Product Reviews

WebSphere CloudBurst in Test Organizations

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 07:15:00 EDT

The WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance can bring speed and agility to test organizations by drastically increasing the pace and ease with which users interact with WebSphere Application Server environments. I recently got a chance to catch up with IBM's Robbie Minshall. Robbie is a WebSphere Test Architect, and he is responsible for a team of testers that harness a lab of over 2,000 physical machines to put our WebSphere Application Server product through some pretty rigorous testing. Toward the beginning of 2009 Robbie’s team started to leverage the WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance in order to create the WebSphere Application Server environments needed for their testing.

Reporting Solutions Using Crystal Reports for Eclipse

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 13:15:00 EDT

SAP (Business Objects) has recently released Crystal Reports for Eclipse version 2.0 to provide reporting solutions for Java-based applications. This is available as free to use (within an organization) and has the advantage that it is built on the most tested and reliable component (Java Reporting Component in Crystal Reports) that has been in market for quite a few years now. This article discusses the features of CR4Ev2.0, usability of its designer and API, and starting off with an overview of Crystal Reports product architecture.

Cloud BI & Amazon VPC

Sat, 12 Sep 2009 15:15:00 EDT

Today RightScale did a webinar on their Cloud Business Intelligence offering with Talend, Jaspersoft and Vertica. One of the bigger objections to cloud BI in the past has been security — how can I move all of this mission critical data to a public insecure cloud? With Amazon VPC now in the picture, the BI datasets are now as secure at Amazon as they are in your data center. Why wouldn’t you use the cloud for your BI needs?

Eclipse Europa 3.3.2 Integration with SCM Tools

Thu, 20 Aug 2009 13:30:00 EDT

Presently, I am the administrator of SCM AllFusion Harvest. SCM AllFusion Harvest is a process-based Software Configuration Management (SCM) tool for managing application source code. I manage 121 applications housed in SCM AllFusion Harvest and support 185 users using the product. The development tools we currently use are PowerBuilder PBV8, PBV11; Visual Studio 2003, 2005, 2008; and Java.

Open Source Selenium Web Application Testing System

Fri, 07 Aug 2009 16:15:00 EDT

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 executed by the testing tool with the transactions that are executed on the server side. Your logging framework or diagnostics solution can then take this tag and link the transaction to the originating web request. Tagging Web Requests with Selenium

Social Networking Tip For Programmers – and Everyone Else

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 18:15:00 EDT

Set aside one hour daily for active marketing: Software developers love to spend days and nights coding great stuff. Focusing on marketing, sales and customer activities is not quite as exciting. Put some discipline in place. A good starting point is to devote one hour per day of your time to work exclusively on marketing. [...]

Zend Studio for Eclipse

Thu, 29 Nov 2007 22:00:00 EST

In my many years of programming, almost 20 years now, I have used countless integrated development environments (IDEs). I have used everything from a simple text editor all the way up to the high-end IDEs that Sybase, IBM, and Oracle use. More recently I have come to embrace the open source movement and development in Web environments. My programming language of choice for these days is PHP, so it stands to reason that I would be looking for an IDE. Like so many other developers I followed the path of looking for the pinnacle of IDEs for PHP. I started with basic text editors, moved into text editors with code colorizations, and then into project-based development environments, and finally to a fully robust IDE. The one that I've been using for a few years now is Zend's Studio Professional.

Product Review: Zend Studio for Eclipse

Tue, 16 Oct 2007 16:30:00 EDT

Zend has decided, and I think this is a great idea, to join in with the Eclipse community that was founded in large part by IBM a number of years ago. The values that can be added by joining with the Eclipse community are many and varied. Since Eclipse was primarily established as a Java development environment it has certainly grown in leaps and bounds by way of add-on libraries just to name one popular area.

Dokuwiki - A Practical Open Source Knowledge Base Solution

Tue, 09 Jan 2007 03:30:00 EST

Whether you're a company of one or 100, managing knowledge is a core concern and implementing a knowledge base is a sensible way to capture your content. Dokuwiki is a practical open source Web application for creating a knowledge base that's easy for novice Webmasters to set up but flexible and full-featured.