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Tag Archives: developer

10 Lessons from Spring Applied to Java Virtualization with vFabric

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The Spring Framework became the de-facto standard for developing enterprise Java applications, and its radical simplicity was fundamental to its success. Why the “radical” simplicity? Because at the time, it was hard to imagine how creating such applications could be made simple.

By tackling issues such as portability, understanding the importance of cross-cutting concerns, and making it trivial to develop automated tests, Spring allowed developers to focus on what matters: what makes their application unique.

As I was pulling together my presentation for SpringOne2GX 2012, I reflected on the parallels between Spring’s success and the direction we were going with EM4J. Why did Spring succeed? Why did simplification win? Where are we replicating these patterns within VMware, vFabric, and Java?

In short, complexity is expensive, and simplification has many economic benefits. By giving people better, simpler, and easier to use tools to help build, run, and manage applications, we create economic advantages.

In a nutshell, there are some core reasons why Spring succeeded, “Spring values” if you will: Reducing complexity, increasing productivity, provisioning flexibility, tooling and monitoring, extensibility, automation, flexible integration and ease of testing. Continue reading →

Announcing the Availability of vFabric Data Director 2.5, GemFire 7, EM4J 1.2, and More

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Application developers and data management teams continue to look for ways to modernize legacy apps, manage costs more effectively, build new apps on robust application platforms, and solve big data problems. These are some of the key reasons why vFabric is on the CIO (or CTO) agenda. With several new product releases in the vFabric Suite, VMware continues to provide a best-in-class application platform and help customers solve their top application development and data management problems.

vFabric Data Director 2.5

Database as a Service (DBaaS) helps companies virtualize data engines and automate management while getting a handle on the costs and compliance issues related to data sprawl. In the newest version of Data Director, several new data engines are supported (in addition to Oracle and Postgres) along with other new capabilities:

  • Support for Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 and SQL Server 2012
  • Support for Hadoop deployment, management, and monitoring across all major distributions through Project Serengeti
  • Enhanced automation of Oracle and SQL Server template creation
  • Broad support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and Oracle Linux
  • Enhanced Oracle database ingestion, including ingestion to a point-in-time and more
  • Support for static IP database virtual machines (DBVMs)
  • Express set-up for development or experimentation

Continue reading →

3 Steps on Using Spring Insight Developer to Analyze Code

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If you don’t know about Spring Insight Developer, this post may save you tons of time and potentially headache.

Imagine that you need to update some code behind a button, but you didn’t write the code. What if you could press the to-be-coded button and then see what code was invoked (including methods and arguments), the SQL invoked, and the time it took to execute?

This is what Spring Insight Developer allows you to do, and more.

It’s also free, and it uses AspectJ and AOP to load-time weave your application, you do not have to make any changes to your application code to use it.

Let’s take a look at a simple example of tracing your app, viewing the details, and seeing the code in action.

Continue reading →

NanoTrader: Now The SpringTrader Reference Architecture

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What is SpringTrader?

Back in August, we provided a sneak peak at NanoTrader, VMware’s vFabric Reference Architecture.  It was referenced in several posts and then featured in a session at SpringOne recently.  The application has now been named SpringTrader, and we wanted to a) share more information about the SpringTrader app including some updated architecture graphics, b) provide a new tool (a version you can log into online), and c) share the location of the Spring Trader bits for download.

If you haven’t heard, the SpringTrader reference architecture is used to help Java-based application architects, developers, infrastructure, and operations teams advance their application roadmaps and provide reusable patterns.  Some might also consider how vFabric Application Director can be used with the SpringTrader app to enable continuous deployment or automatically provision and scale the app in a completely virtual data center (i.e. a software defined data center). As well, vFabric Application Performance Manager can be used to monitor the entire stack and trigger automated scaling events like adding a new JVM and tc Server to the SpringTrader app’s production environment.
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vFabric VMworld Sessions available On Demand

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For anyone that attended VMworld 2012, you can access content for all VMware sessions here.

If you did not attend, you can purchase a subscription to access the content online. Content from all previous years is free for all community members along with the 2012 General Session Keynotes.

For your convenience, we’ve provided a list and links to all the vFabric-related sessions below:
Continue reading →

Understanding the Difference between Spring Insight Developer & Insight Operations

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Every developer knows Byte Code Instrumentation (BCI) is useful. It automates how you instrument your code, and let’s you see exactly how data is being transferred and manipulated within your application. The level of detail is essential to writing and debugging good code.

The Spring Framework has its own BCI tool, called Spring Insight. It comes in two flavors: Spring Insight Developer Edition (Insight) and Spring Insight Operations (Insight Operations). It is also bundled with AppInsight as part of the vFabric Application Performance Suite, and currently only works on Java/Spring code, a fact that is open to change with the upcoming Split-Agent Architecture.

So what is the difference?

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5 Trends Driving Change in App Architectures

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From mainframe to client-server to web-based to cloud-oriented, application architectures have evolved.  Now, the cloud services market will be over $100B in 2012 (source Gartner) and IaaS is set to grow 45.4% – extremely fast in a tough world economy. This growth means companies are prioritizing cloud services and evolving application architectures very quickly. From the viewpoint of our customers, we see five key themes driving change in IT application architectures:

1. Systems of Engagement
2. Pervasive Frameworks
3. Expanding Application Usage Types
4. Data Explosion
5. Cloud Economics
Continue reading →

PostgreSQL contributor Heikki Linnakangas joins VMware vFabric Team

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In this short Q&A, we get the perspective of Heikki Linnakangas who’s just joined VMware after being a senior software architect and contributing to PostgreSQL for six years.

1. You’ve been involved with PostgreSQL for a while, could you give us a bit about your background and how you’ve been involved?
It all started in 2003, when my second child was born. I was at home with the baby for a month or two, and thought it would be fun to take a look at how a DBMS works under the covers. I have done programming as a hobby since I was a kid, but had not had a chance to do much outside a work environment for some time. Continue reading →

4 Key Architecture Considerations for Big Data Analytics

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Everyone seems to be talking about “Big Data” these days. We’re bombarded with information in online and print media about the explosion of machine generated data, the petabytes of data that companies like Facebook and Twitter generate, and the billions of dollars of opportunities awaiting all businesses through the use of big data. We also hear about what seems an alphabet soup of new technologies to process and analyze big data: Hadoop for distributed data processing, R for analytics, Lucene for text indexing and search, Mahout for machine learning…the list goes on and on.

If you’re a business user, you’re thinking that big data could give you an edge over your competition. If you’re a developer, you’re excited about the many new technologies you can learn about. If you’re an architect, you’re trying to figure out how all these big data technologies fit within your existing and future infrastructure.

Continue reading →

2 Ways Fast/Big Data Impacts the IT Org Structure

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Though my background includes time as both a developer, architect, and CTO, much of my time today is spent discussing applications with senior IT executives. I manage an application development division of a national VAR and focus on the vFabric stack from top to bottom. One of the challenges I face is trying Screen shot 2012-08-08 at 10.48.39 AM
to provide application-centric consulting services to operations/infrastructure teams who (a) don’t really own the decision of app software infrastructure and/or (b) don’t understand it and, (c) worse in some cases, don’t care. Recently, I’ve come to love my job for two primary reasons:

1. “Cloud” technologies are forcing the Operations teams and the Application teams to “share” responsibility for overall IT efficiency. The cloud concept of an on-demand, elastic infrastructure is knocking down political walls and silos that have evolved over the past decades in IT. This is no more evident than at VMWare, where vFabric and vSphere product lines are starting to blur (e.g. vCenter –> vCloud Director –> Application Director). Finally, I have something to talk to the Infrastructure folks that gets them excited! Perhaps it is the needed automation of infrastructure that brings Ops to the Aps side. Or, perhaps it an elastic architecture that brings Aps over to the Ops side. In any event, the two teams are brought together and work together more in cloud solutions.

Continue reading →