As you can probably tell from the pace of releases on this blog, the Amazon RDS team has been designing, implementing, and deploying new features at a very rapid clip. They've added a number of data protection and security features...

Paul Weiss introduces cloud computing and its various models, comparing them with virtualization, then overviews Eucalyptus and compares it with AWS. By Paul Weiss

Ian Plosker explains why a data model needs to follow the query patterns when using a NoSQL storage solution. By Ian Plosker

The Cloud Foundry Maven plug-in continues to evolve. It was recently updated and released as a new milestone version 1.0.0.M3. We'd like to thank Gunnar Hillert from the Spring Integration Team for providing guidance and new features. We would also like to thank Ali Moghadam from the Cloud Foundry Support Team for taking over some of the development tasks and contributing the new features in M3. We never properly announced the 1.0.0.M2 release so we include the change log for this release here as well. The major new features are as follows: Support for stand-alone applications as well as frameworks other than Spring Ability to specify runtime - great for Java 7 or even Node or Ruby apps Option to list log output for app Support for creating and deleting services To facilitate this the format for the entry in the configuration has changed to include one or more entries where you can specify name, vendor, version and tier (version and tier are optional). The old format where you specified just the service names is deprecated and you need to rewrite the configuration to use this new release. here is an example creating a MySQL service: <services> <service> <name>mydata</name> <vendor>mysql</vendor> </service> </services> Change logs for the two most recent releases: Changes from version 1.0.0.M1 to 1.0.0.M2 Added Framework configuration parameter (-Dcf.framework) which allows to set the framework for the application. It defaults to spring. Added ability to deploy not only war-files but also point to directories and deploy those Add support for deployments of stand-alone applications by specifying standalone as the framework Deprecated warfile as now you can deploy stand-alone applications as well. Behavior is equal to the path property. Added path configuration property (-Dcf.path). Added Runtime property (-Dcf.runtime). It defaults to 'java' but technically you could also use the Maven Plugin to deploy e.g. Node and Ruby applications. Improved cf:info Maven goal. It will now show a list of available frameworks and system services, as well as a list of available runtimes* instances property now defaults to 1. Changes from version 1.0.0.M2 to 1.0.0.M3 Added Services configuration parameter which allows to add services. The default values are name and vendor. Modified the cf:push goal to take the services configuration and create the services if not created and bind them to the application. Added cf:logs goal which shows the log files of the application listed in either the configuration parameter. Added cf:services goal which shows the list of available services along with provisioned ones. Added cf:create-services goal which creates services listed in the configuration parameter in the pom file. Added cf:delete-services goal which deletes the services created using the services configuration parameter in the pom file. To use this Maven plug-in see the project page -- https://github.com/cloudfoundry/vcap-java-client/tree/master/cloudfoundry-maven-plugin

Oracle and Google will both appeal a jury's findings that Google infringed copyrights but didn't steal patents when it used Java as the basis for Android, its mobile operating system. By Charles Humble

At JavaOne this year, I experimented with a new way of experiencing the conference. Rather than attending as many interesting sessions as I could fit in (as I've done in the past), I chose to focus on talking with some of Java's innovators and organizers who were present at the conference, and taking copious notes as the conversations proceeded. The result is that I now have in my possession a notebook that is filled almost to the last page with comments, quotes, and notes about conversations with more than a dozen prominent JavaOne attendees, including Java Champions, Java User Group leaders, Duke's Choice Award winners, and JCP Award winners. The interview series will actually have a kind of theme -- at JavaOne this year, I felt several strong currents of energy, including these two specific directions: Community participation via the Adopt-a-JSR and Adopt OpenJDK projects, and the generally high level of Java User Group enthusiasm; and New entrepreneurial engagement facilitated by new technologies that enable a single developer who has an idea to launch a global business without needing substantial financing. To me, it seems the playing field is being leveled. The "Adopt" initiatives enable any developer who has the desire to participate to influence the outcome of Java's future. Meanwhile, the realization that today a single developer can create a start-up that might become the next Facebook, using for example Jelastic's cloud platform and Apache Hadoop to ensure flawless scaling, for perhaps under $100 US per month during the initial site development phase, amazes me! Who would have guessed a few years ago that such possibilities would be today's reality? These aspects of the new world we live in will be highlighted in the Java.net JavaOne 2012 interviews. It's not me saying what can be. It's simply me listening to what Java experts are saying, and conveying it to you, the Java Community, through the interview posts. JavaOne 2012 was a fascinating event for me, and I suspect that was the case as well for almost all of its participants. I look forward to sharing my JavaOne experience with you in the coming weeks... 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)

Community activity surrounding JavaFX has been steadily growing, with tweets, blog posts, and projects increasing in number. We are pleased to announce that there is now a JavaFX community site on Java.net at the following URL: javafxcommunity.com This site is an aggregator of JavaFX information, where you can find links to JavaFX blog posts, tweets, and other resources. Gerrit Grunwald and Jim Weaver are the community leaders for this site, and they welcome your feedback on how to make the JavaFX Community site more useful to you! Learn more on Jim Weaver's Rich-Client Java Blog.

AWS GovCloud (US) is a gated community cloud designed to support the compliance needs of customer workloads with direct or indirect ties to U.S. Government functions, services, or regulations. The AWS GovCloud (US) framework adheres to U.S. International Traffic in...

In four short years, GitHub has become the de-facto place to host code, with recent investments of $100m and a reputation for being the “coder’s social network”. Yet, so far, few other code repositories have truly stepped up to the plate - until now. Yesterday saw the release of a dramatic redesign of Bitbucket, with a slick new UI and a ton of new features, bringing it in line with the level of polish and features as its rival. So if they’re both now equally good, why should you switch? Here’s five reasons why you should consider trying Bitbucket out. 1. Free private repositories The most obvious advantage of switching to Bitbucket is the ability to host unlimited private repositories, with up to five contributors, for free. GitHub, in comparison, charges $7/month for just five private repositories. In fact, Bitbucket’s pricing is currently far more competitive than GitHub, even providing unlimited private repositories (for $200/month). Hopefully this competition will push GitHub’s own prices down, too. 2. Support for Mercurial Mercurial vs. Git has become one of the tech world’s great debates, with internet forums boiling over with passion for each. Thankfully, with Bitbucket there’s no need to choose, since as of last year it now supports both version control systems. And if even if you’re a hardened Git user, it might be worth having a go with Mercurial. While it may not be as cool or as popular as Git, Mercurial is still a solid and reliable alternative used by Mozilla, OpenJDK, Chromium, Adium and the W3C (we’ll leave it to the forums to discuss the individual pros and cons). 3. JIRA integration Since Atlassian also produce JIRA, Bitbucket comes with built-in integration between the two systems, allowing each commit to be linked to a bug or task. If your team uses Atlassian’s JIRA for bug tracking, it’s a no-brainer. 4. It’s worth having a backup Obviously, the beauty of a distributed version control system is that, should GitHub go down, your repository is still accessible. If they experience some serious downtime, you’ll need to find a quick alternative web presence for your project - and Bitbucket is a perfect choice. Besides, do we, as an industry, really want to put all of our eggs in one basket? What if GitHub lives long enough to see itself become the villain? We should embrace and encourage competitors to ensure that GitHub never lets itself become slack. 5. That damn cat Sure, the Octocat was funny at first, and the pseudo-3D Star Wars-referencing 404 page is pretty cool, but recently it’s been trying a bit too hard to be quirky. Thankfully, Bitbucket has a far saner mascot, a humble bucket that knows its place, one that doesn’t feel the need to dress up to fulfil our every fetish. Though... on second thoughts, Octocat is far too cute to abandon.

MariaDB has announced a preview of the Cassandra Storage Engine. This is a plugin that allows MariaDB to access Cassandra clusters using normal SQL syntax. By Jonathan Allen

The platform-as-a-service market has been heating up over the past couple of months as vendors finally begin to understand the importance of this burgeoning area Companies that once seemed wary of putting all their chips on the table with cloud platforms, such as Salesforce with Heroku, are now preaching a polyglot future for PaaS. Gartner too predict a bright future for PaaS, estimating that the sector will be worth $1.2bn by the year’s end. As the big vendors come to town, what of the old guard? Red Hat’s OpenShift arrived in August 2011, and despite undergoing several makeovers in that time, it has established a steady community backing. Reasons for that include May’s open sourcing of the cloud platform in OpenShift Origin and the team’s intentions to bolster relations to other projects, particularly 10gen’s NoSQL datastore MongoDB. In PaaS, it’s often about how many strings you can add to your bow. Now, the OpenShift team have announced a tentative roadmap for 2013 and beyond, in a state of play blogpost. According to Red Hat’s Juan Noceda, a self-service Web Console and Red Hat Enterprise Linux’s “High-Density App Allocation Technology” will be donated to OpenShift Origin project within the next few months. Additional features are slated for before the end of 2012 including support for trendy native Websockets and native support for Java Web and JEE containers. Currently only the linked JBoss AS is native, so it’s welcoming to see others. Crucially for customers, the public (OpenShift Online Service) and private (OpenShift Enterprise) GA launches are expected in 2012 as well, with Red Hat looking to jump sooner rather than later. Also announced this week is a partnership with PHP company Zend, which could be an important step towards OpenShift becoming an everyman cloud. An increasing number of PaaS vendors recognise the benefits of offering a broad language pallette, and by adding PHP debugging, monitoring and application performance capabilities, OpenShift could become a viable choice for its community. Noceda asserts OpenShift’s polyglot intentions, indicating that in 2013, additional languages and frameworks will arrive, as prioritised by the voting community. As it should be within any large developer collective, the community get the casting vote and drive the agenda. By the looks of it, we could see Memcached and Redis appear, or perhaps native support to the Play! framework. Whatever arrives in 2013, OpenShift are going the right way about creating an impressive arsenal of support to their cloud platform, that should get equal backing in the community and within the enterprise.

Welcome back to another installation of This week in Spring!. There's been a flurry of activity this week at SpringSource as we begin the final leg of the march to SpringOne! We're just a week away, and the show is shaping up every day to be the best show ever! We hope to see you there! Don't miss the day 1 and 2 keynotes from Adrian Colyer, Jurgen Hoeller, Mark Pollack, Graeme Rocher, as well as exciting sessions we've highlighted on SpringSource.org in the last 4 weeks: Going Async - Push Notifications, Client-Side UI Smackdown, Decomposing Applications for Deployability and Scalability, How to build Big Data Pipelines for Hadoop using OSS. Alvin J Rayes put together a nice post on using Spring MVC 3 with Apache Tiles, the templating engine. Tool Suites lead Martin Lippert has announced that Spring Tool Suite and Groovy/Grails Tool Suite 3.1.0 have been released! Nice job, Martin! Spring Security lead Rob Winch has announced that Spring Security 2.0.8, 3.0.8, and 3.1.3 have been released! This brings the total number of outstanding bugs down to 0. Excellent work, Rob! Have you been following the exciting new blogs from the Spring Integration team on the upcoming Spring Integration 2.2 release's new features? Gary Russell has put together a nice blog on the new support for retry in Spring Integration. The support for retry capabilities originally comes from Spring Batch's support for retrying operations, and was then factored out to the Spring Retry project. Now, you can take advantage of it in Spring Integration flows! Gunnar Hillert has a nice post on how to use the new adapters in Spring Integration 2.2 to work with JPA. Learning OAuth? Want to know about the scenarios in which OAuth can help better secure your RESTful APIs? Join Spring ninja Dr. David Syer for his article introducing OAuth, in terms of how Cloud Foundry uses it for the UAA service. Krishna Prasad has put together some very cool posts recently. I liked his post on connecting systems using publish-subscribe through Spring Integration and vFabric GemFire. His next post, on responsive web design using Twitter and Spring MVC , is brilliant. Really well done, Krishna! vFabric ninja Al Sargent has a quick field report from JavaOne, and the inexorable march towards simplicity. The folks at Broadleaf Commerce wrote up a nice article on integrating Spring Social with Broadleaf Commerce The Spring Social community continues to contribute extensions to Spring Social. Most recently, Jeffrey Williams has started an extension for integrating with Intuit's Quickbooks Online! Spring Social connects you to your social providers and all manner of other OAuth-secured services. Are you guys using Twitter? Be sure to check out this list of SpringSource people represented on Twitter.

Scott Ambler thinks that many Agile teams are making a common mistake when they do their initial, up front modeling. The mistake? It seems to be all of that up-front modeling they're doing.

The @osintegrators pushed an interesting article up comparing the deployment steps you need to take to get a war file hosted on a variety of different cloud providers. Mostly screenshots, a quick scroll of the article gives an interesting look at how the different vendors compare.

A review of many of the main resources regarding open source license compliance, shows the situation is quite complex. To help ease the elaborate nature of the material I created a license approval table that outlines the compliance of specific licenses. Analysis of this table open some assertions we discuss in this post, showing we should no longer talk about just GPL, but have to identify whether we are addressing GPL V2 or V3. Both aim to stay in the mainstream as "Strong Copyleft" references.

One of VMware's Java cloud platform leaders cites several changes - from how apps are consumed and produced to the economic advantages of cloud platforms - as drivers of app architecture change.

Demonstrates the application of adaptive control and local search optimization techniques to performance management of Java/JVM applications.

Solving the 'big data' problem isn't an issue you would typically associate with those dealing with presentation tier technologies, but as content management systems get swamped with information, figuring out what data to deliver to which user quickly turns into a problem that needs to be solved using big data technologies.

So long the JPA implementations in the market we simply put, slow. But there is the new kid on the block - Batoo JPA - http://batoo.jp

This is the third article in the series of "Become a Java GC Expert". Preview Text: This is the third in a series on understanding and performing Java Garbage Collection. I will show some of the best options you can use for GC tuning. Legacy Sponsored: unsponsored ...

My first ever software programming language was C. Almost two decades later, in weird unexpected ways I find myself understanding software concepts, subconsciously in C. Preview Text: My first ever software programming language was C. Almost two decades later, in weird unexpected ways I find myself understanding software concepts,...

Editor's Note: This post was originally authored by Andrew Wilson from the VoltDB blog. Preview Text: Last month I presented a webinar introducing the basics of application development using VoltDB. We had a lot of great questions and I thought it would be handy to write them up and share the answers with everyone. Legacy ...

You have an optimization task at hand. Which is great - you finally have the possibility to do something interesting instead of implementing yet another invoice processing screen. The optimization task is (hopefully) linked to some non-functional requirement, such as the number of transactions your application has to process per second or the maximum time per transaction allowed. Now, you...

So, JavaOne. Preview Text: I'm going to be controversial. I think this was my favourite conference of this year. I know that's not trendy, and that Oracle-bashing is still a popular pastime. And I know I've also made a big deal about how much fun it is to meet people who program in different languages. ...

I am starting this particular blog post as I sit the the San Francisco International Airport waiting to board an airplane to head home after another satisfying but tiring JavaOne (2012) experience. It is difficult to write another blog post after having frantically written ~30 blog posts on the conference since the keynotes on last Sunday, but I want to record some of my observations and...