Web Forefront

Web application deployment has changed substantially throughout the years. Once the domain of niche market players or 'hosting providers' that allowed you to park content on the web, this space has grown considerably, sparking the interest of players like Google, Microsoft and Amazon.

These larger companies are setting the stage to change not only how you deploy web applications, but also how you design them and how you pay for their presence on the web. All of which has given way to 'platforms' that scale and adapt more easily, than the services offered by the 'hosting providers' of yesteryear.

But what are the benefits of such 'platforms' or 'cloud computing platforms' as they are now called ? In what ways are the offerings made by Google, Microsoft and Amazon in this space different ? This entry contains more details, including an extensive 6 page Reference Card I recently wrote on the topic.

I recently had a discussion on what Java build tool to use for a particular project. Its a small project in terms of the amount of code it will use -- a book project to be exact, with all its examples. But one of the co-authors suggested we use Maven. Even though I've learned to use Maven I shy away from it, but now that my co-author has hinted with A Survival Guide to Maven, OR, Why Maven's Still Cool , I thought I'd write this post on why Ant will never go away and why I believe Maven will never prosper.

Its been almost two years since I posted the Content is the peasant, if you only live in the Internet kingdom entry, in which I mentioned how syndication, RSS feeds and the likes were going to put Internet content on its head. Fast forward to tougher times, tighter budgets and more diligence to make a sale, no wonder some people are going ballistic.But I still think we are just seeing the tip of the iceberg on this evolving saga.

Passwords are sacrosanct on the web. Some sites force you to change it every so often, others force you to use a minimum length, others force you to use certain symbols to make a password stronger. All this is OK I believe. But why do passwords always appear in the form '******' when you introduce them on a web page? As if everyone is peeping over your screen at that very second? Jakob Nielsen, one of the most notable usability experts says 'Stop Password Masking', his comments reminded me of the only time I've seen non-masked passwords: Hollywood movies. Perhaps Hollywood on this occasion has a better depiction of what works, especially now that Nielsen said something on the topic.

The era of multi-core processors, dual-core two processors in one, quad-core four processors in one, is now in full-swing. If you think to yourself 'my software will be blazing on a machine running a hexa-core processor which is six processors in one!'. It just might, but before it can do that, your software might as well run on a single-core processor if it isn't designed to take advantage of this fact. This post is a high-level view on multi-core processors, concurrency and the programming languages that have caught recent headlines as concurrency champions and how they fit this multi-core paradigm.

In an earlier post I described OSGi versioning and Java's run-time and how the former is often discussed with the latter, since Java lacks run-time versioning. In this post I will describe another OSGi feature, one that although not as fresh a concept as Java versioning, is still central to OSGi: The OSGi service model.

For those using .NET the title is probably not news, since this has been available since .NET 1.0. This is simply a follow-up to the last post ' OSGi: Versioning and Java's run-time '. Yes .NET got this functionality in its first version, Java is 7 versions in and its still not clear when support for this will materilize. The mechanism is strikingly similar though, this post will illustrate how.

When the topic of OSGi comes up it often comes hand-in-hand with the term versioning. In short: 'Java has no support for versioning and OSGi does, so OSGi fills this void'. But how does this versioning mechanism work and what implications does it have for a Java application? This post will attempt to summarize how OSGi, versioning and Java's run-time fit together.