Stories by: Rick Grehan

When you consider the cloud, you typically imagine a realm of deployed, production applications. Zend Developer Cloud (ZDC) adds a twist: ZDC creates a place in the cloud where PHP-based applications can be developed for the cloud. No more developing locally, then deploying into the cloud -- ZDC pushes both into the ether.

Amazon's Relational Database Service (RDS) creates a MySQL database server in the cloud. 

Signifying a formless haze of computing power and storage that is somewhere "out there," computerdom's current buzzword is as difficult to get one's arms around as a real cloud. A seemingly limitless pool of processors and memory and disk space, and you just scoop out what you need. Sounds great, doesn't it?

Connecting your application into the Amazon Web Services (AWS) isn't complicated, particularly if you've done Web service programming on other projects.

Amazon's Web Services (AWS) are based on a simple concept: Amazon has built a globe-spanning hardware and software infrastructure that supports the company's Internet business, so why not modularize components of that infrastructure and rent them? It is akin to a large construction company in the business of building interstate highways hiring out its equipment and expertise for jobs such as putting in a side road, paving a supermarket parking lot, repairing a culvert, or just digging a backyard swimming pool.

In the beginning, Mainsoft released Visual MainWin for Java EE, which compiled .Net CIL (Common Intermediate Language) code into Java bytecode. As technically fascinating as that was, on its own it provided limited traction. Much of Microsoft's attractiveness to the enterprise goes beyond its .Net languages and runtime frameworks. It is Microsoft's enterprise applications such as SharePoint and SQL Server that -- for many enterprise programmers -- make the .Net environment worth using. A tool that simply moves .Net code into Java moves that code out of reach of Microsoft's enterprise applications.

If you believe the documentation, the white papers, and the news releases, iTKO's recently released LISA 4 is an SOA testing tool. That descriptor, however, is modesty riding on the back of the still trendy acronym "SOA" because LISA goes well beyond testing what are typically understood to be SOA components: Under one roof, it houses the abilities to test Web and Java applications, the ESB (enterprise service bus), JMS (Java Message Service) systems, EJBs, databases, combinations of the above, and -- oh yes -- Web services.

Android is Google's foray into the handheld OS realm. It follows a path trodden by -- among others -- Symbian's Quartz, the SavaJe operating system, and J2ME. In fact, one of Android's stated goals is to overcome some of J2ME's shortcomings. Whether or not Android succeeds, either at that specific goal, or in general, remains to be seen.

A typical PDA’s limited memory, storage, and computing power might tempt one to conclude that such devices can’t accommodate databases beyond elementary phone and to-do lists.

JBoss 4.0 is remarkable in a number of ways. Not only is it an open source, platform-independent, full J2EE application server but its installation (on Windows 2000, the OS I tested it on) is ridiculously simple.