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JEE6 a Victory for Java

Rob Williams of JavaLobby put together the following write-up about JEE6, which he considers to be a "victory" of what has been leading up to here:

At first blush, JEE6 looked like just the transfer of injection consensus to a standard, and a bunch of long-overdue fixes for JSF. But after a week of using it, the cumulative effect is pretty amazing. I still believe that DI has taken a disproportionate amount of the caloric burn of the last decade, but CDI is a positive development. Per my earlier post, JEE5 was more immediately appealing, but JEE6 is the denser, higher fiber offering. It‘s frankly pretty remarkable how well it all hangs together. Today, I was thinking ‘what is the binding agent here?‘ and the answer came to me pretty quickly: JEE6 represents the final victory of a concept that has been in utero for a very long time. Of course I am thinking of the component.

The concept originated from a speech in 1968 that was directed at addressing the software crisis; unix‘s pipes and filters were the first attempt to embody the concept in practice. But, of course, things didn‘t really happen for objects until the end of the 80s, and then the component reemerged. Unfortunately, in the 90s, the concept was saddled up as a means of system/language interop by CORBA, and interapplication integration by Microsoft (OLE/COM). Having programmed both OLE and COM, the former was a complete joke (though interesting) and the latter was interesting, but it washitched to such a pile of schlock, it was painful. Then came Java and EJB, which, let‘s face the facts, was an unmitigated disaster. EJB 2 really only attempted to address the glaringly absurd omission of asynchronicity. Seriously, tacking on a message-driven bean and having a single onMessage method seemed kind of like progress at the time, but in retrospect, makes you wonder what the team thought was a realistic timeframe for a real, comprehensive approach that could hold water.

You can read the rest of the article over at Javalobby, or as always, you can find LearnQuest's complete listing of Java Training Courses on our website!

Cisco and Citrix Teaming on Enterprise Desktop Virtualization

Citrix and Cisco Systems are teaming up to offer a package for running large numbers of virtual desktops across an organization, in an attempt to ease any painstaking deployment processes. Cisco vice president Jackie Ross states that the idea behind the joint offering is to "bring simplicity to the desktop market." More from InfoWorld:

The package includes Citrix's XenDesktop, which is VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) software that downloads an operating system to a desktop computer from a centralized pool of servers. The package also includesCisco's Unified Computing System, an integrated assemblage of blade servers, switches, storage adapters, and networking fabric.

By teaming with Cisco, Citrix is hoping to distinguish its offering in the increasingly crowdedVDI space, which also includes products such as VMware View and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization.

The basic starter kit will provide remote access for up to 300 users. The companies will provide "expansion packs," as Ross described them, for an additional 400 users per pack. The system should be able to scale to "tens of thousands of users," Ross said.

The package benefits from engineering customization, which should cut the costs of deployment, executives from both companies said during a press conference. For instance, it will include extended-memory B250blade servers from Cisco. The memory extensions should boost the number of desktops each blade server can maintain by 20 percent, or up to 100 users of high-memory applications.

"We can offer up to four times more memory in a two-socket blade," Ross said, adding that, "More often than not, memory becomes the bottleneck, not the CPUs. So customers will require [fewer] blades to support the same number of virtual desktops."

The system will run 10 Gigabit Ethernet, with connections to storage using either FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet) or Fibre Channel. Each switch should accommodate up to 320 blade servers.

Because XenDesktop uses Citrix's HDX(High-Definition User Experience), a set of streaming protocols, users should be able to access desktops over great distances by way of a WAN (Wide Area Network), said Citrix vice president Sumit Dhawan.

The software was built with an "open architecture," Dhawan said. It will be able to support multiple client devices, storage back-ends and hypervisors. This package can use either XenServer or VMware's ESX Server, and will support Microsoft's Hyper-V in the near future, Dhawan said.

The companies are not providing storage with the package, but they do offer profiles to help customers hook their systems to their NetApp products and other brands of back-end storage.

The package is available now, though Cisco and Citrix representatives declined to provide the price of the product to the press. The companies will provide a single support telephone line for both installation and post-installation issues arising from either company's products.

While VDI has been around for several years, Microsoft's release of Windows 7 was widely seen as a catalyst for greater adoption, even if enterprise deployment remains sluggish.

LearnQuest offers a great variety of Windows Server Training courses, which can be found here on our website.

HTML 5 May Give Webpages the Ability to Talk and Listen

Well here's an interesting, if not somewhat creepy, development: HTML5 may give wesites the ability to communicate and hold conversations. A new activity group in the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) is investigating the possibility of incorporating voice recognition and speech synthesis interfaces within Web pages. In a year from now, the new incubator group plans to file a report summarizing the feasibility of adding voice and speech features into HTML. More from ComputerWorld:

The human voice and the Web are not strangers: Google includes a voice-based Web search app in its Android smartphone operating system and Microsoft promises robust voice-driven features in its upcoming Windows Phone 7.

The HTML Speech Incubator Group is studying the feasibility of developing a standard Web interface for both speech recognition and synthesis, said group chair Dan Burnett, who is also director of speech technologies and standards at voice response system provider Voxeo.

Such an interface could be used across multiple browsers. Using built-in or plug-in voice recognition and speech synthesis engines, browsers could read pages aloud or permit users to audibly fill out Web forms.

While this work may overlap with another voice-based W3C effort, VoiceXML, the two efforts are somewhat different, Burnett said. VoiceXML wouldn't work very well for the Web, given that it was primarily designed for voice-driven applications, such as telephone-based voice response systems, where it is used widely. Like HTML itself, the voice capabilities of HTML would be stateless, or not require a dedicated session with the user.

Burnett noted that while the report would discuss the feasibility of establishing a set of interfaces, the work of developing the interfaces themselves, should they be warranted, would be taken on by another W3C group, such as the HTML Working Group.

The W3C has been busy with speech technologies on a number of other fronts as well. The organization also recently released version 3.0 of VoiceXML. In this new version, the working group added semantic descriptions of the features, and organized the functionality into modules.

The W3C also plans to shortly release version 1.1 of SSML (the Speech Synthesis Markup Language) -- often used in conjunction with VoiceXML -- that will incorporate Asian languages, and provide developers more flexibility with voice selection and handling of content in unexpected languages.

Maybe in a couple of years from now, we here at LearnQuest will be offering HTML courses on how to make web pages communicative. But for now you'll just have to stick to our regular catalog of web design and HTML training!

Silverlight Will Exceed HTML5 Capabilities, According to Microsoft

Microsoft said this week that Silverlight is going to broaden web capabilities in ways that HTML5 is in no way able to provide. Although they say that they don't expect or intend for Silverlight to replace HTML5, rather enhance it. From InfoWorld:

While acknowledging the importance of HTML5, Microsoft stressed this week that its Silverlight rich Internet technology extends the Web beyond what HTML5 allows.

Standards-based multimedia features offered by HTML5 have taken the spotlight lately from proprietary technologies, such as Silverlight and Adobe's Flash. But Silverlight still has a purpose in the wake of HTML5's emergence, said Microsoft's Brad Becker, director of product management for Developer Platforms, in a blog entry entitled "The Future of Silverlight."

"On the Web, the purpose of Silverlight has never been to replace HTML; it's to do the things that HTML (and other technologies) couldn't in a way that was easy for developers to tap into. Microsoft remains committed to using Silverlight to extend the Web by enabling scenarios that HTML doesn't cover," Becker said. "From simple 'islands of richness' in HTML pages to full desktop-like applications in the browser and beyond, Silverlight enables applications that deliver the kinds of rich experiences users want."

Silverlight is valuable for business/enterprise applications, premium media experiences, and consumer applications and games, Becker said.

"The media features of Silverlight are far beyond what HTML5 will provide and work consistently in users' current and future browsers," Becker said. Silverlight offers advantages in such areas as high-definition video, content protection, 3-D video, and smooth streaming, said Becker.

Microsoft, Becker said, is participating in more than 400 standards engagements, including the development of HTML.

"It's not just idle talk. Microsoft has many investments based on or around HTML, such as SharePoint, Internet Explorer, and ASP.Net. We believe HTML5 will become ubiquitous just like HTML 4.01 is today," Becker said. Microsoft has committed to backing HTML5 in its upcoming Internet Explorer 9 browser and has partially leveraged it in Internet Explorer 8 as well.

The company is working on donating test suites to help improve consistency between implementations of HTML5 and CSS (Cascading Styles Sheets) 3, Becker said. But these technologies have had issues with variations between browsers.

"HTML5 and CSS 3 are going to make this worse for a while as the specs are new and increase the surface area of features that may be implemented differently. In contrast, since we develop all implementations of Silverlight, we can ensure that it renders the same everywhere," said Becker.

Microsoft, meanwhile, has shipped four major versions of Silverlight in about half the time that HTML5 has been under design, he said. Silverlight 4 shipped in April, making it the fourth release in two-and-a-half years. Silverlight also is more than a browser technology, with Microsoft investing in desktop, mobile and living room capabilities for the technology.

"For HTML5 to be really targetable, the spec has to stabilize, browsers have to all implement the specs in the same way and over a billion people have to install a new browser or buy a new device or machine. That's going to take a while. And by the time HTML5 is broadly targetable, Silverlight will have evolved significantly. Meanwhile, Silverlight is here now and works in all popular browsers and operating systems," Becker said. 

Stay tuned for Silverlight 4 and HTML5 training, but in the meantime you can brush up on your web design skills with LearnQuest's extensive list of course offerings!

Five Questions You Will Probably Be Asked on an Oracle Database PL/SQL Job Interview

James Koopmann of Database Journalwas kind enough to share five questions that he has been asked when interviewing for DBA positions as well as PL/SQL developer positions:

When interviewing for a PL/SQL developer position, the interview quite possibly could turn into a quiz on writing SQL and extracting information from a set of tables. The following set of questions are actual questions presented to the author when interviewing for both DBA and PL/SQL developer positions.

1. Identify the primary key and foreign keys within the table structures.
2. Where might I put the total amount of an order (which table)? Why?
3. If I were writing an application what would have to be the order of population for this set of tables?
4. For the following SQL (A through F) identify which SQL is the best for displaying the customers that have placed an order.
5. If you had to put any indexes on these tables, where would you put them?

For the article in it's entirety, click here, or to brush up on your SQL skills, visit LearnQuest and browse through our extensive catalog of Databases Training and get the skills you need to land that killer job.

VMware Announces Java for the Cloud

Virtualization software provider EMC VMware announced today that it is introducing cloud computing platform for Java development, which they plan to release at the VMware Cloud Application Platform at the VMworld conference in San Francisco. The platform will heavily rely on technologies from SpringSource division that the company aquired last year. From Computerworld:

The VMware Cloud Application Platform leverages the popular Spring Framework for Java development and the newly branded vFabric product set, which features pre-existing SpringSource products offering capabilities such as data management, messaging, and dynamic load balancing. The 2.5 million users of Spring will be eyed as initial users of the platform.

"At the end of the day, we feel we're providing a very legitimate path to this cloud computing architecture of the future for Java," said Shaun Connolly, EMC VMware's vice president of products. Until now, there had not been a clear path to the cloud for Java developers, he said.

Applications on the VMware cloud platform can share information with underlying infrastructure to boost software performance, quality of service, and infrastructure utilization, according to VMware. Users can deploy vFabric inside a data center or within public clouds such as VMforce. Also, vFabric can be deployed at a VMware vCloud service provider such as Savvis.

VMware anticipates its Java cloud platform being used for deployment of rich Web applications or for application integration.

Components of vFabric include the following technologies:

• tc server, an enterprise version of the Apache Tomcat Java server
• GemFire data management software
• RabbitMQ messaging server, for communicating between applications inside and outside the data center
• ERS (Enterprise Ready Server), which is an enterprise version of the Apache Web server featurjng dynamic load balancing
• Hyperic, for application performance management

"The benefits of our VMware vFabric is these are very lightweight components," Connolly said. "At the end of the day, developers want a nice elastic fabric and that's why we chose the name vFabric," he said. VMware's Java cloud platform is akin to Microsoft's Windows Azure cloud platform for Microsoft-based developers, Connolly said.

VMware's cloud platform is aimed at the private cloud market, said analyst Karin Kelley, of the 451 Group. "They're basically building up their middleware stack to support the enterprise private cloud for Java apps and they're really targeting the private cloud market," she said.

VMware VFabric can run on top of the company's vSphere virtualization technology, which supplies automated provisioning and configuring, Connolly said. RabbitMQ, Hyperic, and GemFire technologies were gained through acquisitions. SpringSource itself was acquired by EMC VMware last year.

Spring and VMware Application Platform Services are available for download. VMware anticipates selling vFabric-based services, with prices beginning at $500 per CPU.

For more information, LearnQuest offers a selection of courses to get you up to speed on the latest VMware technologies!

The Seven Skills Every IT Manager Will Need to Survive the '10's

Last week we brought you an article from InfoWorld listing the five IT skills you'll need in the future. This week, they give us the seven must-have skills an IT manager will need to survive the 2010's. From InfoWorld's Rusty Weston:

As companies emerge from the recession, IT managers need to rethink their careers, especially as businesses recast IT's role more as growing the business than running the operations. The old approaches to career growth won't work. Instead, IT managers -- and those who aspire to be managers -- should focus on seven key skills for the new era.

Although no single set of skills can bulletproof your career in this decade and beyond, the foremost of these seven is the ability to continuously learn and possess a broad range of valuable tech and leadership capabilities, according to IT experts interviewed by InfoWorld.com.

"Thesurvival skill for an IT manager is the ability to think about where you develop your career," contends Kathryn Ullrich, an executive IT recruiter and author of "Getting to the Top" (Silicon Valley Press, 2010). "How do you stay on the cutting edge of tech so you're continuing to develop your skill set? And career resilience? If you're developing into a manager, director, or VP, it is about adding leadership skills."

Although IT managers can't be proficient in everything, they are expected to have fluency in major business and technology issues. "Unless they want to be order-takers, [IT managers] should have a point of view on the business -- its strategy, its operations, and how it can be improved," says Hank Leingang, an IT strategy consultant and former CIO at Bechtel and Viacom.

Many IT managers focus solely on mastering new tech skills to increase their value to their employers -- a strategy that makes perfect sense, but only up to a point. Once you reach that point, you can damage your career by becoming viewed as only technically proficient and being perceived as unskilled in business planning and learning how to communicate and collaborate well with customers, coworkers, and service providers. But if you have a balance of these "hard" technology skills and "soft" business and people skills, you can go a long way toward insulating your career from recessionary woes.

Here are the seven essential survival skills for IT managers seeking to reinforce their position or springboard to greater responsibility.

Jump in for the complete list!

Top 10 Productivity Tips for Microsoft Access 2010

If you're either already working with the new Microsoft Access 2010 or are looking to dive in, the people over at Database Journal put together this helpful list of the top ten productivity tips:

1) Hide/Show the Ribbon

Unless you've adopted Access 2007, you'll find the ribbon to be a bit irritating. Menu options aren't where you left them in Access 2003. Moreover, the thing takes up so much space it infringes on your work area. You can "minimize" the ribbon quite simply by double-clicking on one of the tabs and Access remembers your selection for future sessions.

2) Get used to Right-Clicking

Maybe it's just me but the simplest things have become hard. The old menu options for going "into design mode" still exist, but if you've minimized the ribbon (see tip # 1), then it's going to take an extra click ... or two to get there. In Access 2003, one click could toggle you between Form View and Design View. Now, after showing the ribbon (first click), the default view is "Layout View" so you must click (second click) on the drop down arrow to see the Design View option (third click).

I suppose I'm just lazy but I've taken to using the Right-Click menu. You can right-click a form, report or query to expose the View menu. That makes it a consistent 2-click process. However, there's another discrete little toolbar in the lower right corner that exposes the available View Menu options. This is a "one-click" solution I can live with, once I get used to looking there for it.

As for opening things in the Access Navigation bar at the left, the only two ways I know of is to double click the object (which opens it) or to right-click and choose the type of view you wish. Like I said, get used to right-clicking.

 Check out numbers three through seven after the jump!

IBM Announces New Software for Smarter Security and Compliance Management

 
IBM has announced its acquisition of security software company BigFix, which it hopes to extend security and compliance globally to thousands of laptops, PCs, and servers from the data center. From the official IBM press release:

The new software, delivered through IBM's recently closed BigFix acquisition, provides built-in intelligence that identifies all of a company's PCs, laptops, servers, point-of-sale and virtualized devices--wherever they are--then flags when devices are not in compliance with corporate IT standards.  Its single dashboard makes the proper fixes across 500,000 machines in minutes. Organizations can see, change, enforce and report on security policies and system configurations of all endpoint devices in real time – including those not continuously connected to the corporate network.

Securing the enterprise is a top priority to clients.  Worldwide security software revenue is forecast to surpass $16.5 billion in 2010, an 11.3 percent increase from 2009 revenue of $14.8 billion, according to Gartner, Inc.

Five IT Skills You'll Need in the Future

Are you going to have the necessary skills you need ten (or even five) years down the road to do your job? Experts think that the most sought-after IT skills of the future are going to involve mining overwhelming amounts of data, protecting systems from security threats, managing the risks of growing complexity in new systems, and communicating how technology can increase productivity. Via InfoWorld, here are the five must-have IT skills of the future:

1. Analyzing data
By 2020, the amount of data generated each year will reach 35 zettabytes, or about 35 million petabytes, according to market researcher IDC. That's enough data to fill a stack of DVDs reaching from the Earth to the moon and back, according to John Gantz, chief research officer at IDC.

Demand will be high for IT workers with the ability to not only analyze dizzying amounts of data, but also work with business units to define what data is needed and where to get it.

These hybrid business-technology employees will have IT expertise and an understanding of business processes and operations. "They are people who understand what information people need" and how that information translates into profitability, says David Foote, president and CEO of IT workforce research firm Foote Partners LLC. "You'll have many more people understanding the whole data 'supply chain,' from information to money," he says.

We'll reveal numbers two through four after the jump!