Cloud doyen Salesforce.com Tuesday fielded Desk.com, a new on-demand social and mobile help desk platform that’s supposed to let businesses deliver personal customer service by unifying support channels including Twitter, Facebook, e-mail, the phone and the web via a Desk.com Agent Desktop. Basic pricing starts at $49 a month per full-time agent for unlimited usage. Flex pricing runs $1 an hour per part-time agent. Users can reportedly respond to cases themselves on the go, re-assign, change groups, change status, change priority for cases and modify customer information associated with cases.

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Some companies get it. Others wander around in the fog and think that it's a "Cloud". In case you've missed it, 2012 has been the year of some amazing strategic moves by Dell. If you think Dell isn't a software vendor, you're dead wrong. Dell "gets it" - SaaS, Software & Cloud. Dell is making some exciting waves in the "solutions" business. Building on the momentum as a result of the acquisition of Perot Systems some years ago and a buying spree where they acquired a host of best-of-breed software solutions such as Boomi (Cloud-based Integration Platform),Dell has just announced a newly created Software Division and has appointed veteran John Swainson as president, reporting to Michael Dell.

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Tilera, the wannabe many-core Intel server replacement, said Monday that it’s delivering the expected 16- and 36-core versions of its new 64-bit low-power proprietary TILE-GX processors along with evaluation systems it hopes will give Intel something to worry about. The things should be in volume by mid-March. They’re Tilera’s first 64-bit chips capable of using more memory than its original 32-bit widgets – like 512GB or 1TB. They’ve been shipping in limited quantities – alphas – since September. The start-up claims to have 20 design-wins and 80 “deep” engagements for the GX family that it expects will turn into design-wins – probably this year – because they’re do-or-die mission-critical projects. Forty-seven are in the US, 13 in Europe, and 20 in APAC, mostly China.

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x += x++ * x++ * x++; Now that's a little annoying. You'd shoot a developer who worked that into a program, but it's they type of thing you'd see on a certification exam. Maybe it's a little too difficult for the OCAJP, the Associate exam from Oracle, but it's probably pretty good fodder for the new OCPJP exam for Java 7.

Hibernate is an excellent Java ORM tool but it lacks the features required to implement a multi-tenant cloud architecture. Don't let that stop you.

Every company should plan regular architecture capability maturity assessments using a model. These should provide a framework that represents the key components of a productive enterprise architecture process. A model provides an evolutionary way to improve the overall process that starts out in an ad hoc state, transforms into an immature process, and then finally becomes a well-defined, disciplined, managed and mature process. The goal is to enhance the overall odds for success of the enterprise architecture by identifying weak areas and providing a defined path towards improvement. As the architecture matures, it should increase the benefits it offers the organization. Architecture maturity assessments help to determine how companies can maximise competitive advantage, identify ways of cutting costs, improve quality of services and reduce time to market. These assessments are undertaken as part of the Enterprise Architecture management.

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This article introduces the concepts of Component Oriented Development and Assembly (CODA) using the OSGi Service platform with an example application. The article starts with an introduction to software components, elaborates with an example application, followed by an overview of the OSGi Service platform, and an implementation of the example application using this platform. Components are parts that can be assembled to form a larger system. Electronic components such as ICs (Integrated Circuits) are assembled together to build an electronic system; similarly software components are assembled together to build a software system. Software systems have a static form as well as a dynamic runtime form. Software components can be assembled either in static form or dynamic form. In either case, the software component is an independent unit of development, deployment, and assembly. Using components to build software systems will provide many architectural advantages apart from promoting ease of reuse.

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This year, TheServerSide Java Symposium -- North America's longest-running, vendor-neutral Java conference -- is being reinvented to make it accessible to more Java professionals. So, get ready for the new format’s first outing on April 10, and set your GPS for San Francisco.

Tiggzi is cloud-based mobile app builder. It makes it super easy and fast to build HTML5 and hybrid (with PhoneGap) mobile apps entirely in the cloud. With a new Free plan, anyone can now build a mobile app.

Creating and securing a Spring 3 , Spring WS 2 web service using multiple XSDs and LDAP security.

Apache JMeter, the Open Source Load Test tool reference, which recently became a Top Level Apache project has released a new version 2.6

Mobile applications are more and more becoming part of a company’s online services. This leads to the question whether we need to monitor like other parts of our IT infrastructure. As they are part of our shipped application services we need to ensure they are working properly. However, not every application must be monitored the same way. Additionally monitoring always comes at a certain cost. We need people to take care of the monitoring, we have to prepare our applications to be ready for monitoring and we potentially also have to buy or at least integrate new monitoring tools. So is it worth the investment?

Want to escape the outsourcing axe? Today's IT trends are creating lucrative niches for ambitious developers.

Including environment variables in your Maven build process could boost your team's efficiency at every stage of the software development lifecycle. Java developer Paul Spinelli demonstrates his custom approach to environment-aware Maven builds.

The change would unify Java EE/SE and ME oversight.

Every variable you declare in Java must be associated with a type, and it must also be given a unique name. When naming your variables, put a little bit of thought into it and name them well. Well thought out variable names make Java programs both easier to read and easier to maintain. Good names can even make Java programming fun.

One of the common problems of people that start using Hibernate is performance, if you don't have much experience in Hibernate you will find how quickly your application becomes slow. If you enable sql traces, you would see how many queries are sent to database that can be avoided with little Hibernate knowledge. In current post I am going to explain how to use Hibernate Query Cache to avoid amount of traffic between your application and database.

Is Java well-matured over the past 10 years? Read what a C developer thought about Java 10 years ago and compare it with how things are today!

These past few weeks, I published several blogs pointing out problems with static rule based correlation, their current limitations, their high TCO, etc. Because these solutions have been sold for many years as the end all be all to security problems, it has created false expectations in the industry and among clients. But SIEM as a general discipline holds plenty of promises, let’s not throw the baby with the bathwater.

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MLstate's Opa streamlines Web app development with a single language for client and server, but the bright promise is not without pitfalls.