Java darling Azul Systems is fluxed
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Life support or pushing the R&amp;D horizon? A number of notes concerning Azul Systems have reached our inbox - none of them bringing very inspiring news.â¦
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(InfoWorld) - Azul Systems Inc. is doubling the capacity of its "computing appliance," a device that uses multiple multicore processors and is a departure from the typical server-based approach to large scale computing. Azul Thursday is scheduled to launch two new models of its Vega 2 computing appliances that feature up to 16 chips with a total 768 cores for running Java software applications. Rather than add more servers with dual- or quad-core chips as computing needs grow, Azul describes its product as a pool of processing power that applications can dip into as needed. The company calls it "network-attached processing," because of its similarity to network-attached storage. Besides the Vega 2 7280, Azul is also launching the model 7240 with eight chips and a total 384 cores. This follows the December 2006 launch of the Vega 2 3210 with two chips and 96 cores and the 3220 with 4 chips and 192 cores. Network-attached processing is more energy-efficient than the multiple servers that would be needed to deliver the same performance, said Stephen DeWitt, CEO of the 5-year-old firm. He compares the concept to that of an electric utility. "Imagine, if you will, in New York City trying to power every light, toaster or refrigerator with a battery. It's incredibly inefficient. Instead, what everyone does is tap into a big [electrical] grid," De Witt said. In an Azul system, one server could be loaded with multiple Java applications and would connect to the appliance to do the processing. Azul is taking a contrarian approach to delivering processing power, said Cal Braunstein, CEO of the research firm Robert Frances Group. Azul processors act as attached processors to the server and only handle the Java code, Braunstein explained, which allows the server processors to perform more work by shifting the Java execution to the Azul appliance. Although Azul's approach shares similarities with IBM Corp. mainframe computers, there are also important differences. "Azul's model is unique," Braunstein said in an e-mail interview. "I am not aware of any other companies pursuing this particular model." But since Azul is new and small, big companies that could use it may be reluctant to buy technology they're not familiar with, he said. An Azul Vega 2 is running part of the network at Pegasus Solutions Inc., a company that provides the back-end technology for making hotel reservations through online travel sites, hotels and travel agencies. The Azul system easily handles the workload of nine servers, said Steve Lapekas, chief technology officer for Pegasus. "I can't get the box to sweat," Lapekas said. Pegasus limits its use of Azul to a portion of its data center, though he said it may expand its use elsewhere. DeWitt and the founders of Azul started the company after leaving Sun Microsystems Inc. The two companies are embroiled in a patent dispute dating back to March 2006 in which Sun accuses Azul executives of taking Sun's patented technology with them to start Azul. A lawsuit is still pending in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, DeWitt said. Â
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InfoWorld - Azul Systems Inc. is doubling the capacity of its &quot;computing appliance,&quot; a device that uses multiple multicore processors and is a departure from the typical server-based approach to large scale computing.
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Azul Systems said new Java servers, using Vega 2 processors, run three times faster than predecessors.
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Build a web application in minutes NetBeans and Ruby, part 2 Having limped along in the wake of Eclipse, Sun Microsystems' NetBeans is getting its second wind. One thing that's helping is a fresh focus on scripting, particularly around Ruby on Rails.â¦
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A new article on the ITJungle.com website asks if Zend's support of PHP on IBM's System i machines could be the "next RPG", replacing the current language as the language of choice.   For years, the System i platform and its followers have marched through the wilderness of development languages, seeking a suitable replacement for the aging RPG, whose benefits aren't a good fit for a Web world. Now, some platform advocates see the server-side scripting language PHP stepping into that role.   The bulk of the article is an interview between Alex Woodie (of ITJungle.com) and Duncan Kenzie, president of Excel Systems. They cover topics like:   Duncan's first perceptions of PHP why he decided it would be a good language to go with how it works in their WebSmart software differences between Java and PHP impacts the ease of the shift for RPG programmers to PHP
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Latest PEAR Releases:Console_CommandLine 0.1.0Services_Amazon 0.7.1Testing_Selenium 0.4.2HTML_Table 1.8.2Structures_DataGrid_Renderer_Pager 0.1.3Structures_DataGrid_Renderer_HTMLTable 0.1.4Structures_DataGrid_DataSource_MDB2 0.1.11Structures_DataGrid_DataSource_DBQuery 0.1.11Structures_DataGrid_DataSource_XML 0.2.0Structures_DataGrid_DataSource_DBTable 0.1.7Structures_DataGrid_DataSource_CSV 0.1.6Structures_DataGrid_DataSource_Array 0.1.3Structures_DataGrid 0.9.0Structures_DataGrid_Renderer_XUL 0.1.3Structures_DataGrid_Renderer_Smarty 0.1.4Structures_DataGrid_Renderer_HTMLSortForm 0.1.3Structures_DataGrid_DataSource_DataObject 0.2.1OLE 0.6.1PHP_CodeSniffer 1.0.0Console_CommandLine 0.1.1Structures_DataGrid_DataSource_PDO 0.1.0Net_FTP 1.4.0a1
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The JyAALib project is a Java/Jython implementation of the Asynchronous Action Framework based in Pure Object Oriented Concepts. The Massive Parallel Framework in Python Language - Full Compatible with Jython-JAVA.   New Beta version 1.9 is available for the PyAALib-JyAALib : The Massive Parallel Framework in Python Language - Full Compatible with Jython-JAVA
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As mentioned by the Zend Developer Zone, Ed Finkler has posted the latest version of his Inspekt security tool.   Although downloads have been on the Google Code site for a bit, I recently put up a new build of Inspekt. This could probably be described as a late alpha release, with most proposed features implemented.   Also included in this new edition are full API documentation for the application, some documentation on its basic usage and, of course, the source of this latest release.
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Aaron Wormus has a new note on his blog today about his presentation at this year's Zend/PHP Conference & Expo and another speaker he's excited to hear.    One of the Zend conference sessions that I'm pretty excited about is Don Samisa Abeysinghe's (of WSO2) "Fully Fletched Web Services with PHP".   I'll be presenting a session on "Moving to PHP5 with Style." This tutorial/case study will be based on experience in transitioning several codebases from PHP4 to PHP5, creating unit tests & started a move towards a service based architecture without a complete platform rewrite.    Aaron's talk fits under the banner of the "PHP Development" talks, including others on topics like hosting PHP applications on Windows, working with PDO, unicoding in PHP6, and using PHPUnit.
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Pierre-Alain Joye has three different posts to his blog about the releases of new versions (or new software) he's posted recently - a new release candidate for GD, the new Hidef extension in PECL, and a bug release for the zip extension.    The first post concerns the Zip extension release and which of the provided libraries you should use with your PHP installation (he recommends the latest PECL version over the included version). There's also a link to the new release - 1.8.6 The second post is an announcement about the publishing of the Hidef extension into the PECL library. It can be used to do a "one time declare" of constants in your application, working with a configuration file to only load them the first time the browser hits the site/application. Finally, in the newest of the posts, Pierre points out a brand new release candidate for GD 2.0.35 to two possible correct race conditions. You can download this new release here: tar.gz file, tar.bz2 file
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Travis Swicegood is teasing us with some output from a script in his latest blog post:   So my free time of late (what there is of it) has been spent on a project that's getting really close to v0.1 release. In other words, its first functional release. If you've ever run a test using the PEAR installer or know what a .phpt file looks like, you might be able to guess what I've been up.   Keep an eye on his blog for more information on his "secret project".
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Patrick Chanezon sayz :  "I got some pretty good feedback after my post Java Syndication Babel: let's paint the picture together!, mainly from the Rojo/Feedparser team."  ...  "Then the Rojo/Feedparser team, Brad Neuberg and Kevin Burton posted some good comments. I agree with Kevin that we don't necessarily need a JSR and should start collaborating now. From Kevin and Brad it seems like what we should work on first is defining a common set of Unit Tests, and a way to get a DOM-Rome-like API on top of their SAX-like API."  So check out the list  and the wiki .  Hopefully we'll be able to collaborate and make some forward progress.  I'm sure everyone will benefit.  The more I think about a ne ...
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Based off of a previous article from Mike Willbanks, Stuart Herbert has posted some of his own thoughts on tuning and tweaking your applications for the best performance you can get out of them.   There's some good advice in there, and I thought it'd be a good idea to quickly add a bit more detail about the separate approaches that Mike raises.   He goes over the APC caching, memcache, the "gzip trick", the "Not Modified" header and optimized SQL statements.   He also mentions one thing that Mike didn't mention - a split between static files (no PHP needed) and their dynamic cousins. Having a more pure Apache (no PHP installed) can help give a minute jump in speed that, depending on the size of the site, could really add up from a user's perspective.
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Alchemi is a software framework that allows you to painlessly aggregate the computing power of networked machines into a virtual supercomputer (computational grid) and to develop applications to run on enterprise grids.      We are pleased to announce the release of version 1.0.6. The major changes since 1.0.5 are a LUA (Least Privileged User Account) operation for both Manager, Executor in normal and service mode and an option for executing user's GThreads in a secure sandbox (experimental)  Please note that this is a developer release intended for enthusiasts and early adopters as documentation is not up to date.     Go here for downloading the files in this release:     http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=66729&package_id=186776&release_id=456163
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(InfoWorld) - Azul Systems Inc., a maker of appliances that enhance the performance of servers running Java software applications, is boosting the performance further with new models introduced Monday. The Vega 2 appliance features up to 768 processor cores, up from a maximum of 384 cores in the Vega 1 appliance introduced in 2005, Azul said. The appliances operate as a sort of a turbocharger for servers. Azul is launching the new product while continuing to defend itself in a patent infringement lawsuit against it by Sun Microsystems Inc. Azul calls its technology "network-attached processing" because, the way it functions, Java-based computer workload is diverted from a database to the Vega appliance for processing before being piped into the server for distribution to end users on the network. "It is able to run through the Java code and give you the responses in the work effort consistently and at a much faster rate than normal servers can do Java," said Cal Braunstein, an analyst with the information technology consulting firm Robert Frances Group Inc. The Azul appliance provides data center managers an order of magnitude increase in computer processing power compared to what's available with the typical array of servers, said Stephen DeWitt, president and chief executive officer of Azul. Data center processing needs to keep growing but for some, new server capacity comes online too slowly. "Right now it's 'Here's a thimbleful, here's a thimbleful, here's a thimbleful','' DeWitt said. "We give you a straw that is attached to an ocean." By offering as many as 768 processor cores, Azul's uses parallel processing rather than faster processors to move data, he said. It's like adding more lanes on the freeway instead of giving everyone a faster car. The 768-processor model, coupled with 768G bytes of memory, is at the high end of the Vega 2 line and will be shipped beginning in 2007, said Scott Sellers, chief operating officer and a cofounder of Azul. An entry-level Vega 2 with up to 192 processors and multiple memory configurations is available now in the Americas and Europe. Prices in the new series start at US$49,995. The maximum capacity Vega 1, introduced 18 months ago, featured 384-way processors and 256G bytes of memory, Sellers said. Azul has been engaged in a legal dispute with Sun Microsystems since last March when Azul sought an injunction in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California to block Sun from suing Azul for patent infringement. Sun filed a suit anyway in May, alleging patent infringement and abuse of trade secrets. Sun claims Azul is using Sun-patented "speculative locking" and transactional memory technology in Azul products, according to the lawsuit. It also says Azul hired 10 former Sun executives, including DeWitt, while they were still bound by a noncompete contract clause by Sun. Analyst Braunstein doesn't think the suit poses a real threat to Azul: "I don't think there's a smoking gun at the moment." Attorneys for Sun did not return calls seeking comment.ADVERTISEMENTNEW IT SERVICES FROM IBM: EASIER TO BUY AND IMPLEMENTDiscover a simpler, more cost-effective way to get the solutions your company needs to grow more flexible and efficient.
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Over on the Zend Developer Zone today, Akash Mehta has written up  a review of a book from Packt Publishing, "PHP Web 2.0 Mashups" (by Shu-Wai Chow):    As it's title suggests, PHP Web 2.0 Mashup Projects is a demonstration of the various techniques available for developing mashups in PHP. Through a highly practical format, Shu-Wai takes the reader through a series of projects utilising different web services and APIs, while carefully exposing the reader to a wide variety of technologies and data formats.   With careful selection and shaping of language, the book is an extremely effective introduction to the world of mashup development with PHP.    Akash talks about the contents of the book (the different projects it covers) and how the book provides a version useful resource to those just getting into the mashup world - a reference guide to some of the popular data transfer methods/formats out there.