That boom you hear? That's the cloud. Cloud computing is experiencing serious growth – even the Department of Defense is joining the party. However, some people are a little concerned about giving up hard copies and going completely virtual. Getting on this bandwagon is a great idea that can save money and time (assuming the cloud server chosen has a solid reputation). Here are some reasons, posted on an article on HuffingtonPost.com, cloud computing is gaining in popularity. It Saves Money (and the Environment) Keeping paper copies, updating them, making more copies to distribute, shredding them, ordering more paper and ink – it's a vicious cycle. Many companies waste serious cash on this process, not to mention the leg work of employees whose sole responsibility is to keep up with the filing. Switching to cloud computing can save a lot of money and trees, which is why many companies are going green and upping the bottom line at the same time.

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A question that every online application provider will face eventually is: Does my application scale? Can I add an extra 100 users and still ensure the same user experience? If the application architecture is properly designed the easiest way is to put an additional server behind the load balancer to handle more traffic. In this article we recount an incident that happened to one of our clients when the cause of poor application performance was eventually attributed to problems with the load balancing of the application servers. Around 8 am the Operations team at Rendoosia Inc. (name changed for commercial reasons) got an alert from the APM tool that one of three SharePoint servers was generating many HTTP Server (500) errors. All three servers were behind a load balancer; hence why the team decided to analyze the overall performance of all three servers with the report presented in Figure 1.

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If you want to significantly expand your web development skills beyond PHP, this practical, hands-on book teaches you ECMAScript—the core JavaScript language—from the ground up. You’ll discover some similarities between JavaScript and PHP, such as conditions and loops, but the primary focus is on JavaScript’s unique object creation, classes, prototypes, and inheritance.

Things are moving fast for the Ruby language instrumentation in TraceView. We already support tracing of memcache-client, memcached, dalli, mongo, moped, mongoid, mongomapper, cassandra, ActiveRecord (postgres, mysql, mysql2) plus more. Most recently we added support for Rack and Resque tracing. Installing TraceView consists of two parts: 1) installing the system daemon on your host and 2) installing the Ruby gem in your application. Why a system daemon? TraceView uses a system daemon to collect instrumentation from sources beyond application code such as host metrics, Apache or Resque. The system daemon is installed with two commands that can be pasted into your shell. An account specific version of these commands are available in your TraceView dashboard once you create an account. (Under Settings; App Configuration; Trace New Hosts).

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Analyzing Hadoop jobs and speeding them up is often a tedious and time-consuming effort that requires experts. In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Michael Kopp, a technology strategist in the Compuware APM center of excellence, will show you how proven APM techniques can be used to speed up your Hadoop jobs at the core without going through tons of log files, beyond just adding more hardware and within minutes instead of hours or days. Michael Kopp is a technology strategist in the Compuware APM center of excellence and has more than 10 years of experience as an architect and developer in the Java/JEE space. Additionally, Kopp specializes in architecture and performance of large-scale production deployments with a special focus on virtualization and cloud.

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A free open-source pricing and valuation engine (quant library) for financial products, written entirely in the Java programming language.

It’s now possible to create isolated networks in the cloud using OpenStack Networking. Cloud Networks can help enhance network security, increase application agility and improve scalability and availability of your servers.

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Enterprises should have a clear understanding of potential security benefits and risks associated with cloud computing to set realistic expectations with their cloud provider. With this baseline knowledge, enterprises can effect changes in security and privacy that are in the best interest of the organization. In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Todd M. Moore, IBM Director - Interoperability and Partnerships, Director - OpenStack Foundation, share his experience on how to analyze and respond to the security implications for cloud computing. Learn about the "Security for Cloud Computing: 10 Steps to Ensure Success" white paper from the Cloud Standards Customer Council and understand the strategies designed to help decision makers evaluate and compare security offerings.

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With billions of reads and writes daily, Netflix relies on NoSQL database Cassandra to replace a legacy Oracle deployment.

Today we're launching the Express and Community Editions of eXo Platform 4.0: The Open Source Enterprise Social Platform. After 10 years, I feel like this is the first product we’ve launched that has this level of fit and finish: something that has never been accomplished before in the open source world. I even think it is among the most beautiful enterprise software ever launched.

License and compliance management was difficult when most everything you needed was terrestrial – on the ground, tangible, countable. But as assets float toward and into the cloud, license and compliance management are becoming more complex, more challenging, and even more important. In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Erik Iversen, Leader, Software Asset Management Team at SHI International, to discuss how to use a simple three-step model to help get ready. Erik Iversen leads the Software Asset Management team at SHI International. He started the SAM Services team in 2008 with just one customer; now the team supports a variety of software governance and compliance programs for hundreds of customers of all shapes and sizes.

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Through a great deal of research on enterprise cloud adoption and security, I’ve learned something telling. As you would expect, CISOs’ opinions about cloud strategy are quite varied. While many folks recognize their company’s use of SaaS for HR, sales, communication, and other applications, they are fairly divided about the use of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and how secure these environments are in keeping company data safeguarded. After many talks with these technology leaders, I’ve determined that each fall into three distinct categories. The first group is the server huggers and they make up a very small percentage of the respondents. They simply have no reason to leverage IaaS. Their applications are very resource intensive and expensive, and their businesses are highly predictable, so the need for scalable capacity just doesn’t exist. However, the time may come where they have company needs to bring the cloud into the mix. If so, they should be well informed on how to take advantage of cloud services and realize the ways to protect data during and after that migration.

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Multi-tenant environments bring a new set of challenges when it comes to security. In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Omar Khawaja, Global Principal, Security Solutions, at Verizon Terremark, will provide a structured and sequenced data-centric security approach to identify and align users, systems and access to data. Cloud Expo attendees will learn the key considerations to be had when outsourcing IT environments to the cloud as well as the importance of a model-driven template. Omar Khawaja is Global Principal, Security Solutions, at Verizon Terremark.

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The scale and automation of cloud computing deliver economies of scale – and price points – that can’t be matched by traditional computing platforms. Managers can minimize capital expenses and align operational costs to business demands with scalable, flexible resource deployments. Those same factors enable innovation through rapid prototyping and testing of complex systems that aren’t feasible – or affordable – with established approaches. It’s little wonder the cloud has emerged as the first choice of infrastructure for many IT managers and practitioners. Security and compliance play just as critical a role in the hybrid cloud as they do in more conventional environments. So it’s unfortunate that as organizations move operations to the cloud they tend to mirror the protection efforts they employ with their physical, on-premise systems. It’s a mistake because in many cases existing controls don’t migrate well to the cloud. As a result, they fail to provide the requisite protection and diminish – or even eliminate – anticipated cost and operational benefits of cloud computing.

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The next version of enterprise Java has received executive approval in the Java Community Process and a reference implementation is due soon, Oracle says.

Orthogonality is a concept often used to describe modular and maintainable software, but it's also a design principle found (and broken) in some of our most popular Java utilities. With this short article you'll wrap your head around orthogonality once and for all -- by seeing how it is implemented, and violated, in Log4j. Workarounds are also discussed.

I received a question around the JOptionPane class so I might as well point you in the direction of some swing dialog box articles:

• Creating a Message Dialog Box - Part I looks at using the showMessageDialog method of the JOptionPane class.
• Creating a Message Dialog Box - Part II goes a bit further by looking at the showConfirmDialog and showOptionDialog methods.
• Building an Input Dialog Box shows how to use the JOptionPane to get some data from the user.

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When you look at the database market, it’s a virtual jungle out there. Those of us in the industry 15 years ago can look back and remember when we only had the option to use a relational database from Sybase, Oracle, Microsoft or IBM. That was pretty much it if you were planning to build a new complex application with persistent storage. Nowadays, the number of options is absolutely brilliant, but this also means you need to do your homework. I found a great visualization of the database market landscape by 451 Research. The similarity to the London underground map is striking.

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If you are interested in getting started with Java, or just object oriented programming, this is a great book to start with. The book starts off with a high level overview of the Java platform and goes straight into an example of creating a hello world application. While creating the hello world application the authors take you on a tour of the NetBeans IDE. It then covers the basics of 0bject-oriented programming and the Java programming language. The authors cover objects, classes, inheritance, interfaces, packages, variables, operators, expressions, statements, blocks, and control flow statements. After the introduction chapter the chapters begin to go into detail about each of the topics that were introduced, and many more. I have listed the chapters below.

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A recent survey by Sonatype found widespread use of open source -- with 80 percent of a typical Java application assembled from open-source components -- but a lack of corporate standards governing usage.