John Hughes explains how Quviq tests embedded ECU software for AUTOSAR compliance using QuickCheck. By John Hughes

Bruce Durling discusses the impact of cloud computing on the climate and what can be done to reduce the amount of CO2 generated by data centers in order to process big data. By Bruce Durling

Java expert Mark Heckler shows you how to use a quick and easy drop-in dialog box capability in JavaFX.

The Bucharest Java User Group is up and running in Bucharest, Romania!

JavaFX expert Jim Weaver shows you how to leverage the power of the FX Markup Language to define the UI for enterprise applications. Part Two of a two-part series.

JAX Innovation Awards winners reflect the vibrancy of the Java community.

VMware SpringSource engineer Lyor Goldstein shares a significant architectural change to introduce a "split-agent" mechanisom that will be coming to Spring Insight in the next release due out later this year.

Dear Spring Community, I am pleased to announce the first release candidate for Spring Shell project! Spring Shell is an interactive shell that can be easily extended with commands using a Spring based programming model, extracted from the Spring Roo project. Downloads | JavaDocs | Reference Documentation | Changelog This release contains various fixes related to JLine/Jansi. See the changelog for detailed info. We look forward to your feedback on the forum or in the issue tracker.

Heroku has announced Heroku Enterprise for Java, a new service for companies and IT organizations to build and run Java applications in the cloud. Enterprise for Java is designed to enable quick creation and deployment of enterprise Java applications. It also greases the skids to move development processes to a continuous delivery model, all without traditional, on-premises software or IT infrastructure. Enterprise for Java is part of the Salesforce Platform, which is being updated and expanded this week at Dreamforce in San Francisco. Traditionally, creating Java applications applications has required piecing together both a range of development and runtime infrastructure tools -- such as source-code control systems, continuous integration servers, testing and staging environments, load balancers, application server clusters, databases and in-memory caching systems.

With the much-anticipated Folsom release just one week away, Rackspace have finalised relinquishing their control of the cloud platform to the OpenStack Foundation. It’s a symbolic day for anyone connected with OpenStack, as all the code and intellectual properties now fall into the hands of the rapidly expanding collective. The newly-formed foundation has launched with an initial $10m, donated by its founding members, to fund development and marketing efforts. According to Rackspace, the initial goal had always been to create “an open and ubiquitous platform for public and private clouds,” that would obtain the backing of some of the industry’s biggest cloud infrastructure players. And by looking at the stats (850 organisations and 5,600 individuals pledging allegiance) and the names signed up such as Red Hat, IBM, HP and VMware (amongst others), it seems that Rackspace are bowing out with their heads held high. In fact, this move had been in the works for over a year, after Rackspace’s initial announcement in October 2011. The other founding member of the initiative, NASA, stepped aside back in May, suggesting that the role of the two creators was reaching its end. Rackspace’s drive to create such a thriving community around the project cannot be understated, however, and rightly deserves to be commended. Just over two years after its inception, half a million lines of code have been contributed to OpenStack, whilst the software has been downloaded more than 300,000 times from the central repositories. The next release, Folsom, is almost ready to go, with deployability improvements, security enhancements and an updated dashboard. The biggest challenge however for Folsom is the inclusion of the incubating Networking (Quantum) and Block Storage (Cinder) projects, splitting from the larger Compute (Node) to allow for greater flexibility. Any new direction in OpenStack’s roadmap will become apparent from the Grizzly design summit in October, with the release itself planned for April 2013. We can expect Ceilometer (providing metering) and Heat (responsible for basic cloud orchestration) somewhere down the line, though. Whilst Rackspace won’t desert the project entirely (they’ve built their private and public clouds on it, after all), governance now falls solely down to the community - as it should be if OpenStack wants to reach the lofty but now attainable goal of becoming the Linux for Cloud. Image courtesy of racheocity

Rackspace has transferred all the OpenStack code, trademarks and related intellectual properties to the OpenStack Foundation, leaving the cloud computing platform into the hands of the community. By Abel Avram

There’s no escaping the fact that the realms of Java and modern mobile development aren’t the best of bedfellows. For years now, writing iOS and Blackberry apps in Java out of the box has been an impossible task. Developers have been well within their rights to look elsewhere for a solution to their problem. Shai Almog and Chen Fishbein felt the problems of multiplatform development firsthand at Sun while working on J2ME. Fishbein was the man behind Java ME’s Swing-inspired Lightweight User Interface Toolkit (LWUIT), that aimed to make it easier to develop interfaces for embedded devices. With Oracle being neither mobile or client oriented, solving the issues in-house just wasn’t an option in the end. Hitting a proverbial brick wall, the duo began to think about how to tackle Java’s modern mobile frailties. Thus in 2012, they founded Codename One: a new Java SDK allowing developers to write native applications, with support for iOS, Android, Windows Phone and Blackberry. It’s a long overdue idea for Java. Almog told us that “Java solutions were either expensive proprietary heavyweight solutions or academic experiments that didn't provide any sense of WORA which is highly important to Java developers. As long time Java advocates and Swing fans we were confident that the community will embrace this approach.” Despite still being in beta, Codename One’s multi-layer approach is a well thought-out one. Having reviewed over 100 competing products before launch, Almog believes that Codename One’s offering is a viable one, despite the cross-platform competition. “iOS is painful to program and Android is no panacea. Markets like Windows Phone/RIM get a lot of flack but by being in a small market your application can really stand out,” he says. “I think that the pain faced by developers is very obvious and many want to solve it [...] I think our product and its potential speak for themselves. I don't think anyone has an offering remotely like ours.” No adjustments need to be made as developers can simply install a plugin for their IDE (Eclipse or NetBeans currently) and get coding as normal. The built application is then sent as a compiler jar to Codename One’s cloud servers, where it is translated to the appropriate device’s language. For iOS, the code is converted to C (with an Objective C porting layer) and Xcode is used to compile the app. For Android, Codename One compiled to DEX APK whilst for RIM and J2ME, the bytecode is adapted slightly with J2SE classes. So the WORA motto remains strong in Codename One, their software making it possible to invoke native code across the board. Almog explains that if you’re a Java developer with a penchant for Swing, things should be quite easy to pick up, and assures us that their API layer “includes pretty much everything you would expect from a modern day mobile OS”. “Since the API sits on top of a relatively narrow porting layer it is remarkably portable and most of the logic for the differences between the platforms is abstracted and shifted up into the Java layer,” says Almog. “This effectively means that we can reproduce the iPhone/iPad feel on the desktop and within our tools. So using a port to Java SE we provide visual tools and a simulator platform that allows you to develop for all platforms without requiring that you install the full toolchain of the platform.” There are some Java features that need to be adapted. For example, java.net and Java's File API's don't work well for mobile devices, so to perform networking or file system operations you should use our API's,” Almog adds. So where next for the plucky startup? JavaOne is on the immediate horizon, but Almog reveals there are many features in the works. With many solutions for cross-platform app development emerging, such as Phonegap and Titanium, it’s about time Java got a helping hand with mobile development.

My first chance to do serious concurrent programming was using C++ on Windows in the 90s, on NT, where async programming was done with IOCompletionPorts. It was pretty interesting, but as is the case with most things C++, it was like 'here's the keystone, you can build the rest of the doorway now.' C++ got a bad wrap. Sure you could blow the whole machine up with an errant pointer, but...

Lately I'm trying to build a web application which will be exposed in a RESTfull manner. There are some general guideline and hints about how to define it, but no explicit standard or accepted schema structure to use. Preview Text: Lately I'm trying to build a web application which will be exposed in a RESTfull manner. There are some general...

Thursday is code puzzler day here at DZone. The idea is simple: solve the coding problem as efficiently as you can, in any language or framework that you find suitable. Note: Even though there really is nothing stopping you from finding a solution to this on the internet, try to keep honest, and come up with your own answer. It's all about the participation!Do you have code puzzlers that...

At JavaZone I've presented a talk called Taming Java Agents. It is not about the distributed computing or messaging as the title might imply. It is about the tools that exercise -javaagent JVM argument to hook into class loading process in order to perform some necessary evil to the bytecode. Preview Text: At JavaZone I've presented a...