and now the stock market even is tracking it. The adoption problem that is facing virtualization strategies stems from a bottom up IT driven approach versus a top down business aligned approach. Furthermore, the technology is limitingin value unless it is implemented as a “virtual enterprise cloud service oriented platform architecture” with a dynamic operational model. The playbook for exploiting virtualizaiton AND other key enabling technology components is outlined in nine steps below. Fundamentally, an enterprise cloud vs a public cloud is specifically business aligned to the enteprise. The program creates a virtual oriented cloud utility platform that incorporates the needs of the business, the control over execution and the leverage of everything virtual.

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As a serial entrepreneur, I learned a lot of lessons from things that didn’t work. These lessons later on shaped my ideas on what would be needed to build a successful startup company. When I became a VC, I realized that these same lessons could be applied to helping evaluate the many businesses that I was getting to see. Whilst the following criteria are by no means a guarantee of success, or the only criteria that you should think about, I do believe they can be very helpful. So in no particular order, here is a list of six questions that I learned to ask to validate my own startup ideas, that now shape what I look for in an investment. I hope this list will help you validate your idea:

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As BIRT 2.5.2 was released recently, I wanted to post on some of the new features available in the release. BIRT 2.5.2 represents a maintenance release, which is generally dominated with bug fixes and not new enhancements, but this release does have a few that are worth noting. The SQL Query Builder is now directly available without creating a connection profile. When adding a new data source, the query builder is listed as one of the data sources available. After selecting the Query Builder data source you are prompted with a list of available databases. Once you select the type of database you can then specify the specific driver and connection properties that will be used.

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Enterprise build system, Gradle Inc. and repository specialist JFrog have formed a collaborative relationship to work toward a series of offerings that the companies say will enhance user productivity. The companies will begin packaging JFrogs repository manager, Artifactory and Gradle together as a more complete build offering.

Web services testing software vendor eviware has released soapUI 3.5, which now supports the testing of JMS, AMF and databases. Free and open-source, soapUI is a desktop application used in inspecting, invoking, developing, simulating and testing Web services. The interface is designed to feel like the IDEs that are already familiar to developers.

I’ve been thinking about my presence on the Internet from the early days, from my time at Argonne National Labs near Chicago in 1988-1989 and from my graduate school days at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis in 1989-1992. That was even before the web browser days, which didn’t come out till 1993-94... I’ve been thinking about my presence on the internet from the early days, from my time at Argonne National Labs near Chicago in 1988-1989 and from my graduate school days at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis in 1989-1992. That was even before the web browser days, which didn’t come out till [...]

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Did you miss our Application Performance Management virtual seminar in February? In these expert presentations discover the best techniques for perfecting performance builds and for finding, diagnosing and fixing performance bugs. Gain instant access to the latest tools for mastering performance management across the lifecycle.

Five articles on classloaders, objects, classes, redeploying, OSGi, Tapestry 5, HotSwap, JRebel and other aspects of Java class reloading and turnaround.

Are you tired of turning every non-trivial class into an interface, and then create an "Impl" that actually does the work when mocking objects for testing? Do you know about JMock's ClassImposterizer? It allows you to mock instances without calling the constructor of the mocked class, ultimately helping you write and test your code faster.

Get a taste of what's possible with the OpenCable Application Platform in this article, the second in a three-part series. Author Jonathan Knudsen demonstrates how to create applications, called Xlets, for OCAP devices and run them on a desktop computer using the OCAP RI.

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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