Programming
JackBe Launches Enterprise Mashup Platform on the Cloud
Mar 4th
CHEVY CHASE, Md. – (Business Wire) JackBe, the leading provider of Enterprise Mashup Software, today announced that its award-winning Presto Enterprise Mashup Platform is now running on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. ‘Presto Cloud (Community Edition)’ is immediately available at no cost to all members of JackBe’s Mashup Developer Community.
Presto Cloud (Community Edition) combines agile mashup creation with the instant accessibility of a cloud service, enabling mashup developers to connect Internet-based data sources in their own secure workspace and easily share their mashups with community members around the world. With Presto Cloud (Community Edition), users can also take advantage of a public mashup catalog consisting of hundreds of mashable data sources from JackBe Preferred Partners as well as shared mashup applications created by other community members.
“Presto Cloud Community Edition is the fastest way to start mashing. The shared platform lets our community members instantly use an enterprise-grade mashup platform for easy mashup creation as well as benefit from collaborating with other mashers from around the world,” said JackBe’s CTO, John Crupi. “And Presto Cloud Community Edition is only our first step. We have big plans in future releases for production mashup applications in the cloud.”
“I am very excited to see enterprise software vendors like JackBe taking advantage of cloud-based platforms and services,” said Dion Hinchcliffe, Web 2.0 strategist and founder of Web 2.0 University. “The cloud has become a particularly compelling destination for enterprise developers to harness innovation and build valuable business applications. I believe enterprise mashup platforms like JackBe Presto are a natural fit for this dynamic new extension of the IT environment.”
Presto Cloud (Community Edition) is available at no charge to members of JackBe’s Mashup Developer Community. New mashers can join the 3,000+ member Mashup Developer Community at www.jackbe.com/dev. Production licensing for the Presto Enterprise Mashup Platform is also available. For more information, contact info@jackbe.com.
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IBM Announces – Cloud computing for developers April 6-8th
Mar 4th
Solutions for application development, 6-8 April
Join this cloud computing for developers virtual event to learn about technologies that can help solve your business and technical challenges in the cloud. These sessions are ideal for anyone looking to build a cloud infrastructure or develop and deploy cloud-based applications. Topics include: Getting started in the cloud, security, metering and billing, rapid provisioning and mashups.
See real-world examples of specific challenges and solutions, as well as live demonstrations of techniques and products. Finally, get connected to the developerWorks community and find the resources you need.
Audience: Developers, architects, students, partners, ISVs
Prerequisites: General understanding of cloud computing
What are virtual briefings?
Virtual briefings are presented online using Saba Centra. These sessions replicate a typical classroom with a complete set of features for highly interactive, effective group learning – bringing together voice, video, data and graphics in a structured online learning environment. Sessions are instructor-led and end with an opportunity for you to ask questions using either VOIP or Text Chat.
Agenda
April 6: Build a cloud computing infrastructure
| Session | Topic | Time (EST) |
|---|---|---|
| Introduction | Introduction to cloud computing for developers | 11:30am-12:00pm |
| Session 1 | Identity management in the cloud: Get the basic principles of trust and identity management, including how to define users, their roles and responsibilities. | 12:00pm-1:00pm |
| Session 2 | Connecting to the cloud – the hybrid model: Learn about the benefits of the hybrid model and how to design a hybrid application. | 1:15pm-2:15pm |
| Session 3 | Metering usage of shared computational resources in cloud-delivered solutions: See a scenario for metering usage of computational resources in a sample multi-tenant banking application. | 2:30pm-3:30pm |
| Register for April 6 sessions. | ||
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Cloud Computing News – Apple looks to move movies to the cloud…
Mar 3rd
Apple’s plans for cloud computing go beyond music.
The company’s representatives have recently spoken with some of the major film studios about enabling iTunes users to store their content on the company’s servers, two people familiar with the discussions told CNET. That’s in addition to streaming television shows and music.
The news comes a month after Apple spoke to the major record companies about a similar plan involving music. Apple’s vision is to build proverbial digital shelves where iTunes users store their media, one of the sources said. “Basically, they want to eliminate the hard drive,” the source said.
By cramming digital songs, videos, and all manner of software applications on computers and handheld devices, there’s some indication that consumers are maxing out hard drives, particularly on smaller mobile devices. That has led to speculation among Apple watchers that some consumers might slow their purchasing of new content, if they have nowhere to easily put it.
It’s a bit of leap to reach that conclusion, certainly when a stagnant economy might be hampering sales, but there are some worrisome signs. The NPD Group reported last week that the number of people who legally downloaded songs dropped by nearly a million, from 35.2 million in 2008 to 34.6 million last year. Screen Digest, a research firm that focuses on the entertainment industry, on Monday said growth in movie downloads slowed dramatically in 2009, following sharp increases in the two prior years. Screen Digest had projected that total U.S. online movie sales for 2009 would come in at about $360 million, but the total reached only $291 million, the company said.
Before iTunes users can store their movies and TV shows in Apple’s cloud, the company must get the studios to sign on. This may not be easy. The studios want to make sure that Apple’s plans play nice with non-Apple devices and services.
Hollywood isn’t interested in any walled gardens, said James McQuivey, a media analyst at Forrester Research.
“The studios are very concerned that they’re going to get roped into somebody’s proprietary platform,” McQuivey said. “They want a world where consumers have a relationship with the content, and not with the device or the service. They are in a position to force Apple to go along and make sure that content bought [via] iTunes will play on a Nokia phone. That is very un-Apple-like.”
The upper hand in Hollywood
“Apple would prefer not to do this,” McQuivey continued. “But it just doesn’t have the leverage it once did. Apple can’t dictate terms or position itself as a digital savior.”
The reason that Apple doesn’t wield the same power over the film and TV industries that it did with music is that more players are willing to give the studios what they want.
The Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem, or DECE, is a consortium of heavy-hitting media stakeholders lining up to create standards for file formats, digital rights management, and authentication technologies. The group includes Adobe Systems, Best Buy, Cisco Systems, Comcast, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Lions Gate Entertainment, Twentieth Century Fox Film, Microsoft, Netflix, Panasonic, the four largest recording companies (Universal Music Group, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, EMI Group, and Warner Music Group), Samsung, Sony, and Warner Bros. Entertainment.
DECE’s goal is to make sure that a movie or TV show bought from Comcast’s video service will play on Samsung devices or on Netflix’s service.
Not all the studios have joined. Walt Disney has create a DECE-like service called KeyChest, which is supposed to be DECE-compatible.
Applying more pressure on Apple is Google, one of its main rivals. Google, obviously, has YouTube. It’s also eyeing some start-ups with cloud technology to beef up its streaming services.
Two weeks ago, sources told CNET that Google had informal acquisition talks with Catch Media, a Los Angeles company that wants to become a clearinghouse of sorts, in which consumers move media around the Web, and Catch handles the permissions and licensing.
So what’s Apple’s answer to the Google threat? Apple is building a new data center in North Carolina that, according to reports, will be the backbone of its streaming offerings. In December, Apple bought Lala, a struggling music service with an expertise in cloud computing. Google was also trying to acquire the company, but Apple outbid Google.
The one thing that could help Apple pull away from Google, giving it more clout with the studios and TV networks, is if iPad catches on with consumers.
The Web-enabled computer tablet, which is due to hit store shelves later this month, features a 9.7-inch display screen and can play back video at up to 720p resolution, the sources said. If consumers start buying video to watch on the iPad, Hollywood could soften its stance on standards. But McQuivey says Apple can’t create any proprietary formats, at this point.
“Apple can’t suddenly make the iPad a closed environment,” he said. “Apple is not any position to refuse to limit its customers’ choices. By pioneering (the apps), Apple is stuck doing what’s right for consumers.”
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Can Microsoft’s Azure Find True Blue Developers?
Feb 3rd
Microsoft on Tuesday said that its Azure cloud computing platform was open for business after more than a year of development. While Redmond may be late to the cloud bonanza, it now has a platform that could become a major force in cloud computing — if it can get developers to trust it. Derrick Harris takes an in-depth look at Azure over at GigaOM Pro (subscription required) to see what exactly Microsoft is offering and how it compares with other clouds.
Derrick is pretty optimistic about Microsoft’s chances to build a developer community for Azure. He said that since Azure offers a platform as a service, a fabric to join public and private clouds, and a robust SQL database, it will meet the needs of many potential customers. From his report:
What sets Windows Azure apart from the competition is that it tries to be everything to everyone, and often times it succeeds. For example, the sheer variety of languages and frameworks it supports is rare among PaaS offerings, most of which target one language or stack (e.g., Ruby on Rails or LAMP) and build the best possible service around it. This means that Azure might be attractive to developers who really like to experiment or businesses that run various types of applications, but that Azure won’t likely be the best at serving any particular language (except for .NET, of course). It remains to be seen whether PaaS customers will buy into Microsoft’s reputation and relative openness with Azure, or whether they will take their business to the best clouds for their particular jobs.
The question of Microsoft’s success may boil down to how much enterprises and customers need to consolidate all of their IT operations in a single cloud or with one vendor. It could also depend on whether those customers want to take advantage of the plethora of application-specific or language-specific platforms for each IT function. If they do, then there’s no need for a general purpose cloud that tries to be all things to all developers because customers will seek to find the best fit for each program they want to run.
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Salesforce Simplifies The Creation Of Business Applications With Visual Process Manager
Feb 3rd
2009 was a banner year for Salesforce.com. The enterprise cloud computing company made significant enhancements to its product lineup, reported overall strong earnings
, and even launched their own take on realtime enterprise social networking and collaboration, Chatter. Today, Salesforce is launching one of its first product enhancements for 2010: the Force.com Visual Process Manager.
Force.com, company’s platform to build and deploy enterprise applications, will now allows companies to design and deploy business processes inside their apps without having to build the applications on other software. Customers can visually design any complex business process with a design tool and instantly run it in the cloud without writing a single line of code. The technology powering the Visual Process Manager is based on technology acquired from Informavores, call scripting startup Salesforce bought last year.
The Manager has several different components. The Process Designer essentially helps businesses sketch out applications with established set forms, questions, and choices, and logic components, like task assignments, decision trees, and approval processes. These components can be dragged and dropped into a visual process design diagram/ The Process Wizard Builder enables companies to design a “wizard” to help walk end-users, step-by-step, through their business process. The Process Simulator lets customers test out and review processes before they are deployed. And lastly, the real-time process engine will run all of a company’s sophisticated processes and provides realtime scalability.
For example, if an insurance company wanted to create a step by step business application for sales representatives to follow in order to create a price quote for insurance packages, the administrator could visually map out every question and step the sales reps need to take and then simple create an application that would automate these processes.
Prior to the inclusion of the Visual Process Manager, companies would have to build applications off of separate platforms, including on-premise software, hardware and infrastructure, to automate processes. The bonus to the Visual process Manager is that it integrates seamlessly into all of Salesforce’s applications. The Process Manager will be available to Enterprise and Unlimited Edition Force.com subscribers for $50 per user per month.
The company recently rolled out Force.com Sites, which lets companies build and run their applications for internal use as well as for public use on Salesforce.com cloud computing platform. And Salesforce also opened up an additional distribution channel off of Force.com: the Value-Added Reseller (VAR) program
While the opening up of the Visual Process Manager pales in comparison to the scale of launching Salesforce Chatter, both products represent Salesforce’s rapid pace of innovation. It should be interesting to see what 2010 brings for Salesforce; the company just raised $500 million, which we all expect will be uses towards a few acquisitions.
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NASA building cloud service for climate modeling
Feb 1st
NASA is aiming to improve its climate research capabilities by creating a software-as-a-service interface for scientists and students who need to build complex climate models.
“Right now the climate models that we have are very complex, the software is upwards of 500,000 to 1 million lines of code,” says Michael Seablom, head of the software integration and visualization office at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.
A climate model might, for example, predict what would happen to global temperatures over the next hundred years if humans double carbon dioxide emissions.
“Trying to get the models running is difficult and it costs us a lot of money here because we have to help groups build the system on their local machine,” Seablom says. “The problem with that is if you’re a graduate student, you could spend months just trying to get the model running and verify that it’s working correctly.”
NASA’s goal is to build a Web portal for investigators to log onto, allowing them to run the climate models on remote systems provided by the space agency. The grid computing software company Parabon Computation was awarded a two-year, $600,000 contract to help NASA build the system.
Parabon says the Web-based platform will be built upon its Frontier Grid software, which can take idle computing capacity from many machines and manage it as one large computational grid, with applications running on virtual machines.
Seablom says NASA’s climate modeling teams will tap into processors from NASA’s Nebula cloud computing platform and could someday purchase computing cycles from public cloud platforms.
“I hate to use the term ‘cloud computing’ because I’ve heard the term so much and I’m sick of it,” Seablom says. “But the fact of the matter is this is a very good cloud computing model and we’re going to save a lot of money doing it. I’m very excited.”
Parabon uses its own software to buy idle computing capacity from universities and businesses and then resells computing cycles as an online service, says Parabon CEO Steven Armentrout. In this case, Parabon is selling its platform to NASA as an enterprise software package to be deployed internally behind the NASA firewall, he says.
“These tools — such as a browser-based source code editor, online collaboration utilities, and virtualized build and runtime environment management interfaces — will allow developers to more efficiently create and modify a wide variety of high-performance computing (HPC) applications,” Parabon states in an announcement of the NASA contract.
Frontier can be used to harness the unused CPU power of desktops and servers, Armentrout notes.
“I believe they [NASA] have 80,000 desktops,” he says. “If they were to put Frontier on all 80,000 they would have one of the fastest supercomputers in the world.”
Although the system will initially run climate models, it can be used for many types of scientific research.
“If it’s successful, and that’s a big if, we could be buying our compute cycles over the network, as opposed to just having them in-house, or it could be a combination of the two,” Seablom says. “The important thing for the taxpayer is we think this will save money.”
