While checking out the search engine terms to my blog, I found an interesting one there: “why so many programming languages?” A great question indeed. If you take a look at the Wikipedia page on programming languages, you will be surprised by the number of programming languages today. To give you a hint, the languages are categorized into different sections by their first letters. When I browsed the page, I found most of them were new to me and will definitely remain so in the future. 
Read more... (592 words, estimated 2:22 mins reading time)
This week I spent some time deploying a Web application I developed using Microsoft Visual Web Developer 2010 Express (it’s free). For that, I installed Microsoft Internet Information Service (IIS) on my Windows 7 enterprise edition. This turned out pretty straight-forward: Control Panel – Programs – Turn Windows Features on or off. In the Windows Features dialog box, just locate the Internet Information Service and check on it. After a click on the OK button, the IIS (version/build is IIS 7.5.7600.16385) was installed. Read more... (316 words, estimated 1:16 mins reading time)
After installing the UCS emulator, I started to read and try UCS management APIs. I found the following two documents very helpful: Cisco UCS Manager API Management Information Model, and Cisco UCS Manager XML API Programmer’s Guide.
Key Concepts
The key concepts of the APIs are pretty similar to VMware vSphere API. For example, it has managed objects which represent UCS resources like chassis, blades, fabric interconnects, etc. They contain administrative states and operational state. Read more... (720 words, 1 image, estimated 2:53 mins reading time)
This month Eclipse turns 10 years old. Ten years ago, IBM donated the initial Eclipse Java IDE, which was then estimated $40M, to Eclipse Foundation. It has since grown to 273 open source projects and $800M portfolio today. Quite an achievement by any standard!
This news release summarizes some of the key accomplishments: Read more... (551 words, estimated 2:12 mins reading time)
My former colleague Emad Benjamin at VMware has just published a new book on running Java on vSphere. When I was still there, I had the opportunity to review the Chapter 5 of his book.
As many of you know, Emad is a well-known expert on this subject who has spoken at various events like VMworld and helped numerous customers. You can buy his book at Amazon or from publisher directly. Remember to bring it to next year’s VMworld for his autograph.:-) Read more... (435 words, estimated 1:44 mins reading time)
I think it’s going to be the longest single post I have ever done because we have quite a few openings in our VCE team. We are building our software capability for what I called turnkey software stack for cloud computing on Vblock.
The following are just three openings we want to fill immediately: Sr. GUI Engineer, Sr. Build/Automation Engineer, and Sr. Software Development Manager (update: Principal Solutions Engineer). We also have more software engineer and QA positions whose descriptions are not listed here. If you are interested in any position, please feel free to email me (firstname.lastname@vce.com). Read more... (2352 words, estimated 9:24 mins reading time)
Because my new team at VCE uses Maven, I just picked it up again. Last time I used it was when I helped to port the CloudTools to vSphere for the CloudFoundry demo for VMworld 2009 keynotes. Because the project founder Chris Richardson had chosen Maven, I just followed his footsteps forward. After that, I didn’t use Maven. Read more... (573 words, estimated 2:18 mins reading time)
Like many other industries, IT industry has all sort of best practices, from how to use a product to how to design software. I have personally contributed top 10 best practices on how to use VMware vSphere APIs (part 1, part 2).
Given the complexity of IT systems, it makes sense to capture the expert knowledge in the format of best practices. I think there are just too many of them and not all of them are of high qualities, thus I have a mixed feeling about best practices these days. Read more... (509 words, estimated 2:02 mins reading time)
As a developer, I’m always interested in latest development of middleware platforms. Yesterday came a big news from VMware: the vFabric 5 Cloud Application Platform reached GA. For those who might not be familiar with vFabric, it is an integrated suite of middleware for deploying and managing applications.
Note that despite the version number, this is the first release of the vFabric platform. I guess the version 5 may be just for aligning with vSphere 5. Also, this is a suite of products that have been there for a while. Read more... (272 words, estimated 1:05 mins reading time)
There are many programming languages today, sometimes too many to choose from for a new project. The good thing is that there aren’t many main stream programming languages, so picking one is not a daunting task. And almost all main stream languages can achieve similar things, meaning any one of them will work. So in the end it’s really a matter of team preference and sometimes company policy. Read more... (329 words, estimated 1:19 mins reading time)
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