Quite a few interesting sessions today:

Google Knowledge Graph

With the Knowledge Graph, Google is trying to give a new dimension to its flagship product: Search.
Users should be able to have a conversation with search, and search should anticipate on a user’s interests by showing related topics.
So search needs to understand the context of searches, in other words: it needs to understand the world. This is where Knowledge Tree comes in handy.
Knowledge Tree is a hugh graph with semantic data about real world entities and their relations. This data has been gathered from Wikipedia, Google+ and many other sources.
The complete tree is viewable and downloadable at freebase.com.
 Read more

Today was the first day of the Google IO conference in San Francisco. I was lucky enough to be able to attend so I can share some (personal) highlights of the day.

In the keynote Google showed some of their latest developments:
It is now possible to upload a batch of pictures to your online storage and let Google decide which are the best ones to keep. For instance when you’ve been on holiday and have taken 600 pictures, too many to show to anybody, Google can propose a selection after doing some intelligent analysis:
It can filter pictures if they are dupicates or if they are unclear. But it also recognizes if pictures contain some of your (Google+) relations, which would make them more interesting. Even more cool: with the help of some machine learning and a lot of training, Google can now estimate if a picture is pretty or not.
Another cool feature: Google will recognize if you have multiple pictures of the same person in the same scene. Based on some intrapolation algorithm, it can generate new pictures in that scene. Some examples were shown and they were actually really good. Read more

As a software developer you’re using dependency management to handle dependencies on your project; include frameworks and libraries to your project. If you’re a Java developer you’re probably using Maven. When you’re not using Maven you’re probably using one of the more versatile build tools like Ant or Gradle, both can use Ivy for dependency management. Either way, you’re not putting binaries (jars) in your source control repository.

How about your FitNesse acceptance suite? Since it’s all software and all belongs to the project, you probably want to have the same standards when executing the acceptance test suite. It’s really not that different from executing your regular (unit) tests.

In this blog I’ll explain how to launch a FitNesse suite from Maven. I’ll also elaborate on how to get FitNesse to recognize the dependencies required to launch the application. A future post will be dedicated to the FitNesse/Ivy combo.

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We’re conducting a survey to take the pulse of the Application Release market. We will reveal the top challenges and key initiatives effecting you, your business and the Application Release market in a report to be published in early 2013. The report will offer a comprehensive view of what challenges your peers are facing, the latest trends in application development and key initiatives currently being planned.

This survey will take just five minutes of your time. All personal details will be kept anonymous. Participant will receive a copy of the finding and be entered to win 1 of 3 gift certificates valued at $100, $250 and $500! Take the survey now >

Xebia’s expertise with middleware and application deployment automation led to the wish to� explore new tools handling these area’s.
Along came VMware’s Application Director 1.0 beta and later GA, and together with VMware Netherlands we built a demo environment at Xebia.

The setup did not go real smooth, mainly because we had some infra setup troubles and the interfacing between software components did not work directly.

After all was working, I compared the vApp director 1.0 with Xebialabs’ DeployIt deployment tool.
Conclusion: vApp director 1.0 is nice, but more operations/infra oriented than developer oriented. With DeployIt, when parts of the deployment (say, only a war & datasource) is changed between deployments, only those steps are done in correct order. With vApp dir, you have to script this out, or deploy everything from scratch, which takes a long time. On the other hand, DeployIt cannot create VM’s by itself.
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A number of my colleagues and myself recently decided to share our knowledge regarding “performance” on this medium. You are now reading the first blog in a series in which I present a test-driven approach to ensuring proper performance when we deliver our project.

Test driven

First of all note that “test-driven” is (or should be common in the java coding world. It is, however, applied to the unit-test level only: one writes a unit test that shows a particular feature is not (properly) implemented yet. The test result is “red”. Then one writes the code that “fixes” the test, so now the test succeeds and shows “green”. Finally, one looks at the code and “refactors” the code to ensure aspects like maintainability and readability are met. This software development approach is known as “test driven development” and is sometimes also referred to as “red-green-refactor”. Read more

A number of my colleagues and myself recently decided to share our knowledge regarding “performance” on this medium. You are now reading the first blog in a series in which I present a test-driven approach to ensuring proper performance when we deliver our project.

Test driven

First of all note that “test-driven” is (or should be common in the java coding world. It is, however, applied to the unit-test level only: one writes a unit test that shows a particular feature is not (properly) implemented yet. The test result is “red”. Then one writes the code that “fixes” the test, so now the test succeeds and shows “green”. Finally, one looks at the code and “refactors” the code to ensure aspects like maintainability and readability are met. This software development approach is known as “test driven development” and is sometimes also referred to as “red-green-refactor”. Read more

Today I had an interesting error when powering on a virtual machine in VMware Workstation 9 on my Windows 7 host.
When powering on the virtual machine I got the message “The VMware Authorization Service is not running”.  Read more

Our approach to software development has changed in the last few years. IT professionals and software developers are working more closely together than ever before. The DevOps trend also extends to an acknowledgement that automation is a key factor in reducing costs and increasing release speeds.

Striving to be cost effective is a constant for any business but the increased focus on speed of deployment is a product of the growth of the Cloud and Agile development methodology. The bottom line is – the faster new features, fixes and improvements reach the customer, the greater their satisfaction. The same principle applies in an enterprise environment – the faster the latest version of an application reaches users, the more productive they can be.

Both environments require scalability. As your product offerings grow and branch out, the delivery method must be capable of handling the changes. In the enterprise environment a large portfolio of software applications is the norm and any deployment solution must be able to scale.

Automated app deployment can reduce costs, increase speed and scale as needed, but before we take a look at the solution let’s discuss the problem.

App Deployment Nightmares

There are a lot of potential problems in deploying applications manually. Not least of which is the time it can consume for developers and IT support. Configuration is the first challenge. Where is the application stored? Which version should be installed? Where should it be installed? Where is the configuration file and how is it applied?

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Last week at the Xebicon conference in the Netherlands we presented different setups of Product Owner teams, using 3 models. We talked about Product Owner teams, as in most cases the Product Owner role is not executed by just the Product Owner person. He (or she, of course) organizes help from others to fulfil this exacting role. Read more