Gradle - Build Automation

I have been working with Gradle build automation for sometime, and I am impressed by it's features.

It has advantages of Maven, Ant and new features of writing scripts you can immediately understand.

The scripts are simple to write, test and deploy.

The amount of momentum it has, I will not be surprised if Gradle replaces Maven.

There are also tools available that can convert Maven pom.xml to Gradle.

Here's the link:
https://www.gradle.org/


Happy build automation !!

Tejas

Social Collaboration Platform - eXo platform

Sourceforge has a source code project hosted for Social Collaboration which is JEE compliant and can be hosted on Tomcat. It boasts of a large number of features which are useful and very advanced including some very cool GUI look and feel.

The project is open source and available at
eXo Platform

Happy Surfing
Tejas Bavishi

Cloudyn

Cloudyn is a cloud cost analytics tool that gives ROI calculation on the amount of money you spend on public clouds like Amazon AWS and Google Cloud platform or openstack.

This means you get clear picture about your expenditure and forecast about amount of money you spend on these IaaS services.

Recently introduced, this tool will gain lot of attention as increasingly companies and CTOs / CIOs will want to control their costs on cloud and also work on the ROIs.

The product is available online at Cloudyn


Happy Surfing
Tejas Bavishi

GitHub or SVN

The GitHub project allows you to host the open source software (also private code) on the repository. Along with it comes issue tracker, standard security, effective communication across teams and developers.

Also, note that GitHub works with any SVN client tools as well. So no need to learn new tools for GitHub client.

More information here:
https://github.com/features

Tejas Bavishi

Marketing email campaigns

Marketing email campaigns require HTML formatting and images. To make it simple, this is a tool - http://mailchimp.com/

Good results using mailchimp

Tejas Bavishi

Computer Hardware - High Spec Computing

If you are looking specific version of hardware and software for a short duration, and you do not want to purchase hardware and software, you can buy the virtual instance on the Amazon EC2 cloud.

I regularly use the virtual instances and when done, switch it off. So pay only for the duration I use.

http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/


Tejas Bavishi

SPM - Performance Monitoring & Alerting

SPM is a performance Monitoring and Alerting tool. It is a rich visual tool and available for Solr, Hadoop, JVM and Redis, etc.

The tool is available as SaaS as well as on-premise, brilliantly done.

http://sematext.com/spm/

Tejas Bavishi

Docker container for OSS

This is a fantastic open source project. Docker container is a open source container for any x86 hardware and Linux kernel. It can be used to wrap Java apps, create and automate test environments, build private PaaS environments.It is build once and run anywhere including cloud environments, VMs, laptops, etc

Docker has a great eco system built around it.

Still to explore this new technology, but is very promising in the OSS space.

Thanks
Tejas Bavishi

GUI tier - Adobe Flex

I recently came across Adobe Flex as a easy way to create GUI interface for enterprise applications. From what I have seen, there have been several advanced GUI tier technologies. And now, for Java, there are good options evolving for Rich Internet Applications.

Some options are:
Vaadin
Adobe Flex
JSF
Sencha
And the list goes on...

Adobe Flex is easy to implement as a GUI and the accompanying Flash studio IDE makes it efficient for fast RIA development.

Also, the Flex app is automatically compatible on variety of Mobile Devices, Tablets, Web browsers and Desktops.

The documentation and video tutorials are free and very good. http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/videotraining.html#day1

Happy reading

Tejas Bavishi 

Good tutorials on Java EE and Hadoop

I found good source of tutorials on JEE and Hadoop here http://www.coreservlets.com/Apache-Tomcat-Tutorial/

Happy reading :)

Tejas Bavishi

Heroku integration with SalesForce.com

Heroku cloud has a new exciting feature - https://www.heroku.com/1

What this means is that the customer database on SalesForce.com can be directly accessed by apps deployed on Heroku. This is a very interesting feature to be released in 2014.

--Tejas Bavishi

eCommerce landscape 2014

The Gartner report provides an interesting landscape for eCommerce solutions. Here's the link - http://www.gartner.com/technology/reprints.do?id=1-1FKHRJ7&ct=130510&st=sb

It is interesting to note that following solutions are leading:
http://www.oracle.com/in/products/applications/commerce/atg/index.html
http://magento.com/
http://www.elasticpath.com/java-ecommerce


My personal favourite is ElasticPath, being the Java solution apart from ATG.

There are so many other vendors who provide eCommerce solutions which are not so complex as mentioned above.

For an aspiring developer, who wants `to develop frameworks on web based shops, there are good options to build skills on above mentioned eCommerce platforms.

Happy eCommerce!!

-Tejas Bavishi

Heroku - Cloud Computing infrastructure

Heroku provides cloud infrastructure like servers and database hardware. It also provides developers an easy way to develop applications and deploy it on cloud. The deployment and hosting the applications is just a few steps process which is well documented on their site - https://www.heroku.com/

The servers provide JEE application deployment and database is MySQL. Also, the servers are auto scaling by paying additional money for production applications.

This infrastructure is good and so development teams do not need to focus on IT and focus on the application development.

There are so many add-ons for this cloud, available at - https://addons.heroku.com/
The add-ons provide additional features like NoSQL databases, testing, search apps easier. Also, the development source code repository is integrated with Git.

Happy cloud computing!!

-Tejas Bavishi