02 Friday Aug 2013
Posted in Books, General, Technology
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![Java EE Development with NetBeans 7 [Video]](https://blog.mp3monster.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/2469os_video.png)
Java EE Development with NetBeans 7 [Video]
David also has a book out on the subject of Java EE 6 with Netbeans as well http://www.packtpub.com/java-ee-6-development-with-netbeans-7/book and his author page at packt – http://www.packtpub.com/authors/profiles/david-heffelfinger
16 Tuesday Jul 2013
Posted in Books, mindmap, Packt, Technology
As I work my way through the Aaron Woody book Enterprise Security: A Data Centric Approach to Securing the Enterprise I’ve been building a mind map of helpful notes -to help serve as a reminder or means to quickly drill back into the book for future reference.
The mind map has been build using freemind – it isn’t the prettiest of documents, but content is king here.
Freemind Mindmap as an image https://www.dropbox.com/s/u1ggk7exi6t0t3o/Enterprise%20Data%20Security.png as a Freemind file https://www.dropbox.com/s/lf53fs63c4x1v91/Enterprise%20Data%20Security.mm freem,ind can be obtained from freemind.sourceforge.net/
14 Sunday Jul 2013
Posted in Book Reviews, Books, Packt, Technology
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Enterprise Security – A Data Centric Approach to Securing the Enterprise
Continuing with the review of Enterprise Security: A Data Centric Approach to Securing the Enterprise by Aaron Woody having given a bit of history and motivation for an alternate approach Chapter 2 of the book starts describing the data centric approach.
We start out looking at why network boundaries need to revisited – as a result of BYOD, closer integration with business partners, collapsed/simplified software stacks etc. Then go into defining in more details the data centric views and how t go about building a trust model for identifying what needs to be secured. A trust model looks at the different dimensions that can impact data:
With the guidance to help gather the information you can start to build a profile of your data and the need (or not) for security with challenges and risks that need be addressed to achieve this within an organisation. All of which has to take into account of ‘data at rest’ (i.e. in databases, flat files etc) and ‘in motion’ transfers such as email, HTTP, FTP, SQLNet and so on.
The book then begins to talk about architectures that can reflect the considerations and needs of your data.
In terms of the writing, chapter is pretty direct and to the point which is great as long as you have some basic appreciation of security needs. It would have been good to enrich the information with some examples (although the Appendix does illustrate a bit further). The ideal would have been to have a use case running through the book (perhaps at the end of each chapter applying some of the ideas to a fictitious scenario).
Useful Links
02 Tuesday Jul 2013
Posted in Book Reviews, Books, Packt, Technology
I have started to review another book, this time Enterprise Security: A Data-Centric Approach to Securing the Enterprise by Aaron Woody. Based on the interest that my review of Getting Started with Oracle Event Processing 11g I thought I’d follow a similar approach of reviewing one or two chapters at a time, although because of other constraints possibly not as quickly as last time.
As an enterprise architect, and having worked within some more sensitive environments which means security typically has a lock the world down, particularly at the perimeter. But with an increasingly less practical as we become ever more connected. Not to mention the tighter the old approaches are applied, the more the business will by pass IT (e.g. Go acquire SaaS solutions without IT support), the net result being a home goal in undermining the very thing you’re trying to achieve. So the killer question is, can the book show another way that works matching the challenges ranging from SaaS (software as a service) to BYOD (bring your own device – i.e. connecting your own smart phone to systems and work with them on the move etc) against the backdrop of increasing data legislation and commercial fallout (customer loss etc) as a result of security breaches becoming public knowledge.
Chapter 1 is very much a good scene setter, providing some of the background as to how security approaches have evolved over the last 30 or so years. It sets out some clear perspectives on the challenges of applying security such as
The book also challenges the mentality of security is the network, which a grave mistake as security impacts processes and roles just as much as it does the software and physical infrastructures.
This sets up for the journey for defining an alternate approach starting with defining the boundaries that should be considered.
19 Wednesday Jun 2013
Posted in Book Reviews, Books, Packt, Technology
Having posted a number of long reviews regarding the Packt Publishing book Getting Started with Oracle Event Processing 11g here is a brief review (also posted to Amazon UK)
Although the book’s introduction says that its target audience is developers and architects the first few chapters are a very good introduction to the ideas and goals if Complex Event Processing (CEP) that would be easy to get to grips with by anyone in the IT industry, explaining the ideas and illustrating them with easy to grasp real examples.
As the chapters go on the book increasingly delves into the specifics of the Oracle solution providing illustrations of the different aspects of the product from Continuous Query Language (the heart of the CEP capability) to OSGi and how it can be used to effect easy deployment. That said, there is a lot here regarding general good practice, and provide insight into what should be expected from a good CEP platform.
Unlike a number of Packt books I’ve seen, this doesn’t simply take a step by step, screen by screen tutorial approach where you tend to get sucked into following the steps, the book focuses on what and why. This does mean that a bit more thought is needed to follow the examples through – but that is no bad thing in my opinion.
See posts below for a far more detailed write up on this excellent book.
19 Wednesday Jun 2013
Posted in Book Reviews, Books, General, Packt, Technology
This is the final chapter of the Getting Started with Oracle Event Processing 11g, and unlike e rest of the book looks forward as to where Event Processing might go (and therefore Oracle) as well as a few observations on the Oracle solution itself. The obvious potential for Oracle is to bring the CEP tooling into JDeveloper rather than an Eclipse plugin as is presently the case.big JDeveloper gets the suggested changes (the book has no apparent link to Oracle product road map) would result in a more wizard centric approach to development.
In terms of technology approaches the only other major point made is the likely harmonization with SOA principles. What did surprise me is that the link to BAM (Business Activity Monitoring) and BPM (Business Process Monitoring) wasn’t made despite the ever shrinking gap between business views onto data such that a business would be able to respond to to analysed events rather than BI reports well after the event. The most fascinating piece of this chapter is the relationship between CEP and Big Data (Hadoop etc) and the idea CEP could filter out data, or use Hadoop as a data source.
The rest of the chapter focuses more on possible directions for event processing in general, such as smart homes, cheaper devices feeding back more data allowing dynamic management and tracking of objects such as shipping containers and predictive analytics.
A well written chapter, but then by now you’d expect nothing less, but perhaps not as informative as the rest of the book, but then this chapter is far more speculative.
Overall Alexandre Alves, Robin J. Smith and Lloyd Williams should be very proud of the book and I hope that it sells well. As I said previously, this maybe geared to the Oracle product, but the way it has been written you could take the concepts and ideas and you could be confident of having some solid foundation understanding on any CEP solution.
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19 Wednesday Jun 2013
Posted in Book Reviews, Books, General, Packt, Technology
The penultimate chapters don’t dive into the core Event Processing technology but look at some uses cases and the combination of CEP with Oracle’s spatial extensions and database capabilities. My initial reaction was that these chapters are perhaps more niche than I’d want, but when I thought a little longer it occurred to me that a lot of CEP use cases would include make use of spatial. Intact a system development I lead some years ago, if built today could be built using these features.
The book focuses on the idea of notifying people about a public transport service, but think about the great many mobile services evolving for smart phones given their push notification capability now you can see how e spatial features could offer a lot of value.
The chapters like everything else in this book are very well written, and worth reading.
If anything the questions left in my mind, are more commercial dimensions of such a technology – enterprise Oracle database which contains a number of the special feature is not cheap, and I’d imagine that the spatial cartridge isn’t cheap. This leads me to a natural next question, given the common application scenarios like e one described, has anyone stood up a SaaS service using this technology, and how cost effective/competitive/attractive would it be?
As you can see a thought provoking book.
15 Saturday Jun 2013
Posted in Book Reviews, Books, Packt, Technology
Continuing to look at the Introduction to Oracle Event Processing book, by chapter 6 the books has covered the key principles and ideas for building a CEP solution, and we’re now need to consider deployment. But refreshingly the book also takes on a number of non functional requirement (NFR) areas such as the issue of monitoring, a subject area that many technical books tend to ignore. The attention to monitoring is admittedly driven by the fact that Event Processing is inherently sensitive to timing and system loading etc and will obviously have a direct impact on what outcomes are produced.
As the book takes you through aspects of building a simple solution – the CEP equivalent to writing ‘Hello World’ it would be great if the authors could make the implementation available for download, so you could go straight into deployment.
Chapter 7, then takes us into other performance improving aspects such as how to get event enrichment data, and importantly exploit caching to drive the performance. If you’re familiar with Coherence then this aspect should be pretty easy to get to grips with, and the book actually focuses on the OEP aspects of the setup. If you don’t know Coherence, you’d do well to look at additional sources of information.
Chapter 9 is a natural evolution of 8 as further develops performance thinking with clustering and with it High Availability dimensions.
Before looking at High Availability (HA) and scaling the book drives back into more advanced scenarios with CQL by introducing Java into the syntax.
09 Sunday Jun 2013
Posted in Book Reviews, Books, Packt, Technology
Continuing with the review of the Packt book Introduction to Oracle Event Processing (OEP) we find chapters 3,4 and 5 take a far more indepth dive into the product, what it can do and how to implement the features with examples of why you might want to use different features and capabilities. Chapter 5 focuses specifically on the Complex Query Language (CQL) syntax which is a SQL based expression language for querying events and describing expressions with an obvious emphasis on time series data.
As the book isn’t a blow by blow, screen shoot by screen guide through creating an example application using OEP you are going to need to apply a bit of effort now in utilising the ideas and capabilities being explained here.
A very well executed set of chapters.
02 Sunday Jun 2013
Posted in Book Reviews, Books, Packt, Technology
Chapter 2 of the Getting Started with Oracle Event Processing book is really two smaller chapters introducing the platform in terms of its history, building blocks and the challenges that have had to be solved in the creation of an event processing platform (such as managing the potential impact of the garbage collector when handling very high event rates).
Not many books go into the underlying details of how a product is created, but in doing so the authors have provided a lot insight into the art of the possible and avenues for developing further understanding.
The second half of the chapter walks through the use of a demo scenario. Rather than providing details from standard Oracle manuals in a click by click type of guide, the book uses the example to show a flavour of breadth and depth of the tool.
This chapter doesn’t try to describe the installation process, but points you to the Oracle documentation and explains what it should guide you through.
Even if you don’t intend to exercise the demo, it is well worth reading the chapter to understand the construction and breadth of the tool. Based on what has been shown here, I believe some of the Oracle products such as AIA tooling could learn from it.
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