The Amazon RDS team has been cranking out feature releases at an incredibly rapid pace. I'm working double secret overtime just to keep up with them. Here's what they've released in the past month (Click on the image to learn...

Ross Lawley introduces MongoDB, explaining why it is a good solution for cloud deployment. By Ross Lawley

Let's take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week: Monday, October 8 Our friends at AWS Partner 8KMiles released a new presentation, Email Architecture using Amazon SES. Tuesday, October 9 We added two new checks to the...

Posted by Eva-Lotta Lamm, Riccardo Govoni, and Ellie Powers of the Google Play team We've been working on a new Google Play Developer Console, centered around how you make and publish apps, to create a foundation for the exciting features we have planned for the future. Earlier this year at Google I/O, we demoed the new version (video). Since then, we've been testing it out with tens of thousands of developers, reviewing their feedback and making adjustments. Today, we're very happy to announce that all developers can now try the new Google Play Developer Console. At its core, the Developer Console is how you put your app in front of hundreds of millions of Android users around the world, and track how your app is doing. We hope that with a streamlined publishing flow, new language options, and new user ratings statistics, you'll have better tools for delivering great Android apps that delight users. Sleeker, faster, easier to navigate You spend a lot of time in the Developer Console, so we overhauled the interface for you. It's bright and appealing to look at, easy to find your way around using navigation and search, and it loads quickly even if you have a lot of apps. Designed for speed. Quickly locate the app data and business information you use every day. More screenshots » Track user ratings over time, and find ways to improve One of the most important things you'll be able to do is track the success of your app over time - it's how you continue to iterate and make beautiful, successful apps. You'll see new statistics about your user ratings: a graph showing changes over time, for both the all-time average user rating and new user ratings that come in on a certain day. As with other statistics, you'll be able to break down the data by device, country, language, carrier, Android version, and app version. For example, after optimizing your app for tablets, you could track your ratings on popular tablets. New charts for user ratings. You can now track user ratings over time and across countries. More screenshots » Better publishing workflow We've completely revamped and streamlined the app publishing process to give you more time to build great apps. You can start with either an APK or an app name, and you can save before you have all of the information. You can also now see differences between the new and old versions of an app, making it easy to catch unintentional changes before you publish a new version to your users. More languages for listings, with automated translations You'll also enjoy a new app publishing flow and the ability to publish your app listing in 49 languages. Once you've saved any change to your application in the new Developer Console, your users will have the option of viewing an automatic translation of your listing on the web today and soon on devices - no additional action on your part is needed. How can you try the new version? Go to your Developer Console and click on "Try the new version" in the header or go directly to the new version. If you prefer the new version, don't forget to bookmark the new URL. Please note that we're not quite done yet, so the following advanced features are not yet supported in the new Google Play Developer Console: multiple APK support, APK Expansion Files and announcements. To use these features, you can click "Switch back" in the header at any time to return to the old version. Click the "Feedback" link in the header to let us know what you think, so that we can continue to improve your experience as a Google Play developer. Thank you for all of the feedback so far. Join the discussion on +Android Developers

We need to understand what happens to code over time and why, and what a healthy, long-lived code base looks like. What architectural decisions have the most lasting impact, and what decisions made early will make the most difference over the life of a system. Preview Text: We need to understand what happens to code over time and why, and what...

Dear Spring community, I am pleased to announce the synced GA release of the following modules: Spring Data Commons 1.4 - Artifacts - JavaDocs - Documentation - Changelog Spring Data JPA 1.2 - Artifacts - JavaDocs - Documentation - Changelog Spring Data MongoDB 1.1 - Artifacts - JavaDocs - Documentation - Changelog Spring Data Neo4j 2.1 - Artifacts - JavaDocs - Documentation - Changelog Spring Data Gemfire 1.2 - Artifacts - JavaDocs - Documentation - Changelog Spring Data REST Exporters 1.0 - Artifacts - JavaDocs - Documentation There's a more detailled blog post over at the the SpringSource team blog to cover the content of the overall release, the future roadmap etc. Looking forward to your feedback!

New Refcard: We've been eagerly preparing this week's refcard release for the past few months now, and finally the widely-requested Scala Refcard is here. Go download Scala: The Scalable JVM Language right now! --DZ Curators Preview Text: We've been eagerly preparing this week's refcard release for the past few months now, and...

If your managers are judging your productivity by the velocity of your development, and velocity is calculated as the number of story points completed over time, then what is the best way to improve your productivity without actually doing any more work? Simply make every stroke of the keyboard a completed story.

Microsoft is scheduled to conduct a mega launch event on October 25, 2012 ahead of official launch of Windows 8 on October 26. Microsoft will showcase the much awaited Surface tablet and also reveal about the upcoming plans. By Anand Narayanaswamy

"Sams Teach Yourself jQuery Mobile In 24 Hrs" is a new book by Phil Dutson that introduces web developers to building mobile web apps with JQuery Mobile. The book is divided into 24 separate chapters meant to be consumed in an hour each. InfoQ got in touch with Phil to know more about the book and Mobile web app development in general. By Roopesh Shenoy

Riding on a high from last month’s Folsom release, the OpenStack community have brought another big hitter to the table in cloud operating system manufacturer Nimbula. The news, announced ahead of San Diego’s OpenStack Grizzly Design Summit, is a big boost to the cloud infrastructure collective, with the Mountain View company pledging to use OpenStack core technology in future releases, alongside its own automated, highly scalable, self-service cloud software. The expertise provided by the company that built Amazon EC2 will also undoubtedly prove invaluable to the OpenStack codebase. Nimbula Director is the company’s flagship product, and allows enterprises to build large-scale fully-functional infrastructure services in a matter of hours. Customers already using Nimbula Director include Russian Internet company Yandex and US Government service provider Solers, both in need of high level orchestration in their working environments. Director also eliminates the complexities of deploying a private, hybrid or public cloud: something which the OpenStack community are keen to reduce too. Reza Malekzadeh, VP of marketing and sales at Nimbula, explained that OpenStack’s “strong industry momentum” was one of the reasons for jumping onboard. He added: “Our customers appreciate the advanced functionality, scale and security model we provide, but have been asking us about a standardised one. We are excited to now be in a position to work with the OpenStack community to deliver a range of extended infrastructure and platform services around an industry-standard effort. “We welcome Nimbula’s participation in OpenStack, their commitment to contribute code and eagerness to collaborate with the technical community," said Mark Collier, COO of the OpenStack Foundation. “As cloud technology leaders continue to back the project and drive adoption, we move closer to achieving the OpenStack mission of being the ubiquitous cloud computing platform." “OpenStack is the right idea and project, and having smart, innovative companies join the initiative is a positive step,” said Ben Kepes, industry observer and commentator. “Nimbula has great technology and expertise and their joining OpenStack will help develop it as the Cloud platform of choice for the market.” They may have waited to see OpenStack take off, but Nimbula’s decision to join the OpenStack community is great news for the other members. Their experience in the market, as well as their intentions to be an active member could end up being decisive, as the project moves forward into 2013.

Memory leaks are a universal problem in every language. So, on the face of it, Plumbr - which monitors Java applications for potentially destructive memory leaks - shouldn’t be so remarkable. Yet CEO Priit Potter claims that his company’s tool is the first able to identify the exact line number in the source code causing the issue. “The problem is, the causes for memory leaks are very application-specific,” says Potter. “The symptoms are very universal. You see that the application is getting slower, the available amount of memory is decreasing, and finally your application crashes. “But the cause - the reason for the leak - is very much application-specific, and that's why there are no good tools for it. Because you don't have any universal checklist.” Plumbr takes a machine-learning approach, and once installed “really gets to know your application,” says Potter. “It learns how application uses memory, how long the objects live in memory, how they behave in the memory. So then it starts seeing patterns there, and when Plumbr is confident enough there is a memory leak, then it announces the leak and tells you which line in the code is the faulty one.” The company are so confident in the app’s detective abilities that they recently announced a new policy: if Plumbr itself fails to find the source of a leak, the team will find it for you. Potter says only “two or three” customers have taken Plumbr up on this offer, and in all cases, Plumbr was detecting the leak correctly - the customers were simply misreading the results. “Our conclusion was that we still need to make the report more understandable,” says Potter. Still, the team are somewhat modest when discussing the capabilities of Plumbr. In a recent blog post announcing Plumbr 1.2’s reductions in CPU and memory overhead, they humbly asked: “would you consider a tool with overhead numbers like this for a production deployment?” And few companies would be brave enough to include statistics on their homepage such as “15% of Plumbr memory leak reports are false alarms” or “your application uses 23% more CPU with Plumbr” - but this is all part of the company’s differentiation strategy. “We are a new name on the market,” says Potter. “So we have to try to be open, and give more information so that people can make an informed decision.” Plumbr licenses start at $149.99 per year, but you can download a trial version for free.

NoSQLUnit is a JUnit extension to make writing unit and integration tests of systems that use NoSQL backend easier. Visit official page for more information. In 0.5.0 release, an embedded in-memory Redis has been implemented, among other small features.

I ran across a little gotcha today where a float value being inserted into another object container (JSONObject) was not holding the precision of the original value. The JSONObject actually takes a double not a float, and I overlooked the up-casting initially until I started unit testing. (have to love unit tests!) here is a print of the values I started with: Preview Text: ...

XA transactions are useful and out of the box, Play 2.0 today does not have support for them. Here I show how to add that support: Preview Text: XA transactions are useful and out of the box, Play 2.0 today does not have support for them. Here I show how to add that support: Legacy Sponsored: ...

RRiBbit 2.1.0 adds JMS support to RRiBbit Remoting, making it possible to use JMS as a communication layer for your RRiBbit Eventbus.

Here is an interesting article for those of should who have been following remotely the JavaOne 2012 conference. A recent interview with the Java Champion Heinz Kabutz was brought to my attention; including his Java memory puzzle program which was quite instructive from a Java memory management perspective. Preview Text: Here is an interesting...

We want to make EC2 Spot Instances even easier to use. One way we are doing this is by making the bidding and processing more open and more transparent. You probably know that you can use Spot Instances to bid...