Terracotta is out to cure skimpy cache by making Ehcache really, really big, 1TB in fact, a size only a few people can use right now, but just you wait, it says, the day is upon us when practically everybody with a database will want it to be in-memory. The biggest caches these days are still 100GB-200GB and they’re a lot of work to build. Maybe there are two or three that hit 200 GB. The average, on the other hand, is more like sub-20 gigs. Terracotta swears it’s made it easy to store over a terabyte of data and hundreds of millions of entries in a single cache, so data retrieval is a whole lot faster and clouds and virtualization aren’t bottlenecked.

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NaviSite, Inc., a provider of complex hosting, application management and managed cloud services for the enterprise market, is using a combination of Oracle's Sun servers and Oracle software to run its mission-critical systems. With more than 1,500 customers in 10 datacenters across the US and UK, NaviSite needed to expand its virtualization platform to meet the growing infrastructure demands of its customers, while delivering industry-leading performance and availability.

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After months of promising we have finally moved Exadel Flamingo to exadel.org and released version 2.2.0. exadel.org is our community site for hosting open source projects. Flamingo is a light weight framework for connecting rich web and mobile user interfaces to enterprise back end. Flamingo connects Seam, Spring, and Java EE 6 (soon via CDI/JSR299) with the following user interfaces.

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Exadel has released Exadel JavaFX Plug-in for Eclipse version 1.3.4. The biggest feature in this release is Organize Imports (just like in Java editor). The class for Text node is missing, pressing Ctrl+Shift+O, will display the dialog where the correct class can be selected. You can also invoke Organize Imports from the editor context menu (right-click anywhere in the editor and select Organize Imports). You can also invoke Organize Imports from the editor context menu (right-click [...]

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One of the most common questions for people that are new to BIRT is about how to ask data from the DataSet in the report.  The question is when building expressions should I use dataSetRow["FIELD"] or row["FIELD"]? So let me see if I can set the record straight. When data is acquired, it is acquired by a DataSet, so the following query in a JDBC DataSet will create a three field resultset.

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In what is believed to be a cloud first, Unisys is going to offer its upscale enterprise-class ClearPath users a fixed-priced PaaS cloud, a model that flies in the face of the nickel and dime’ing that goes on in commodity cloud land. Unisys already has x86-based commodity clouds on offer but now it’s drawn its proprietary mainframe-style ClearPath widgetry, based on its MCP and OS/2000 operating systems, into the new meme beginning with a managed development and testing solution that will go for $13,000 for three months use of a soup-to-nuts environment that includes 25MIPS, eight megs of memory and 75GB of storage.

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Data center administrators are faced with the challenge of what to do with in-house versus cloud services. Following two years of lean spending on IT infrastructure, the hype over cloud services has caught the attention of everyone – from the C-suite to the functional leadership in organizations as diverse as finance, marketing, logistics and operations. Providers like Salesforce.com are tailoring their message not to the IT department but to the CEO and CFO, promising cost savings, improved reliability and greater business agility. IT leaders are presented with concepts of “indoor” or “private” clouds. Over those same two years, existing data center equipment is ripe for replacement. Innovations in areas like virtualization, power optimization, and multi-core processors coupled with increasing maintenance expenses are providing an incentive for many enterprise organizations to increase IT budgets again. For other firms, aging infrastructure and increasing reliance on IT services is forcing a decision.

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I don’t know any other technology that has ever gotten as much of a beating as JavaFX did last week (here, here, and here). JavaFX has become a technology that developers love to hate. It’s like a pinata for developers. JavaFX was first announced at JavaOne 2007 (that’s 3 years ago). Many predicted its death even before version 1.0 was released in December 2008, and many continue to call for its demise. Last week also turned out to be the week where I presented Enterprise JavaFX at the Silicon Valley JavaFX JUG, and also the week that Steven Chin created a petition to open source JavaFX. Don’t get me wrong, JavaFX is very far from perfect. It has it’s problems and challenges (listed below) and its future is hanging on life support right now, but let’s start with the good.

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Jinfonet Software, a provider of Java reporting solutions, on Thursday unveiled JReport 10. This new version adds rich visualization and interactive reporting to a robust, agile BI platform, providing embedded operational reporting to developers and self-service reporting to end users. JReport 10 brings Agile Business Intelligence to the next level with rich visualization features. Web 2.0 self-service reporting allows highly interactive reports to be accessible across the enterprise with superior performance and scalability.

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It is widely accepted that large enterprises will start cloud deployment via "private cloud" – that is to say, inside their firewall. But what kind of early applications will these be? Imagine you are the head of manufacturing at a Fortune 500 company running an Oracle Manufacturing application and multiple other source systems. You need to know critical production information instantly, several times a day. And you are moving around constantly. You have an iPad and just a touch gives you those critical nuggets of information. This is advanced analytics using the private cloud. Another example is Project Management, where many moving parts are involved. Again, using touchscreen devices like the iPad you can visualize all aspects of the projects at any instant and anywhere.

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In Part 4 I discussed the Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse and how it allows you to view, create, and manage JPA entity relationships. The Entity Editor provides a centralized view of all entity relationships, allows you to modify entity properties, and allows you to navigate between the object model, mapping associations, and database schema layers. In Part 5, I will explore persistence settings. The persistence.xml file defines the context for JPA persistence. In this step, you will use the JPA Persistence Configuration Editor to explore the persistence.xml file for your JPA web project.

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Face it, setting up Java EE application environments can be a time-consuming, error-prone, and highly variable process. A cloud computing approach to Java EE application environments can address these problems and more. In his session at the 7th International Cloud Expo, Dustin Amrhein, Technical Evangelist for Cloud Technologies at IBM, will describe how the IBM WebSphere test organization utilizes a cloud computing solution to enable the construction, deployment, and maintenance of Java EE application environments for testing purposes throughout the organization. This new cloud computing implementation means decreased environment setup times, elevated asset utilization, and increased test iterations. All of this adds up to make the IBM WebSphere test organization more responsive and agile than it has ever been.

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Recently I had the opportunity to figure out how to manipulate sizing, positioning and text wrapping of chart legends so I thought I'd share what I learned. If you have a chart with legend items that don't fit in the available space, BIRT will do one of two things, depending on the wrapping width option. (Wrapping width is found on the legend layout dialog). If the wrapping width is set to zero, BIRT will simply truncate the legend item text and optionally append an ellipsis. (The ellipsis option is located on the legend entries dialog). If the wrapping width is set to a positive value, BIRT will word-wrap the text. Unfortunately when it does this, it doesn't check the vertical boundaries and long items can end up overlapping.

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BIRT Introduced OLAP style data cubes and crosstabs in version 2.2 and while they have been around for some time we still get a lot of questions on how to use and manipulate them. Below are just some of the resources that have been posted to BIRT Exchange that should help you with cubes and crosstabs. To get an idea of what a BIRT cube is and how to tie it to a crosstab report item, take a look at this article which provides a detailed write-up of the technology and supplies some examples. To see a recorded demonstration of a crosstab style report being build see this tutorial video.

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Recently I listened to a large enterprise customer talk enthusiastically about ITCAM’s new agent installation and deployment features. I bet you did a double-take as you read that. Why the enthusiasm? The answer had a lot to do with how the customer delegates IT roles and responsibilities and their desire to go from 500 to 1500 managed JVMs (Java Virtual Machines) without increasing staff.

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For your reference, we've listed the Top 10 Performance Problems as we have seen them over the years when working with our clients. I hope this list is enlightening – and I’ve included follow-up links to the blogs to help better understand how to solve these problems. Many libraries out there make remote communication seem like a piece of cake. There is hardly any difference for the developer to call a local vs. remote method. The lack of understanding of what is really going on under the remoting-hood makes people forget about things like latency, serialization, network traffic and memory usage that come with every remoting call. The easy way of using these technologies results in too many calls across these remoting boundaries and in the end causes performance and scalability problems.

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WebLogic Server Scripting Tool (WLST) provides powerful command-line capability for system administrators and developers to configure WebLogic server environments. However, its usage and adoption does not reach its full potential, seen at many working places, due to various reasons. This article gives a detailed example of using WLST to configure some of the latest security provisions (SAML 2.0) of WebLogic server, and provides insights on how to overcome the possible hurdles which prevent one from using the tool. Why WLST and What's Stopping You?

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MySQL veterans either disaffected or dismissed by Oracle are starting a new company called SkySQL that will offer “enterprise-class support and services for the MySQL ecosystem.” The outfit is being pulled together by former MySQL SVP of global services Ulf Sandberg and its one-paragraph web site, dominated by a picture of a dolphin, says that whoever else is there – without saying who exactly – are former MySQL employees. However, SkySQL is hiring in “all areas, including support, consulting, training, marketing and sales.” Being detail-free left room for MySQL founder Monty Widenius, who’s formally objecting to the Oracle–Sun acquisition now, to position SkySQL as an alternative to Oracle–Sun, which he evidently blames for running off the old MySQL home team.

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He said he was going to do it and he has. MySQL founder Monty Widenius has made good his quixotic threat to appeal the European Commission’s decision to approve Oracle’s acquisition of Sun – and with it MySQL, which Sun paid a downright silly billion dollars for two years ago. Oracle closed on Sun in January and Widenius had a few months grace to take his case to the Court of First Instance in Luxembourg. It is unclear what he hopes to accomplish since he has basically gone underground and turned off his phone while the futility of the move has already cost him his chief spokesman Florian Mueller.

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The New York Times says that Oracle killed a Sun project to clone Intel’s x86 Xeon server chip and turn out a “no-frills, low-power variant” that it could put into thousands of servers for folks like Facebook, Yahoo and Google. The paper said it had heard tell of such a thing for a long time but could never quite nail it until recently when it happened to interview a couple of people “with knowledge of Sun’s plans,” “who are not authorized to speak publicly.” As part of the fey plan Sun bought the assets of one Montalvo Systems that had done work on low-power Intel clones and hired some “top talent” out of AMD.

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