I was working at Rational Software when IBM bought it almost 10 years ago. After the acquisition, we got emails and trainings encouraging us to file patent disclosures. As you may have known, IBM has been the top patent holder in the USA, maybe worldwide as well. At that time, I coined the term “non-patentable software architecture.”
Pattern system was invented to protect and encourage innovations. There are three criteria for a valid pattern: novelty, usefulness, and non-obviousness. Those are all in relative terms. As I can tell, there is rarely anything Read more... (444 words, estimated 1:47 mins reading time)
Google Web Toolkit is an interesting project. It’s basically an AJAX toolkit but presents itself as a Java toolkit. The idea is that you still write Java code as you would with Java AWT, SWING, and the GWT converts it to JavaScript code for you.
But why don’t write JavaScript code directly? Well, you may know Java better than JavaScript. More importantly, Java is a typed language and easier to develop a large system than JavaScript.
Using GWT for Java developers is mostly Read more... (436 words, estimated 1:45 mins reading time)
If you have a mobile phone and travel to other areas or countries, you can still use it to make and receive a call. Your phone number does not change. This is called roaming in the wireless telecommunications.
In the cloud environment, your virtual machine can “travel” around as well, maybe from one datacenter to another, from your enterprise to one of your service providers or the other way around, or from one service provider to another.
It’s relatively easy for a virtual machine Read more... (583 words, estimated 2:20 mins reading time)
Chargeback is an important feature for computing infrastructures. Even inside an enterprise where IT users are not charged with real money, it’s still nice to see the usage patterns and sometimes avoid wasting resources. As I mentioned in IBM RC2, applying chargeback reduced unnecessary usage overnight.
VMware vCenter Chargeback is a component for this purpose. It can run standalone with Web GUI, and surface to vSphere Client as a plug-in. Although its name includes vCenter, it can also work with vCloud Director (see Using vCenter Chargeback with VMware Cloud Director).
I just spent some time over the weekend reading the API documentation, including vCenter Chargeback API Programming Guide, API Reference. The version 1.5 of the API Read more... (550 words, estimated 2:12 mins reading time)
Communication is always important in any teamwork environment. This is especially true in software development where changes are constant. There are two levels of possible communications in software development: soft communication and hard communication. Let’s go over them one by one.
Soft Communication
It happens among people, those who work on a software project. Two popular forms of soft communication are Read more... (377 words, estimated 1:30 mins reading time)
VMware ESX and ESXi (a.k.a. vSphere Hypervisor) support the most guest operating systems among all the hypervisors. From the vSphere API, you can determine what operating system is installed on a virtual machine.
The related managed object is the VirtualMachine and there are multiple ways to Read more... (841 words, estimated 3:22 mins reading time)
If you are a software engineer, you may move from project to project over the time. How to quickly ramp up with a new project is always a challenge. The term “new” I use here does not mean that the project is new and you need to start from scratch, but that the project is new to you.
Although we all like to start from scratch, the reality is that 80% of engineers are actually doing maintenance works on existing projects: fixing bugs, adding new features, etc.
When you move to a new project, you have to Read more... (603 words, estimated 2:25 mins reading time)
If you develop FLEX with Java backend, you most likely know BlazeDS already. It’s a web application running with Tomcat that exposes Java objects on the server side as services to the Flex Client written in ActionScript. It combines the best of Flex on the client side and Java on the server side. As a result, it becomes one of the most popular architectural styles for web development these days.
It’s less known that you can also develop Java code on the client that consumes the services on the server side. Check out this wiki page by Adobe on the original design. The implementation of Java AMF Client is added to BlazeDS as of July 2008.
Because I had to hack Read more... (1080 words, estimated 4:19 mins reading time)
Many folks talk about developer enablement today because it’s a key success factor for a platform company. If you haven’t watched this video by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, you want to check it out. Also, my previous blog: CO2: The Formula For A Successful Developer Ecosystem.
To empower developers, we got to figure out who the developers are and what they want. It’s hard, if ever possible, to identify every developer in VMware community. But it’s normally easy to find out the types of the developers. In my observation, there are two types of developers (The title of this article is not that accurate, but Read more... (387 words, estimated 1:33 mins reading time)
After working on this for weeks, I am pleased to announce the first release of VMware vSphere API and SDK Frequently Asked Questions. It includes 70+ questions and trustable answers in 6 different categories: General, Getting Started, Language Bindings, VI Java API, API Usage, Troubleshooting.
From now on, before posting any question to any forum please read this FAQ page. For the best readability, I decided not to allow comments on that page. But your feedbacks and suggestions are always important. Please feel free to use this post for comments and discussions. Based on your inputs, I will continue to enhance the FAQs.
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