Amazon finished private beta testing and has entered into public unlimited beta of its cloud database service named SimpleDB. SimpleDB is meant to be a simple to be accessed database in the cloud, and Amazon is offering limited access to it for free.

A number of weeks ago I asked readers to tell me what motivates them. The most original/inspiring contribution was awarded with $100 worth of software development books. Some of my colleagues acted as an independent jury, and Russell Ball, the author of the Caffeinated Coder blog, was selected as the winner, because of the great blog post he wrote on this subject. (And Russell's blatant attampts at unashamed begging did not even make a difference!)

Creating a Rails app with all the dependencies has never been so easy - rg, a template-based rails app generator has been just added to the core.

Two months after Java 6 update 10 was released, Sun has just released update 11. For many users the new version will automatically be detected and installed, but you can always get it from the Sun Java site.

Sun has now decided to cease funding for the SwingX project altogether, as announced via a post to SwingLabs' forum by Jeanette Winzenburg . This has angered many in the Swing development community where there is a growing view that the core Swing APIs are being relegated to a supporting GUI library for the newer JavaFX technology

I’ve seen many newcomers to Java language has been discussing this topic with themselves when they are given training in HTML and web design.For many of those folks, JavaScript is the another name for a nightmare. Few tips from my side for those people.

In order to modularize JDK 7 in the next year or so, and in order better to inform the work of JSR 294, Sun will shortly propose to create Project Jigsaw within the OpenJDK Community. This effort will, of necessity, create a simple, low-level module system whose design will be focused narrowly upon the goal of modularizing the JDK. This module system will be available for developers to use in their own code, and will be fully supported by Sun, but it will not be an official part of the Java SE 7 Platform Specification and might not be supported by other SE 7 implementations. If and when a future version of the Java SE Platform includes a specific module system then Sun will provide a means to migrate Jigsaw modules up to that standard. In the meantime we’ll actively seek ways in which to interoperate with other module systems, and in particular with OSGi.

When it comes to advanced design, finding the right stuff can be even harder. Advanced effects require a much more in-depth tutorial, and often writers aren’t willing to go into the detail needed.

Previously I’ve talked about reversing text with CSS by simply setting a few CSS attributes. Today we will try another trick: turning text upside down. It’s actually possible using a simple CSS property and works cross-browser today.

How to retrieve the value of key that is added using autoincrement value in MySQL.

Using JSF and Flex components together while binding Flex components to standard JSF managed beans. Fiji also offers out-of-the-box JSF-Flash charting components.

The idea of network attached shared memory makes me want to re-think the whole scheme of data persistence. I'm tired of blindly using a RDBMS when another option could be much better.

It’s hard to believe that nearly two months have already passed since opening the doors on the Username Availability Validator project. I made a few mistakes in how I ran the project, but I’m happy with the overall outcome. However, one thing that disappointed me throughout the entire contest was how slow CodePlex can be.

Just like any language, developers can write code in PHP that ranges in quality from truly awful to very good. In this article, learn good programming habits that can help you bridge the productivity gap. Building code that is easy to read, understand, and maintain will enable you to debug, fix, and extend your code with lower risk.

Microsoft is continuing to broaden the pool of Windows Vista Service Pack 2 (SP2) testers beyond the fairly small, select group who’ve been working with test builds for the past few months.

Over the next number of posts I am going to be exploring the world of design patterns. We’ll look at some of the most commonly used patterns and how they look in C#.

I installed the solution on my laptop where my test installation of ESME is running. I was able to register as a new user, receive a OpenID and use this OpenID within ESME in approx. 10 minutes.

JavaFX SDK 1.0 will be released tomorrow, December 4th, 2008, so while we're waiting I thought you might want to learn more about the history of JavaFX and the "contrarian mind" behind it. Al Riske wrote an excellent piece in Sun's "Contrarian Minds" series in which he interviewed Chris Oliver, delving into Chris' background and his role in founding JavaFX. By the way, Chris is the guy on the left in the picture above, presenting JavaFX with Dr. Gosling :-)

Spam on the Web is one of the biggest threats to a modern Web developer. The "bad guys" become more and more sophisticated every year in how to vandalize and proliferate ads over any Web 2.0 page they can grasp. This two-part installment provides a thorough guide to anti-spam techniques. This first article explains how to assess whether a visitor is a spammer and how to organize site workflow to discourage spam.

Method overloading (a feature of object-oriented programing which allows having several class methods with the same name but different signatures) is not implemented in PHP, which is a drawback compared to Java. However, PHP 5 provides a way to imitate overloading by catching calls to "inaccessible methods" with magic method __call.

Las3r is based on the Clojure source code, so they have a lot in common. For instance, the reader is almost a line-by-line port of the Clojure reader. So if you know the syntax of Clojure, you know the syntax of las3r. However, las3r should not be considered a port of Clojure.

Recently, Google has stepped up its presence in the cloud computing arena. Google's new App Engine (aka "AppSpot") lets you design and run web applications using Google's existing infrastructure. Their (free) basic account offers up to half a gigabyte of storage plus the computing power to push approximately 5 million page views per month. That's a nice starting point for anyone who might be looking into a web-based application environment.

Grails 1.1 beta 1 is out, and the release notes give a nice snapshot of some of the sweet new features coming.

In order to modularize JDK 7 in the next year or so, and in order better to inform the work of JSR 294, Sun will shortly propose to create Project Jigsaw within the OpenJDK Community.

The JCP has long come under fire for the insularity and high fees associated with its process. In this report from a QCon panel on open standards development, new executive committee member Rod Johnson explains why he decided to join the organization he once "likened to a commissar in Soviet Russia." Other panelists quoted include Bill Venners, Cay Horstmann, and Michael Van Riper.