SYS-CON Events announced today that the 8th International Cloud Expo will take place June 6-9, 2011, in New York City. The International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo series is the world's leading Cloud-focused event and is held three times a year, in New York, Silicon Valley and in Europe. Over 600 corporate sponsors and 10,000 industry professionals have participated in Cloud Computing Expo since its inception, more than all other Cloud-related events put together. Cloud Computing Expo 2011 East Call for Papers Deadline November 30, 2010 - SUBMIT YOUR SPEAKING PROPOSAL TODAY! The four-day event will offer a rich array of sessions led by exceptional speakers about the business and technical value of cloud computing with more than 150 sponsors and exhibitors and over 5,000 estimated delegates from well over 48 different countries. Explore Cloud Expo Sponsorship &... (more)

Open Letter to the President of Syria Bashar al-Assad

Thursday, July 29, 2010 Woodcliff Lake, New Jersey   To the President of Syria, Mr. and Mrs. Bashar al-Assad Mr. and Mrs. President Bashar al-Assad: At the tender age of 17 months my severely ill daughter Sofia, an American citizen, was abducted by her mother on Monday, July 26, in Istanbul, Turkey, and taken to Syria. Fox News: ▸ video ▸ story I was informed yesterday by Sofia's mother that she will not be coming back to the United States nor will she allow Sofia to return home. Sofia has been diagnosed with a severe medical condition that requires immediate treatment in the United States. It was scheduled to start on July 27, 2010, in New Jersey, the day after her abduction and was supposed to last until she reaches the age of 3. Any delay in the urgently needed treatment will result in a life-long disability for Sofia and make her dependent for the whole of her a... (more)

Where Are RIA Technologies Headed in 2008?

I am always being told off by i-technologists for quoting Picasso as having said that computers are useless. But I still love his reasoning? "Because they can only give you answers." Picasso, like AJAXWorld Magazine, liked questions. So we thought we would share with you what some of the world's leading rich Internet application pioneers are thinking may be the next questions that we need to see answered. From that readers can themselves infer where AJAX is headed. What are the top questions to ask next about AJAX? Eric Miraglia of Yahoo! 1.  (From March'08) How do I calculate the ROI of building my RIA on the iPhone SDK vs using AJAX? 2.  How do I assess the performance of my app and decide what to do next to make it faster?  3.  When it comes to accessibility, how do I know what's required of me for my rich web apps?  Beyond what's required, what makes good business se... (more)

Cloud Expo, Inc. Announces Cloud Expo 2011 New York Venue

Click Here to Save $800 at Cloud Expo New York ! Cloud Expo, Inc. announced on Thursday that Cloud Expo 2011 New York, the 8th International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo, will take place June 6-9, 2011, at the Javits Center in New York City. Cloud Expo - International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo series is the world’s leading Cloud-focused event and is held in New York, Silicon Valley, Prague, Tokyo, and Hong-Kong. Over 900 corporate sponsors and more than 65,000 industry professionals have participated in Cloud Expo since its inception, tenfold more than all other Cloud-related events put together. Click Here to Save $800 at Cloud Expo New York ! "Cloud Expo was announced on February 24, 2007, the day the term ‘cloud computing' was coined," said Fuat Kircaali, Chairman and Founder of Cloud Expo, Inc. "Cloud has become synonymous with ‘computing' and ‘soft... (more)

How to Prevent Flex Numeric Nulls From Turning to Zeros in BlazeDS

I’d like to use this opportunity and invite Flex developers living in Europe to attend our Advanced Flex Master Class in Brussels, Belgium on March 1 and 2, 2010. This question we get on almost every new client project: “We’re struggling with handling of null values for numeric data types in Flex/Java projects. Every time there’s an update, we end up replacing the original nulls with zeros when the user didn’t actually change that value.  Have you guys come up with a silver bullet for handling numeric nulls?” Consider a Java method with a Double parameter. You pass uninitialized ActionScript Number, that is, Number.NaN. What will BlazeDS deserialize (unmarshal)? Double.NaN. At this point your Java code may use something like (value==Double.NaN)?null:value, capitalizing on the fact that information about special value of NaN had been delivered from your client code t... (more)

Cloud People: A Who's Who of Cloud Computing

Behind every cloud service or cloud-based solution, there are real people... A robust ecosystem of solutions providers has emerged around cloud computing. But who are the CEOs & CTOs behind those providers, who are the internal and external entrepreneurs driving companies involved in the Cloud, who are the leading engineers, developers, analysts, researchers, marketing professionals, authors...who, in short, are the people behind the cloud? This list will be updated weekly between now and November 4-7, 2013, when 13th Cloud Expo | Cloud Expo Silicon Valley opens its doors in the Santa Clara Convention Center, in the heart of California's Silicon Valley. Here are some highly prominent "Cloud People" to kick off with... RANDY BIAS | @randybias "Randy Bias is visionary. He sees things others don't." [Emphasis added.] That is how Mårten Mickos puts it, as succinctly as ever.... (more)

AJAX World RIA Conference & Expo Kicks Off in New York City

In the tight economy, front-end engineers and front-end engineering can play a conspicuous role: good user experience, as the iPhone spectacularly demonstrates, means good business. At the 7th International AJAXWorld RIA Conference & Expo which opened Monday in New York City, the speaker lineup is as usual dripping with real-world expertise. The distinguished Speaker Faculty is headlined by Oracle's Ashish Mohindroo, whose Opening Keynote on "Breaking the Collaboration Barrier with Rich Enterprise Applications" set the tone for two intense days of breakout sessions across three parallel tracks. According to Mohindroo and Oracle, Rich Enterprise Applications (REAs) promise breakthrough capabilities and services for achieving higher levels of personal and team productivity throughout your enterprise. "Consumer web and mobile technologies are setting high standards for wha... (more)

Introducing UltraDev by Macromedia, Inc.

Drag-and-drop Web development - it's not a new concept, really. It dates back a few years to the first releases of NetObject's Fusion and Microsoft's FrontPage. It enables developers and designers (and administrative assistants, janitors, and just about anyone else) to drag and drop their way to Web page content quickly and easily - no real Web coding experience necessary. Macromedia's latest development in this arena is Dreamweaver UltraDev. The product is built on the standard Dreamweaver product (the company's GUI Web development tool). UltraDev raises the bar for GUI Web tools by letting coders view live data while they work. This feature significantly reduces the development process. Here's why. One of the pains of Web dev is the somewhat cumbersome page creation process. It goes like this: Write code or drag and drop content. Save the changes. Call the scrip... (more)

Collaborative Filtering

Collaborative filtering on the Web has existed for a long time, dating all the way back to the original incarnations of sites like CDNow and Amazon.com. Recommendation systems are a powerful tool for businesses to extract additional value from their e-commerce and customer databases. They benefit customers by enabling them to find products they like, and help businesses by generating more sales. We're going to look at some of the basic principles of predictive systems and introduce some methods you can utilize to make recommendations in your own applications. Along the way, we'll attempt to point out the benefits and limitations of each type of system. Basic Predictions At the most basic level, predictive information can be provided manually for your items. This can be built into the back-end administration of the site. When adding products to an e-commerce site, yo... (more)

Playing With(in) the Rules

In a book entitled Finite and Infinite Games in 1986, James P. Carse wrote "Finite players play within the rules, infinite players play with the rules." We play finite games every day, from checkers and chess to Yatzee and Monopoly. Finite games have a familiar pattern: a beginning, a middle, and an end; a winner and a loser. A finite game is easy to play because it has a limited set of fixed parameters. Carse also wrote "Finite players play to win, infinite players play to keep playing." Custom software development is not a finite game, and the clients who purchase it are not finite players. The objective of a workflow application is not to win an office betting pool, or even to design and complete a superior workflow application. The objective of a workflow application is to continue to distribute an ever-changing flow of work. Yet as custom software developers w... (more)

CFDJ Feature — MAX 2006: "I Can't Wait To Get Started"

I can't wait to get started." The sentiment struck me pretty hard as I struggled to get some sleep on a packed red-eye flight leaving Las Vegas at 11 o'clock at night. I had visions of components and Flex Forms dancing in my head and I was still reeling from the sheer sense of empowerment that I felt. It's funny, but sitting there with my laptop loaded with the ColdFusion Developers Edition and a copy of Flex Builder, I felt as if I could write the most elegant piece of Web software that my mind could conjure up. I still feel that way now. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Simon Horwith, through his blog, recruited me into checking out Adobe MAX 2006 in Las Vegas and report my findings back to you. Having never been, I wasn't exactly sure what to expect. Other than a lot of swag, I anticipated copious demonstrations of Adobe technology and not much else. I was sorely... (more)