Perl News Desk

Rackspace Offers Its First-Ever Showcase for Retailers

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 22:45:00 EST

Rackspace Hosting announced a new service to assist its e-commerce customers this holiday season. The Rackspace Holiday Shopping Mall, a promotional area hosted on NoMoreServers.com will offer discounts and coupons to encourage holiday shopping and highlight the benefits of using e-commerce. Rackspace counts more than 2,000 e-commerce stores among its customers. The Rackspace Holiday Shopping Mall is the first of its kind for Rackspace Hosting. The website will feature offers from retailers who are also Rackspace customers, like Coca-Cola, Levi Strauss, and ULTA as well as firms like Bonobos, TeeFury, and ChristmasLightsEtc. A complete list of offers is available at http://nomoreservers.com/mall.

Big Data Kills 30-Year-Old Market

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 14:20:00 EST

According to Aster Data, applications need to go to “Big Data,” not the other way around. And to do that the company’s got a massively parallel data-application server that can embed applications inside a massively scalable MPP data warehouse and analyze petabytes of data – or terabytes, if that’s all you’ve got – ultra-fast. Apps are automatically parallelized for scale; users can take their existing Java, C, C++, C#, .NET, Perl and Python applications, MapReduce-enable them and push them down into the data.

Rackspace Cloud APIs Open Sourced

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 14:30:00 EDT

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.

Arbor Networks' Peakflow SP 5.0 Integrates Fingerprint Sharing

Tue, 19 May 2009 08:30:00 EDT

Arbor Networks has announced the availability of version 5.0 of Arbor Peakflow SP, the industry's leading network-wide infrastructure security and traffic-monitoring platform. The new Peakflow SP 5500 device nearly doubles the performance and scalability of the previous version. Peakflow SP now includes ATLAS-enabled fingerprint creation, alerting and mitigation; deeper visibility into the performance and security of business critical applications; and enhanced reporting capabilities that allow service providers to analyze traffic to and from peers, by markets and by geography.

SYS-CON White Paper: Improving Software Development Success with ActivePerl

Fri, 02 Jan 2009 09:15:00 EST

It is easy to sympathize with software developers trying to build large, complex enterprise software solutions. At the start, a software development project is like a smooth sheet of ice: full of possibility. It’s a clean slate, free from architectural flaws, bugs, and broken code. But once the first line of code is written, complexities begin to layer one on top of the other. No matter what the end product, many of the same stumbling blocks come up time and again and get in the way of project success. Some classic pitfalls include time restraints, insufficient in-house resources, scope creep, and spiraling development costs. So how do software developers minimize these obstacles and improve their chances for better, faster, more cost-effective software development? In this paper, we present the open source Perl programming language as a solution for avoiding typical software development foibles.

An Introduction to Ant

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 12:15:00 EST

Writing shell scripts to automate the build and deploy process for ColdFusion applications is not very much fun. The Jakarta Ant project is an open-source, cross-platform alternative that makes it easy to automate the build and deploy process.

Certeon to Present at SYS-CON's Virtualization Conference & Expo, November 19-21, San Jose, CA

Wed, 12 Nov 2008 22:00:00 EST

Virtualization carries the promises of flexibility, lower costs, ease of deployment and simplified server management. However, when condensing the physical resources of your enterprise, are you considering how to make applications easily accessible to the growing number of remote users within your enterprise?

Appcelerator Named "Platinum Sponsor" of AJAX World RIA Conference, October 20-22, in San Jose, California

Fri, 17 Oct 2008 08:00:00 EDT

SYS-CON Events announced today that the leading global rich Internet technology provider Appcelerator named "Platinum Sponsor" of SYS-CON's upcoming AJAX World Conference & Expo 2008 West, which will take place October 20-22, 2008, at the Fairmont Hotel in the heart of Silicon Valley, in San Jose, California. Appcelerator, Inc. is an open source software company specializing in products and services for rapid rich Internet application (RIA) and SOA-based services development. The Appcelerator Platform SDKs enable developers to develop rich Ajax and DHTML applications using cross-browser widgets, a unique Web Expression Language and other open standards-based languages like HTML and CSS - without the use of Javascript. Appcelerator supports most languages, including Java, Ruby, PHP, .NET, Python and Perl.

IBM's Got Its Head in the Clouds

Mon, 29 Sep 2008 20:00:00 EDT

Reminding people of how its backing was the making of Linux, IBM, to no one's surprise, has thrown its support behind cloud computing, that delicious nexus of every chi-chi buzzword technology currently in vogue: Web 2.0, rich Internet applications, software-as-a-service, SOA, grid computing, Web Services, virtualization and utility computing. IBM calls its initiative Blue Cloud - like it could have another name - and claims it's a 'game-changing model for Internet-scale computing,' providing customer with just the right size computer power while at one and the same time being 'green' as well as 'self-healing and self-managing' based on open standards and Linux. Lordy, if this thing was a cute guy with money, it would be every mother's dream.

Red Hat Pits Itself Against VMware

Thu, 11 Sep 2008 23:00:00 EDT

Watching VMware stock and its market cap spike since it IPO'd must have had Red Hat positively pea green with envyWatching VMware stock and its market cap spike since it IPO'd must have had Red Hat positively pea green with envy - so green in fact that it's gonna try taking VMware on by pushing the Xen virtualization integrated in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Red Hat's new goal is to underpin 50% of the world's servers by 2015. And since virtualization is projected to take over the world by then that's a lot of Xen virtualization - and there's no extra cost in it like there is with VMware since it's bundled with RHEL. (Red Hat's telling people they'll save $20,000-$30,000 a server.) Red Hat claims it's got its first 18,000 virtualized servers - although it's a little fuzzy about whether those 18,000 are actually in production - anyway, it's confident they'll get there eventually after all the testing and evaluating is done.

SYS-CON's Virtualization Conference & Expo: Themes & Topics

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 20:30:00 EDT

From Application Virtualization to Xen, a round-up of the virtualization themes & topics being discussed in NYC June 23-24, 2008 by the world-class speaker faculty at the 3rd International Virtualization Conference & Expo being held by SYS-CON Events in The Roosevelt Hotel, in midtown Manhattan.

Red Hat Named "Platinum Sponsor" of Virtualization Conference & Expo

Thu, 29 May 2008 14:30:00 EDT

Red Hat is a trusted open source provider. Red Hat offers enterprise customers a long-term plan for building infrastructures on the quality and innovation of open source. Combining open source operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, together with applications, management, and Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) solutions, including the JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite.

Engelbart's Usability Dilemma: Efficiency vs Ease-of-Use

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 09:15:00 EDT

The mouse was the original idea of Doug Engelbart who was the head of the Augmentation Research Center (ARC) at Stanford Research Institute. Engelbart's philosophy is best embodied, in my opinion, in the design of another device that he invented, the five-finger keyboard - with keys like a piano, used by one hand. The problem was, Engelbart's five-finger keyboard and mouse combination was very difficult to learn.

EC Threats Pry Microsoft Clam Open

Thu, 21 Feb 2008 22:00:00 EST

Microsoft today attempted to exorcize the interoperability bogeymen that have haunted it since it was first discovered to be using secret APIs 20 years ago, bogeymen that now quote European antitrust law at it and carry writs from the Court of First Instance in Luxembourg. To avoid further confrontation with the European Commission, which opened a broad investigation of Microsoft's interoperability last month, the company said it would voluntarily open up all the APIs and communications protocols in its biggest revenue producers now and forever. To be clear, it said that these are the APIs and protocols 'used by other Microsoft products.'

ActiveState Announces Release of Faster, Smarter and More Powerful ActiveTcl 8.5

Fri, 21 Dec 2007 09:00:00 EST

ActiveState announced the release of ActiveTcl 8.5, in conjunction with the official release by the Tcl Core Team of version 8.5.0 of the Tcl dynamic language and the Tk GUI toolkit. Over four years in development, this release is a major advance over earlier versions.

ActiveState Celebrates 20th Anniversary of Perl with Release of ActivePerl 5.10.0 Build 1001

Fri, 21 Dec 2007 09:00:00 EST

ActiveState announced the release of ActivePerl 5.10.0 Build 1001, the complete, ready-to-install Perl distribution for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Solaris, and AIX. Today also marks the 20th Anniversary of Perl, introduced on December 18, 1987, by Larry Wall. Millions of developers worldwide rely on ActivePerl. Complete and ready-to-install, the free ActivePerl distribution includes core Perl, popular modules, the Perl Package Manager (PPM), and complete documentation. The ActivePerl 5.10.0 Build 1001 is available now.

Opera Reopens Browser War; Charges Microsoft with Antitrust

Mon, 17 Dec 2007 09:30:00 EST

Norwegian browser maker Opera Software ASA has complained to the European Commission that Microsoft is abusing its dominant position by tying its Internet Explorer browser to the Windows operating system and hindering interoperability by not following accepted Web standards. It wants IE unbundled or Windows to preinstall competitive browsers on the desktop. And - and this seems extraordinary even for Europeans - it wants the EC to compel Microsoft to support open web standards 'accepted by the web-authoring communities.'

The Top 250 Players in the Cloud Computing Ecosystem

Wed, 12 Dec 2007 14:45:00 EST

A robust ecosystem of solutions providers is emerging around cloud computing. Here, SYS-CON's Cloud Computing Journal expands its list of most active players in the fast-emerging Cloud Ecosystem, from the 'mere' 100 we identified back in January of this year, to 250 - testimony, if any further were needed, to the fierce and continuing growth of the "Elastic IT" paradigm throughout the world of enterprise computing.

Sauers Technologies Releases Public Beta of BundleWorks Application Management Tool

Wed, 05 Dec 2007 13:30:00 EST

For building applications, BundleWorks includes ant tasks and command line tools to allow developers to build standard bundles for both custom and third-party applications. For testing, BundleWorks allows a developer to create and manage multiple environments to test multiple versions of applications. For deployment, BundleWorks supports local and remote deployment and provides a library of functions to handle common deployment tasks. For maintentance, BundleWorks tracks all bundle actions and configuration changes providing a complete history of activity.

Dojo Hits 1.0

Fri, 09 Nov 2007 14:45:00 EST

The three-year-old Dojo Foundation has put out version 1.0 of Dojo, an open source JavaScript toolkit for AJAX development meant for building rich Web 2.0 applications without proprietary plug-ins or single-vendor solutions. The widgetry makes use of Google Gears, Google's solution for making applications work both on- and offline. What Dojo calls Dojo Offline is based on it. The toolkit is all of 25K in size and supports progressive enhancement and animations and is supposed to open the door to a wealth of high-quality widgets and extension modules. Dojo also supports the Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer and Opera browsers and the OpenAjax Alliance Hub 1.0 to guarantee interoperability with other toolkits IBM, Sun, BEA and AOL are Dojo backers.

Egenera Signs First Virtualization 2.0 Partner

Fri, 09 Nov 2007 12:30:00 EST

Egenera, which claims it's the archetype Virtualization 2.0 company to VMware's Virtualization 1.0 - and is going put its PAN Manager software on other people's hardware to prove it - has convinced Fujitsu Siemens, which OEMs Egenera's BladeFrame servers, to put PAN on its own industry-standard Primergy servers. It's Egenera's first PAN partnership since the American company said last week that it was setting up a software line of business around PAN and would move the software out through fellow OEMs. Fujitsu Siemens says the widgetry will form part of its FlexFrame Infrastructure, its latest milestone in its Dynamic Data Center strategy of creating business-responsive IT using the latest virtualization and automation technologies.