Coach Wei's Blog Here is a question that I have been pondering on and off for quite a while: Why do "cool kids" choose Ruby or PHP to build websites instead of Java? I have to admit that I do not have an answer. Why do I even care? Because I am a Java developer. Like many Java developers, I get along with Java well. Not only the language itself, but the development environments (Eclipse for example), step-by-step debugging helper, wide availability of libraries and code snippets, and the readily accessible information on almost any technical question I may have on Java via Google. Last but not least, I go to JavaOne and see 10,000 people that talk and walk just like me. The other reason that I ponder this question is that  the power of Java is a perfect fit for the areas where websites may need more than markups or scripting, such as middleware logic. PHP and Ruby etc ... (more)

Cloud Expo, Inc. Announces Cloud Expo 2011 New York Venue

Click Here to Save $800 at Cloud Expo New York ! Cloud Expo, Inc. announced on Thursday that Cloud Expo 2011 New York, the 8th International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo, will take place June 6-9, 2011, at the Javits Center in New York City. Cloud Expo - International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo series is the world’s leading Cloud-focused event and is held in New York, Silicon Valley, Prague, Tokyo, and Hong-Kong. Over 900 corporate sponsors and more than 65,000 industry professionals have participated in Cloud Expo since its inception, tenfold more than all other Cloud-related events put together. Click Here to Save $800 at Cloud Expo New York ! "Cloud Expo was announced on February 24, 2007, the day the term ‘cloud computing' was coined," said Fuat Kircaali, Chairman and Founder of Cloud Expo, Inc. "Cloud has become synonymous with ‘computing' and ‘soft... (more)

Shrink-Url – Use PowerShell To Shrink Your Urls

Shrinking your Url’s is all the rage nowadays.  If you are on Twitter, then odds are you have used one.  Despite CodingHorror’s distaste for them in his recent blog post on Url Shorteners: Destroying the Web since 2002, they are a fact of life when we live in a world of 140 character status updates. So what’s a URL shrinking service anyway?  Well, to put it simply, you supply them with a URL, they then supply you with a shorter URL containing a lookup “key”.  When future requests are made to this shorter URL, connections are routed to that services website where they convert the short URL to the original URL and issue a HTTP Redirect back to your browser to send you off to the original long url website. So, what’s a guy, or gal, to do if they want to set their status programmatically on Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, or the other gazillion social networking sites ... (more)

AppDynamics on @DevOpsSummit | @AppDynamics [#DevOps #Microservices]

SYS-CON Media announced today that AppDynamics blog feed on 'DevOps Journal' exceeded 540,000 story reads. DevOps Journal is focused on this critical enterprise IT topic in the world of cloud computing. DevOps Journal brings valuable information to DevOps professionals who are transforming the way enterprise IT is done. AppDynamics blog can be bookmarked ▸ Here AppDynamics website can be bookmarked ▸ Here DevOps Journal can be bookmarked ▸ Here In high-production environments where release cycles are measured in hours or minutes — not days or weeks — there's little room for mistakes and no room for confusion. Everyone has to understand what's happening, in real time, and have the means to do whatever is necessary to keep applications up and running optimally. DevOps is a high-stakes world, but done well, it delivers the agility and performance to significantly impac... (more)

Oracle To Keynote Cloud Computing Expo

Enterprises large and small are drawn by the advantages of cloud computing -- pay-for-use, self-service, elastic scalability and the elimination of hardware management – resulting in very low barriers to entry and exit and high agility. However, enterprises are also concerned about security, quality of service, integration, compliance, lock-in, and the long-term costs of public clouds. Private clouds for the exclusive use of one enterprise can however mitigate these concerns by giving the enterprise greater control. In a keynote address to be given at SYS-CON's 4th International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo, Richard Sarwal (pictured), SVP of Development for Oracle Enterprise Manager, will explore how enterprises are likely to adopt public and private cloud computing, building on a foundation of virtualization infrastructure and management systems. The keynote w... (more)

Cloud People: A Who's Who of Cloud Computing

Behind every cloud service or cloud-based solution, there are real people... A robust ecosystem of solutions providers has emerged around cloud computing. But who are the CEOs & CTOs behind those providers, who are the internal and external entrepreneurs driving companies involved in the Cloud, who are the leading engineers, developers, analysts, researchers, marketing professionals, authors...who, in short, are the people behind the cloud? This list will be updated weekly between now and November 4-7, 2013, when 13th Cloud Expo | Cloud Expo Silicon Valley opens its doors in the Santa Clara Convention Center, in the heart of California's Silicon Valley. Here are some highly prominent "Cloud People" to kick off with... RANDY BIAS | @randybias "Randy Bias is visionary. He sees things others don't." [Emphasis added.] That is how Mårten Mickos puts it, as succinctly as ever.... (more)

Walter Cronkite's IT Career Advice

The late Walter Cronkite as a role model for IT managers? At first glance, we might not see the connection between "the most trusted man in America" and high tech management. But if we pull back the layers of how Cronkite approached his job, there are solid day-to-day career lessons for those working in IT. Seven Best Practices Straight From the Desk of Uncle Walter 1. Explain things in a simple way so everyone can understand. CBS' Bob Schieffer said people "understood Cronkite was guiding you through events." He translated the complex or hard to understand in a way that made you nod and think, "I get I now." When explaining the impact of an IT project for your organization, break it down so the non-techies get the light bulb over their heads. Explain it so your mother can understand it--use the criteria: how would Cronkite say this? 2. Have an unbridled enthusiasm. N... (more)

Rackspace Cloud APIs Open Sourced

Cloud Computing on Ulitzer Rackspace Hosting Thursday open sourced the specifications for its Cloud Servers and Cloud Files APIs under the Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution license. It says it worked with developers in an open community to create the specifications and they can now copy, implement and modify the specs, which Rackspace figures should help enable a "truly open cloud." Of course Eucalyptus already offers an open source cloudware. Eucalyptus Systems CTO Rich Wolski said he welcomed Rackspace's decision to provide its client-side tools as open source because it will help achieve cloud interoperability. Rackspace is also making its Cloud Files language bindings for Java, PHP, Python, C# and Ruby available under the MIT license. The source code is up on GitHub, a public software versioning system, at http://github.com/rackspace, where external developers can con... (more)

What Could You Do with Your Code in 20 Lines or Less?

What could you do with your code in 20 Lines or Less? That's the question I ask (almost) every week for the devcentral community, and every week I go looking to find cool new examples that show just how flexible and powerful iRules can be without getting in over your head. Here are a few more cool iRules from the forums. This week I’ve included one of the simplest, shortest iRules to ever make the 20LoL. It just struck me as something quite useful that I’m willing to bet several people will look at and say “oh, that’s handy” despite the fact that it’s not complex or long.  Keep the code coming. Multiple Matches with Switch http://devcentral.f5.com/Default.aspx?tabid=53&forumid=5&postid=60678&view=topic Joe answered a plea for help from the forums that showed how to modify an existing iRule that mad use of switch dropping through to multiple match cases.  This is a ... (more)

Open Source Selenium Web Application Testing System

Selenium is a free Web Application Testing System. It gained lots of popularity since it is available. It’s integration to FireFox – which allows instant record/replay as well as the scripting option - makes it a great tool for functional web testing. BrowserMob on the other side leverages Selenium by providing an automated load-testing environment for Selenium scripts all configurable online via a Web Dashboard. Tagging Web Requests In my recent blog post – Get more out of functional web testing: How to correlate test reports with server side log information? – I discussed the problem that testing results are usually not linked to the log and diagnostics information captured by the application under test. The blog entry offered a way to link the two sides using HTTP Tagging via an HTTP Proxy. Tagging individual Web Requests allows linking each individual request ... (more)

Make PHP Requests “Sleep” to Stop Bad Behavior. Smart or Not?

In a previous post we showed how we hooked up our blog's WordPress application with the new Compuware APMaaS offering. Since WordPress is a PHP application we use PurePath for PHP to monitor it. We highlighted that we got an alert about a response time violation on some of our blog posts - which is shown in the following screenshot. Dynamic Baselining detects a significant violation of the baseline during a 4.5 hour period last night In this follow-up article I want to show you how we get to the root cause of this problem which turns out to be a third-party WordPress PHP plugin that detects Bad Requests including requests from Bots that try to put spam messages in blog comments. Step 1: See PHP Performance Hotspots For the selected time-frame, we open the Response Time Hotspot dashboard. This shows which layer of the PHP Application has the highest performance con... (more)