IBM is a staunch supporter of the JavaOne conference, both as a sponsor and as a source of technical presenters. If you're going to attend JavaOne 2012, don't miss your opportunity to glean invaluable knowledge from IBM's Java experts and to learn about their vital contributions to the Java ecosystem. This article gives you an overview of the activities that the IBM team is involved in during JavaOne 2012.

You can now create Amazon RDS database instances running Oracle Database on Micro instances. This new, option will allow you to build, test, and run your low-traffic database-backed applications at a cost starting at $30 per month ($0.04 per hour)...

JavaOne Rock Stars, conceived in 2005, are the top-rated speakers at each JavaOne Conference. They are awarded by their peers, who, through conference surveys, recognize them for their outstanding sessions and speaking ability. Over the years many of the world's leading Java developers have been so recognized. Martijn Verburg has, in recent years, established himself as an important mover and shaker in the Java community. His "Diabolical Developer" session at the JavaOne 2011 Conference got people's attention by identifying some of the worst practices Java developers are prone to engage in. Among other things, he is co-leader and organizer of the thriving London Java User Group (JUG) which has more than 2,500 members, co-represents the London JUG on the Executive Committee of the Java Community Process, and leads the global effort for the Java User Group "Adopt a JSR" and "Adopt OpenJDK" programs. Career highlights include overhauling technology stacks and SDLC practices at Mizuho International, mentoring Oracle on technical community management, and running off shore development teams for AIG. He is currently CTO at jClarity, a start-up focusing on automating optimization for Java/JVM related technologies, and Product Advisor at ZeroTurnaround. He co-authored, with Ben Evans, "The Well-Grounded Java Developer" published by Manning and, as a leading authority on technical team optimization, he is in high demand at major software conferences.Verburg is participating in five sessions, a busy man indeed. Here they are: CON6152 - Modern Software Development Antipatterns (with Ben Evans) UGF10434 - JCP and OpenJDK: Using the JUGs' "Adopt" Programs in Your Group (with Csaba Toth) BOF4047 - OpenJDK Building and Testing: Case Study-Java User Group OpenJDK Bugathon (with Ben Evans and Cecilia Borg) BOF6283 - 101 Ways to Improve Java: Why Developer Participation Matters (with Bruno Souza and Heather Vancura-Chilson) HOL6500 - Finding and Solving Java Deadlocks (with Heinz Kabutz, Kirk Pepperdine, Ellen Kraffmiller and Henri Tremblay) When I asked Verburg about the biggest mistakes Java developers tend to make, he listed three: A lack of communication -- Software development is far more a social activity than a technical one; most projects fail because of communication issues and social dynamics, not because of a bad technical decision. Sadly, many developers never learn this lesson. No source control -- Developers simply storing code in local filesystems and emailing code in order to integrate Design-driven Design -- The need for some developers to cram every design pattern from the Gang of Four (GoF) book into their source code All of which raises the question: If these practices are so bad, why do developers engage in them? "I've seen a wide gamut of reasons," said Verburg, who lists them as: * They were never taught at high school/university that their bad habits were harmful.* They weren't mentored in their first professional roles.* They've lost passion for their craft.* They're being deliberately malicious!* They think software development is a technical activity and not a social one.* They think that they'll be able to tidy it up later.A couple of key confusions and misconceptions beset Java developers, according to Verburg. "With Java and the JVM in particular I've seen a couple of trends," he remarked. "One is that developers think that the JVM is a magic box that will clean up their memory, make their code run fast, as well as make them cups of coffee. The JVM does help in a lot of cases, but bad code can and will still lead to terrible results! The other trend is to try and force Java (the language) to do something it's not very good at, such as rapid web development. So you get a proliferation of overly complex frameworks, libraries and techniques trying to get around the fact that Java is a monolithic, statically typed, compiled, OO environment. It's not a Golden Hammer!"I asked him about the keys to running a good Java User Group. "You need to have a 'Why,'" he observed. "Many user groups know what they do (typically, events) and how they do it (the logistics), but what really drives users to join your group and to stay is to give them a purpose. For example, within the LJC we constantly talk about the 'Why,' which in our case is several whys:* Re-ignite the passion that developers have for their craft* Raise the bar of Java developers in London* We want developers to have a voice in deciding the future of Java* We want to inspire the next generation of tech leaders* To bring the disparate tech groups in London together* So we could learn from each other* We believe that the Java ecosystem forms a cornerstone of our society today -- we want to protect that for the futureLooking ahead to Java 8 Verburg expressed excitement about Lambdas. "I cannot wait for Lambdas," he enthused. "Brian Goetz and his group are doing a great job, especially given some of the backwards compatibility that they have to maintain. It's going to remove a lot of boiler plate and yet maintain readability, plus enable massive scaling."Check out Martijn Verburg at JavaOne if you get a chance, and, stay tuned for a longer interview yours truly did with Martijn to be publish on otn/java some time after JavaOne. Originally published on blogs.oracle.com/javaone.

It's always a challenge to figure out which session to attend at JavaOne. Our advice? Pick the speaker first and the session second. But who are the top personalities presenting at JavaOne? Well, sessions by Cameron Purdy and Adam Bien already have waiting lists. And if you don't squeeze Reza and Martijn into your schedule soon, you'll be looking at an opportunity lost.

This year, the Oracle Technology Network Lounge at JavaOne will be in the Hilton Ballroom, right in the center of theJavaOne DEMOgrounds. We'll have Java experts, community members and OTN staff to answer your questions. We've also even created a "Mini Theater" for casual demos from community members and Oracle staff. We are keeping the slots short, there will be no tests afterwards. It's your chance to talk to the experts 1 on 1. See how easy it is to turn on a lightbulb with Java and a violin. Here is the full schedule: Monday, October 1 9:40-9:50am Learn about the Oracle Social Network Developer Challenge 11:20-11:30 Update from the Oracle Academy 11:40-11:50 Caroline Kvitka, @OracleJavaMag, Editor-in-Chief of Java Magazine 12:00-12:20pm SouJava demonstrates Duke's Choice Award Winner JHome 12:20-12:30pm Geertjan Wielenga (@geertjanw) Shows What's new in NetBeans 12:40-12:50pm Learn about the OSN Developer Challenge 2:00-2:10pm Java.net Robotics 2:30-2:40pm Geertjan Wielenga (@geertjanw) Java EE and NetBeans Tuesday, October 2 9:40-9:50am Greenfoot/Kinect demo by Michael Kolling 11:20-11:30 Caroline Kvitka, @OracleJavaMag, Editor-in-Chief of Java Magazine 11:40-11:50 Stephen Chin and Jim Weaver, Top Ten JavaFX Features 12:00-12:10pm Nokia Student Developer 12:20-12:30pm Arun Gupta, HTML 5 and Java EE 7 1:00-1:10pm Update on the Java Community Process (JCP) 1:20-1:30pm Update from the Oracle Academy 2:00-2:10pm Java.net Robotics 2:30-2:40pm Geertjan Wielenga (@geertjanw) NetBeans Java Editor Wednesday, October 3 9:40-9:50am Greenfoot/Kinect demo by Michael Kolling 11:00-11:10 Caroline Kvitka, @OracleJavaMag, Editor-in-Chief of Java Magazine 11:20-11:30 Angela Caicedo and Jim Weaver, Leveraging JavaFX and HTML5 12:00-12:10pm Nokia Student Developer 12:10-12:30pm SouJava demonstrates Duke's Choice Award Winner JHome 2:00-2:10pm Stephen Chin and Jim Weaver, JavaFX Deployment with Self-Contained Apps 2:30-2:40pm Geertjan Wielenga (@geertjanw) NetBeans Platform 2:50-3:00pm Petr Jiricka, Project Easel Changes to this schedule will be announced on @JavaOneConf.

John Nolan rants about the computer-driven information society we live in and the compromises it forces us to make, pleading for a simpler and more humane approach to it. By John Nolan

Les Hatton theorizes the possibility to predict the number of defects in software systems based on the observation that such systems have properties independent of why, how or who implemented them. By Les Hatton

John Bender presents the good, the bad, and the ridiculous aspects of doing cross-platform mobile web development, suggesting progressive enhancement as a way to address the existing issues. By John Bender

Raghavan Srinivas, affectionately known as "Rags," is a two-time JavaOne Rock Star (from 2005 and 2011) who, as a Developer Advocate at Couchbase, gets his hands dirty with emerging technology directions and trends. His general focus is on distributed systems, with a specialization in cloud computing. He worked on Hadoop and HBase during its early stages, has spoken at conferences world-wide on a variety of technical topics, conducted and organized Hands-on Labs and taught graduate classes.He has 20 years of hands-on software development and over 10 years of architecture and technology evangelism experience and has worked for Digital Equipment Corporation, Sun Microsystems, Intuit and Accenture. He has evangelized and influenced the architecture of numerous technologies including the early releases of JavaFX, Java, Java EE, Java and XML, Java ME, AJAX and Web 2.0, and Java Security.Rags will be giving these sessions at JavaOne 2012: CON3570 -- Autosharding Enterprise to Social Gaming Applications with NoSQL and Couchbase CON3257 -- Script Bowl 2012: The Battle of the JVM-Based Languages (with Guillaume Laforge, Aaron Bedra, Dick Wall, and Dr Nic Williams) Rags emphasized the importance of the Cloud: "The Cloud and the Big Data are popular technologies not merely because they are trendy, but, largely due to the fact that it's possible to do massive data mining and use that information for business advantage," he explained. I asked him what we should know about Hadoop. "Hadoop," he remarked, "is mainly about using commodity hardware and achieving unprecedented scalability. At the heart of all this is the Java Virtual Machine which is running on each of these nodes. The vision of taking the processing to where the data resides is made possible by Java and Hadoop." And the most exciting thing happening in the world of Java today? "I read recently that Java projects on github.com are just off the charts when compared to other projects. It's exciting to realize the robust growth of Java and the degree of collaboration amongst Java programmers." He encourages Java developers to take advantage of Java 7 for Mac OS X which is now available for download. At the same time, he also encourages us to read the caveats. Originally published on blogs.oracle.com/javaone.

For today's episode of The AWS Report, I spoke to Billy Cox, Director of Cloud Strategy for Intel. We discussed the genesis of cloud computing, some historical trends, and ways that Intel is optimizing their processors for cloud-style workloads. I...

Today sees the long-awaited release of OpenStack 2012.2 (or Folsom to its friends), the latest version of the open-source cloud software. Yesterday, release manager Thierry Carrez wrote on his blog that Folsom includes code from 330 contributors, with 185 new features and over 1400 bug fixes. Duncan McGreggor, Cloud Engineering Manager and DreamHost, told JAXenter that “the biggest new feature is the complete integration of the advanced (over Nova's initial offering) networking features provided by the Quantum project”. Over email, he said that other exciting new features include “improvements in various APIs (covering several of the core OpenStack components), continued work on consolidation of code dependencies (The OpenStack "common" library project), and further excellent refinements of the management user interface (Horizon)”. Folsom is notable for being the first version considered to be mature enough for commercial release by many companies involved, including DreamHost and Red Hat. In an exclusive interview with JAXenter, Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens said his company waited until Folsom to “productise” OpenStack because they believed Quantum to be “a pretty needed ingredient”. This release also comes just over a week after the launch of the OpenStack Foundation, which saw Rackspace hand over control of the project to the community. Stevens said that the change was “subtle, but significant”. According to Bitergia, who published a preliminary analysis of the Folsom source code last week, Rackspace and Red Hat were by far the two most active companies on the project, contributing 47.07% of total commits between them. Out of these two, while Rackspace has contributed a greater portion of the codebase, Red Hat employees have submitted a higher number of commits each. Considering that Red Hat was the third largest contributor to the previous release, Essex, it seems likely that they may reach the #1 spot by the time Grizzly is released. Next month is likely to see the release of CloudStack 4.0, the first version since it was taken under Apache’s wing. However, Stevens told JAXenter that the foundation doesn’t regard CloudStack as a threat since it has “no thriving community or industry participation”.

AUTHORS Matt Vickery - C24 Technologies & Incept5 Daniel Roberts - 10gen Iain Porter - C24 Technologies & Incept5 Preview Text: This article presents a natural combination of C24 iO Studio and MongoDB. These two technologies form a powerful toolset that has...

It’s been a busy month for OpenStack, and by extension board member (and Red Hat CTO) Brian Stevens. Last week, the OpenStack Foundation was officially launched with 850 companies and 5,600 individuals pledging support; this week sees the final release of the latest and greatest version of OpenStack yet, Folsom. The release is perhaps the most important yet of OpenStack’s six releases so far. After all, it’s the first to be considered by Red Hat to be mature enough for commercial release. Key is Quantum, the new component allowing "network connectivity as a service" between interface devices managed by other Openstack services such as Nova. Although included in the Essex release, it was only as a “basic framework”. “It's now up and running and useful, and people are using it on a single to thousands of systems,” says Stevens. “To us, that factored greatly in our plans to wait to productise for our customers a solution based on Folsom, rather than the Essex codebase, because we thought this was a pretty needed ingredient.” While Red Hat may have not been involved in the project from the start, by April this year had become the third-largest contributor of code to the Essex release. With Red Hat now one of the eight ‘platinum’ sponsors of the Foundation, Stevens sits on the its board of directors and has been working hard on the “not-glamorous part” of setting up the Foundation. One of the most important aspects of an independent Foundation is that it makes the organisation and product “completely neutral”, and therefore far more attractive to other companies. “Prior to the Foundation, RackSpace owned all the assets, things like the trademark ‘OpenStack’, says Stevens. “RackSpace, on their own discretion, could decide whether you could even call your product OpenStack, how you could use the word OpenStack, control the licensing of their portion of the code on the switch side.” The change makes little difference to everyday contributors to the project, yet is “subtle, but significant”. “The technical stuff keeps on trucking and running, but I think it gave companies like ours and probably IBM and HP and other larger companies a better comfort level, that their investments today are going to be protected long-term.” A recent controversy clouded the otherwise sunny founding last month when VMware, long considered a proprietary rival to OpenStack, successfully applied as a ‘gold member’ of the Foundation. Some critics dubbed the move as suspicious, but Stevens - who, as a member of the board of the directors, was part of the vote - is diplomatic. “I think that clearly VMware - if we went back to pre-Nicira acquisition, VMware clearly found OpenStack threatening. No matter what they say, it's extremely competitive with their legacy products - with vSphere - and we've all seen disparaging remarks. Which is fine, that's just the world of competition.” But VMware’s purchase of Nicira, which Stevens describes as a “really strong, necessary ingredient for OpenStack”, left the company in an odd situation of being “two companies rolled into one” - one highly competitive with OpenStack, and one actively contributing. “So, yes it certainly was a unique conversation at the board level on membership. I think the board certainly picked the right outcome,” says Stevens, insisting that “there's no upside in being exclusionary on this, as I see it.” Stevens also plays down any competition with CloudStack, the Apache project aiming to produce similar cloud software in Java. “As much as CloudStack is good technology and open sourced, there's just no thriving community or industry participation,” he says. There’s no “ill will” within the Foundation towards CloudStack, insists Stevens. “I would argue that it's not that OpenStack is being dismissive of CloudStack, it's just not the canvas on which the industry is going to solve the open cloud promise. “I think the future's been already written - that it's going to be OpenStack.” That future includes Grizzly, the next major OpenStack release, which is set to arrive in 2013. Once Folsom is out the door, the OpenStack community will meet to hammer out the grisly details at a design summit in San Diego next month. Red Hat also hope to ship their first commercial edition of OpenStack early next year, but will face stiff competition from fellow Foundation members - such as Rackspace, who are already using OpenStack to power their cloud offerings. It’s still too early yet to predict whether CloudStack will live up to the mantle of the ‘Linux of the cloud’ - but with commercial releases pending and a fully-operating Foundation, odds are looking good.

Eclipse’s Git tools JGit and EGit have both received bumper updates just in time for Eclipse Juno’s scheduled Service Release 1. Led by SAP's Matthias Sohn (EGit) and Google's Shawn Pearce (JGit), the two projects (founded back in 2009) set out to secure a solid Git community within the Eclipse Foundation, with contributions from Google, IBM and Github employees, amongst others. This, their 12th release, is arguably the most important yet, as Eclipse projects are encouraged to move across to Git before CVS support is shut off in December. The core project, JGit, is a lightweight Java library for implementing Git, while EGit is Eclipse’s certified Git Team Provider, implementing Eclipse tooling for JGit. This also means that any member on a project has a full copy of the entire code revision history, making querying against the history a doddle. Thanks to the high calibre committers, main use cases can be done entirely in EGit, without using native Git. New in JGit is a garbage collector for FileRepositories, updated porcelain commands and a new command line command, “show”. EGit has received further care and attention, the biggest addition being the “Push To Gerrit” function which allows for seamless code reviewing. Two further updates to JGit and EGit are expected in December and February, in time for SR2. According to Eclipse Director Wayne Beaton, 64% of Juno projects have already switched Git. With the health of these projects, by the time Kepler comes round that figure could be even higher.

In this article, authors discuss the effects of cloud-based testing in software delivery process. They talk about cloud-based testing services such as performance testing and web-based application testing. They also share the results from their interviews with different organizations and their use of cloud in testing and suggest a cloud-based testing roadmap. By Leah Riungu-Kalliosaari, Ossi Taipale, Kari Smolander

Maven 3 built-in variable: ${java.home} points to JRE_HOME and not JDK. If you would like to access the JDK home folder from maven, set JAVA_HOME on the OS level and use the environment variable: ${env.JAVA_HOME} to get access to it's value. This trick together with JDK1.7u10+ simplified the build of LightFish by eliminating a custom variable pointing to a JavaFX installation. Now it is a plain: mvm clean install See you at Java EE Workhops at MUC Airport (October 22nd-24th)! Real World Java EE Bootstrap and Effective Java EE Bootstrap Workshops [Airport Munich]

Introduction Preview Text: My first encounter with the collection framework was on my second day of Java programming. The collection framework has many implementations, and each of these is solving some very specific need of the data structure. Legacy Sponsored: unsponsored ...

What do you get when you combine JavaFX and Scala together on top of a Cloud architecture? The most highly scalable platform for Java client development possible, leveraging the UI richness of JavaFX, elegance of Scala, and infinite scalability of a multi-cloud platform. In this JAXconf talk, JavaFX expert Stephen Chin and jclouds Andrew Phillips will demonstrate a cloud application built on the JClouds platform that makes use of a JavaFX front-end written in the Scala language. Filming Courtesy of Marakana Tech TV

I would consider this post as best practice for using Spring in enterprise application development. When writing enterprise web application using Spring, the amount of services in the service layer, will probably grow. Each service in the service layer will probably consume other services, which will be injected via @Autowire . Preview Text: I...

Posted on September 26, 2012 After publishing How to Disrupt Technical Recruiting - Hire an Agent and reading the subsequent feedback from readers at Hacker News and elsewhere, it is Preview Text: After publishing How to Disrupt Technical Recruiting - Hire an Agent and reading the subsequent feedback from readers at Hacker News and...

Spring Data is a very convenient library. However, as the project as quite new, it is not well featured. By default, Spring Data JPA will provide implementation of the DAO based on SimpleJpaRepository. In recent project, I have developed a customize repository base class so that I could add more features on it. You could add vendor specific features to this repository base class as you...

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...

With JavaOne just around the corner, our latest Java.net polls have asked the community questions about the conference. Our most recently completed poll focused on significant announcements that people expect to happen at JavaOne 2012; while our current poll asks if you've attended JavaOne(s). The significant announcements poll was quite popular, drawing 694 votes, along with a comment. The exact question and results were: The most significant announcement at JavaOne 2012 will be related to: 27% (190 votes) - JavaEE 28% (193 votes) - JavaSE / OpenJDK 6% (42 votes) - JavaME / Embedded Java 11% (74 votes) - JavaFX 12% (84 votes) - I don't know 16% (111 votes) - Other So, clearly, this (non-scientific) poll produced no overwhelming consensus. But, the developers who voted believe the most significant announcement will be related to either Java SE / OpenJDK or Java EE. More than half of the votes expect one of these results. I myself would have had a hard time voting in this poll (being the poll creator, I never vote). Last year, I think the most significant announcement was in essence the cumulative indications that Oracle had a clear-cut plan for Java's future. Since then, we've had some disappointments, the biggest recent one being that Project Jigsaw will be on the next train. The fact that we have a new mini-conference taking place at this year's JavaOne, Java Embedded @ JavaOne, suggests to me that there may well be some quite significant announcements related to JavaME / Embedded Java at the conference. Surely, they'll want to draw attention to a new mini-conference with some sort of important announcement! JavaFX drew a considerable number of votes too. Comparing where we were a year ago to where we are today, with respect to JavaFX, it feels to me like JavaFX is definitely going to continue to "move forward" as a client application technology within the Java sphere. It's a bit like when Microsoft pushes something within the .NET framework. If the primary sponsor of the Java language is committing significant resources to JavaFX as the Java client platform of the future, who in their right mind among the developer community is going to think JavaFX is a doomed technology, and not pay at least some attention to it? New poll: have you been to a JavaOne? Our current Java.net poll asks Have you ever attended a JavaOne Conference? The poll will be open through Friday, October 5 (or maybe Saturday October 6, if I don't have a way to create a new poll on that Friday as I'm returning home from JavaOne). Looking ahead... Ah, JavaOne. I look forward to it! If you'll be there and you'd like to chat with me, I will often be in the Java.net area in the JavaOne Exhibition Hall. I'll be posting my whereabouts throughout the conference via my @kevin_farnham Twitter account, and probably other ways as well. We'll be having a special JavaOne oriented home page on Java.net as well, including blogs, a conference-related Twitter feed, etc. I'll be writing many blogs about my conversations with people, and about the sessions I attend! Java.net Weblogs Since my last blog post, there have been several new interesting java.net blogs: Meruvian, Meruvian blog is here.. in java.net now; Frans Thamura, my belief of Java; Sonya Barry, Java.net at JavaOne 2012; and Bhakti Mehta, My session in Javaone 2012. Poll Our current Java.net poll asks Have you ever attended a JavaOne Conference? Voting will be open until Friday, October 5. Spotlights Our latest Java.net Spotlight is Alex Staveley's Is Java Dead or Invincible?: According to Dutch research firm Tiobe in terms of overall popularity, Java ranked 5th in 1997, 1st in 2007 and 2nd in Sept 2012. At the time of writing there are over 2,000 Java progamming books on Amazon in English and there are almost 300,000 threads on Stackoverflow related to Java. As George Orwell once said: "Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible". But... Articles Our latest Java.net article from Manning Publications is Discovering CMIS Type Collections and Hierarchies by F.Muller, J.Brown, & J.Potts, the authors of "CMIS and Apache Chemistry in Action." Subscriptions and Archives: You can subscribe to this blog using the java.net Editor's Blog Feed. You can also subscribe to the Java Today RSS feed and the java.net blogs feed. -- Kevin Farnham (@kevin_farnham)

The Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) now supports SQL Server 2012.You can now launch the Express, Web, and Standard Editions of this powerful database from the comfort of the AWS Management Console. SQL Server 2008 R2 is still available, as...