As Liferay Inc. opened their North American Symposium Monday, they showed some undeniable strength in numbers. Not only is there a strong turnout of both expert speakers and attendees at the conference, but a morning press release indicated that Liferay as a company continues to grow in terms of both size and revenue.

Igor Minar and Brad Green demo writing a dynamic web application with AngularJS. By Igor Minar, Brad Green

Jeremy Grelle will discuss how web and mobile clients are getting continually more sophisticated as client processing power continues to increase and much richer APIs are provided by the given platform. One of the most mind-bending shifts that is occurring is in transitioning from a world of purely request-response, to the world of client-server full duplex communication that is enabled by the latest smart client platforms. This session will explore the new patterns of interaction that are enabled by the latest communication methods such as WebSockets and Push-to-Device services, as well as the practical concerns of actually implementing such patterns in an application using tools such as SockJS, RabbitMQ and Spring. Check out the session on SpringOne2GX.com for more details and register today!

Coverity announced its new Development Testing Platform 6.5 identifies traditionally untestable issues and also now works with Java in addition to the Cs.

Posted by Reto Meier, Android Developer Relations Tech Lead With the release of Nexus 7 earlier this year, we shared some tips on how you can get your apps ready for a new wave of Android tablets. With the holiday season now approaching, we're creating even more ways for great tablet apps to be featured in Google Play - including a series of new app collections that highlight great apps specifically for tablet users. To help you take advantage of the opportunity provided by the growing tablet market, we've put together this Tablet App Quality Checklist to make it easier for you to ensure your app meets the expectations of tablet users. The checklist includes a number of key focus areas for building apps that are a great experience on tablets, including: Optimizing your layouts for larger screens Taking advantage of extra screen area available on tablets Using Icons and other assets that are designed for tablet screens Each focus area comprises several smaller tasks or best practices. As you move through the checklist, you'll find links to support resources that can help you address the topics raised in each task. The benefits of building an app that works great on tablets is evident in the experiences of Mint.com, Tiny Co, and Instapaper who reported increased user engagement, better monetization, and more downloads from tablet users. You can find out more about their experience in these developer case studies. The Tablet Quality Checklist is a great place to get started, but it's just the beginning. We'll be sharing more tablet development tips every day this week on +Android Developers. In Android Developers Live, Tuesday's Android Design in Action broadcast will focus on optimizing user experience for tablets, on Thursday we'll be interviewing our tablet case studies during Developers Strike Back, and on Friday's live YouTube broadcasts of The App Clinic and Friday Games Review will be reviewing apps and games on Android tablets. What are your best tips for building great tablet apps? Join the discussion on +Android Developers

JavaOne content is available in video in three sizes, depending on if you want to have a sip, have a drink, or go to the proverbial firehose. Tall (Keynote Highlights) Go to the JavaOne playlist on the YouTube Java channel for highlights of the JavaOne Keynotes. Grande (Keynotes in Full) Go to the Oracle Media Network JavaOne 2012 channel to view the keynotes in full (Community Keynote coming soon). Venti (All Sessions, BOFs and Tutorials) To view slides paired with audio of each session, go to the JavaOne content catalog (JavaOne homepage, click on JavaOne Technical Sessions) and select a session. If a video is available, you'll see "Media" in the right column. Look under "Presentation Download" to get the slides. Sessions are being made available as quickly as possible. "It's exciting to see Oracle take community stewardship so seriously," said Sharat Chander, Group Director for Java Technology Outreach. "Making all JavaOne sessions on video available online for free will helps make the future Java for everyone." Thanks to Oracle for funding this and providing to it to the Java Community for free.

Java EE 7 is going to be realigned and the PaaS enablement and multi-tenancy support will be moved to Java EE 8. Software architect and member of Java EE 7 Expert Group Markus Eisele shares some of the reasons he supports this decision.

The JDBC API was designed to keep simple things simple. This means that the JDBC makes everyday database tasks easy. This trail walks you through examples of using JDBC to execute common SQL statements, and perform other objectives common to database applications.

Project lead Guillaume Laforge explains what's in store for Groovy, and Grails lead Graeme Rocher outlines that related framework's future. -InfoWorld

NetBeans Day had most sessions with completely packed rooms, which means there were around 300 people! Panel discussions around central themes in the NetBeans ecosystem (Java EE, JavaFX, and NetBeans Platform) were held, which resulted in a whole bunch of people up on stage throughout the day.

Let's take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week: Monday, October 1 We launched the AWS Test Drive program to make it easier for you to get started with Oracle applications. My UK counterpart Ryan Shuttleworth posted...

Mobile solution hub Emitrom have announced the latest iteration of Flash4j, a Java API aiming to open up the possibilities of Flash to Java developers. You’re probably thinking at this point - isn’t Flash old hat? No one wants it on their system. Perhaps but there’s still a demand for the Flash platform (games or otherwise) despite all this. Flash4j 3.0 aims to help Java developers break down the boundaries to the platform (close bond to ActionScript hindered some developers) and enable them to build rich, interactive content for the desktop browser. Initially pitched as a Java API for Apache Flex, the team behind the API have rewritten the framework from the ground up, adding in a variety of new features. The more intuitive Flash4j 3.0 (now a first class Java object) can detect if Flash is available on the target device from the outset, saving the developer valuable time or time to implement a HTML5 fallback if need be. There’s also support for other frameworks and technologies, including Starling, Apache Flex and Greensock. Back in August, the young startup Emitrom open sourced their entire collection of mobile Java-friendly products, including Touch4j 3.0, Titanium4j 3.0, and Air4j 2.0, hoping to gain greater traction in the market. All of these products now bear an Apache 2.0 license, meaning they’re free for all. If you're intrigued by this Java flavouring of mobile, desktop and browser tools, check out more about this release here.

Red Hat is looking for a new name for the open source JBoss Application Server, a k a JBossAS, because the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform has gotten bigger than just Java. So it's staging a community election to rechristen the widgetry with a name that reflects polyglot programming and support for Java EE-alternative frameworks like Spring. In a press release issued Monday Red Hat said it is "embracing the evolution of transformational technologies such as dynamic service fabric, cloud, NoSQL, mobile and multi-language polyglot computing as part of its product strategy. To mark this evolution, Red Hat plans to enable broader developer access to the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform product, and will be holding an open election to select a new name for the JBoss Application Server community project." It's hoping for quicker evolution.

Jason Dixon presented his view on current and future state-of-the-art monitoring tools at DevOps Days in Rome. He envisions a composable monitoring systems with interchangeable components focused on a single responsibility. By Manuel Pais

JSONiq is a new query language that builds upon XQuery. Like SQL or LINQ, it has syntactic support concepts such as let, for, where, group by, and select. By Jonathan Allen

Dear Spring Community, we are happy to announce the next major release of our Eclipse-based tooling today: The Spring Tool Suite (STS) 3.1.0 and the Groovy/Grails Tool Suite (GGTS) 3.1.0. Highlights from this release include: Eclipse Juno SR1 updates (including Mylyn, EGit, m2e, m2e-wtp) Mac distributions now OSX 10.8 Mountain Lion Gatekeeper compatible updated to tc Server 2.7.2 new Spring Data Gemfire project templates the new Live Beans Graph feature (experimental) grails import wizard support for mavenized grails projects updated to Groovy 2.0.4 and Grails 2.1.1 Some of our users reported general performance issues with the new Eclipse Juno 4.2 platform that STS 3.0.0 shipped with. Most of these issues seem to be related to the underlying UI platform and its usage from various plugins and extensions. Since our goal is to provide the best possible user experience, we decided to provide two separate distributions for STS 3.1.0: one that is built on top of Eclipse Juno 3.8 and one on top of Eclipse Juno 4.2. People who have trouble using the 4.2-based version should try the 3.8-based distribution instead. To download the distributions, please go visit: Spring Tool Suite: http://www.springsource.org/sts Groovy/Grails Tool Suite: http://grails.org/products/ggts Detailed new and noteworthy notes can be found here: STS/GGTS 3.1.0 New & Noteworthy. Updates from STS/GGTS 3.0.0 are available through the automatic "Check for Updates" again. Users of STS 2.9.x (or older) should start with a fresh installation of STS/GGTS 3.1.0. The next version 3.2.0 is scheduled to arrive in March 2013, shortly after the Eclipse Juno SR2 release. Also watch out for milestone builds of 3.2.0 if you wanna stay up-to-date with the latest developments. Enjoy!!!

NetBeans 7.3+ comes with HTML 5, JavaScript, CSS 3 support. JavaScript debugging, node selection (like in FireBug / Safari's inspector), GIT support, code formatting and code completion and even a Chrome browser plugin. [screencast] I tested NetBeans 7.3 and I'm using it in favor of Coda 2, bbedit, textmate and Espresso. My personal killer features: GIT integration, formatting, code completion and seamless import of existing HTML projects. I got lots of Java FX related questions after the session. Many attendees already used Java FX in production and had project specific questions about structuring, architecture and deployment. I like Java FX, but its popularity really surprised me. Node.jar: Some ideas around Nashorn, Grizzly and Java EE were presented. The ideas were demoed with working code. The node.jar project is internal right now, but could be open sourced soon. After some discussion with Oracle engineers, I kept thinking about the synergy of all the technologies. It could result in node.js on steroids: node.js syntax with the simplicity and power of Java EE 6/7. Project Avatar: in a code-centric session, the avatar syntax and internal implementation were presented. Avatar is end-to-end JavaScript framework. The presentation comprises a pre-processor with similar syntax to facelets (I would use just facelets) and can use jQuery, dojo or other toolkits. The backend can be implemented either with JavaScript, or Java EE. Real time communication is realized with Server Sent Events (SSE). Lots of excellent sessions, with great technical content, were delivered by Oracle Engineers without even slightest product pitches. I attended a few sessions delivered by IBM engineers--were great as well. I recognized, that most of the sessions are delivered by Oracle after my enrollment. For the selection I only looked at the description and title and not the speakers. James Gosling appeared at the community keynote and presented his Liquid Robots. Towards the end James Gosling threw some t-shirts in an old JavaOne tradition. twitter goes still strong with Java, Scala and Clojure. It seems like twitter is based entirely on Java now. Sunday's Keynotes are a great invention: there was a significantly more room for sessions. From the content perspective this JavaOne was one of the best.Because I continuously found an even more interesting session, I spent a whole day with the schedule builder. …and at the end I still missed some great sessions... My continuous criticism is: back to moscone :-). Also I'm concerned about the rule that no more than 40% of all sessions can be delivered by Oracle engineers. I would say: only the content and session evaluations should be used for session selection and not an artificial ratio. However: I really appreciate Oracle's effort to involve community wherever possible. Real World Java EE Bootstrap and Effective Java EE Bootstrap Workshops [Airport Munich]

A week ago, it was announced that JBoss AS was being renamed, with the community to vote on its new name. At the time, JBoss’ lead of technical direction, Mark Little, said the decision was motivated by a need to “better reflect the changes we've seen in [JBoss AS’] reason for existence so far, but also for what's to come in the future” However, Little has issued a further blog post attempting to clarify what is changing, and why: One of the major issues we want to fix is the confusion inherent in the term 'JBoss'. Sometimes people use it to mean the community. Sometimes it's the middleware group in Red Hat. Sometimes it's the EAP product. And sometimes it's the community application server project. As Little explains, Red Hat hope to clarify this by defining JBoss as a reliable and enterprise-friendly brand: When people see software called "JBoss," we want them to know that it's a commercial product with a well defined SLA and support lifecycle, in contrast to the community projects with best effort forum-based support provided by the community. So the plan is to ensure that ‘JBoss’ refers only to JBoss Enterprise Middleware. It’s not only JBoss AS which is being targeted; it’s merely one of many projects to have ‘JBoss’ removed from its name, as has been taking place already over the past several years. Yet some might argue that this move still doesn’t entirely clarify the meaning of JBoss - after all, according to an FAQ the community brand will still remain as ‘JBoss Community’. The company face an uphill struggle with their rebranding. The word JBoss is still used as shorthand for the application server so much so that Wikipedia redirects ‘JBoss’ to JBoss AS by default. You can still propose a new name at jboss.org/vote until October 14, with voting itself commencing in the last week of October.

Microsoft has recently acquired PhoneFactor, which provides multi factor authentication by making use of user's phone. According to official sources at Microsoft, this development will bring new security mechanism for Microsoft products. By Anand Narayanaswamy

It has been a while since I last posted, as I've been busy with some of the classes offered by Coursera. There are some very interesting offerings and is worth a look. Some time ago, I purchased Data-Intensive Processing with MapReduce by Jimmy Lin and Chris Dyer. Preview Text: Some time ago, I purchased Data-Intensive Processing with...

Exception Testing Why test exception flows? Just like with all of your code, test coverage writes a contract between your code and the business functionality that the code is supposed to produce leaving you with a living documentation of the code along with the added ability to stress the functionality early and often. I won't go into the many benefits of testing instead I will focus on...

On Sunday I gave my very first workshop on the Disruptor. The aim was to give people some hands-on coding experience using the syntax. Because time was limited (you can't get people to build an entire application architecture in 2.5 hours) the example is somewhat contrived, and needs a big leap to make it into a proper application context. But the workshop should: Preview Text: ...