Through my work on API Evangelist, and heavy reliance on Github, I have a pretty good handle on the licensing of code involved with APIs--I recommend following Githubs advice. Also derived from my work on the Oracle v Google copyright case, and the creation of API Commons, I have a solid handle on licensing of API interfaces. One area I am currently deficient, and is something that has long been on my todo list, is establishing a clear stance on how to license data served up via APIs. My goal is to eventually craft a static page, that helps API providers, and consumers, better understand licensing for the entire stack, from database, to server, the API definition, all the way to the client. I rely on the Open Data Commons, for three licensing options for open data: Public Domain Dedication and License (PDDL) — The PDDL places the data(base) in the public domain (waiving all rights). Attribution License (ODC-By) — You are free to share, create, and adapt, as long as you attribute the data source. Open Database License (ODC-ODbL) — You are free to share, create, and adapt, as long as you attribute the data source, share-aloe, and keep open. I am adding these three licensing options to my politics of APIs research, and will work to publish a single research project that provides guidance in not just licensing of data served up through APIs, but also addresses code, definitions, schemas, and more. The guidance from Open Data Commons is meant for data owners who are looking to license their data before making available via an API, if you are working with an existing dataset, makes sure and consult the data source on licensing restrictions--making sure to carry these forward as you do any additional work.

As device-enabled subscribers demand more, Calix introduces multiple wavelength NG-PON2 solutions primed for next generation applications ANAHEIM, CA - June 29, 2015 - Calix, Inc. (NYSE: CALX), the world leader in gigabit fiber deployments, today announced new cards for its E-Series portfolio that introduce both increased systems capacity and ITU/FSAN NG-PON2 support. By adding 10 gigabit per second (10 Gbps) time and wavelength division multiplexed (TWDM) PON NG-PON2 with both fixed and tunable wavelengths, Calix is paving the way for service providers to leverage next generation fiber solutions that redefine the broadband experience. These solutions, when combined with Calix Compass software applications and GigaCenter platforms, extend far beyond gigabit "speeds and feeds" to encompass superior Wi-Fi performance and compelling cloud-based applications, and lay the foundation for a superior gigabit and multi-gigabit experience for residential and business subscribers. Service providers globally are seeing an explosion of cloud-connected devices. In North America alone, the average person is projected to have over 11 of these devices by 2019. As these devices proliferate and are used to stream and share rich multimedia content, they will place enormous pressure on the access infrastructure. By 2019, 80 percent of all internet traffic will be IP video, while global cloud traffic will nearly quadruple over the same period. (Statistics from Cisco VNI and Cisco GCI) Service providers need solutions that can meet these emerging demands today while seamlessly adding new technologies for even higher scale and capacity in the future. Extending from the award-winning GigaCenter at the subscriber premises all the way to the cloud-based Compass software, Calix next generation fiber solutions arm service providers with technologies to address challenges and opportunities in subscriber support, analytics, and service enhancement. Potential issues impacting the subscriber broadband experience, such as device bandwidth contention in the ultra HD video enabled home, management of the device-rich smart home, and sub-par Wi-Fi performance, can be remedied before they manifest themselves to subscribers. Calix has a long history of serving fiber access customers with an architectural philosophy of a unified access infrastructure, supporting both business and residential services. Calix service provider customers have found the financial benefits of this architecture to be compelling, resulting in industry-leading efficiency in installed equipment costs and on-going operational savings. The Calix NG-PON2 strategy extends this leadership, expanding the capacity of fiber networks and allowing service providers to keep pace with the needs of business and residential customers alike over a common infrastructure. "From being the vendor with the first commercial deployments of GPON over a decade ago, to our unique auto-detect technology and pay-as-you-grow modular fiber architecture, Calix has consistently led the way in fiber access innovation," said Michel Langlois, Calix senior vice president of systems products. "This leadership in innovation is why over 1000 service providers across the globe rely on Calix for fiber access solutions, including nearly 100 delivering a gigabit service experience to their residential subscribers. Next generation PON provides fertile ground for a new wave of innovations, and Calix is again leading the way with significant contributions to development of the NG-PON2 standard, including key submissions that will reduce deployment costs and technical complexity and assure 2.4 GPON coexistence. Demonstrations of both NG-PON2 with tunable TWDM wavelengths and fixed wavelength 10G PON will take place this fall." Calix next generation PON solutions will extend across the entire access infrastructure, from the device-enabled subscriber premises to the data center or central office: Subscriber Premises: The industry leading Calix premises portfolio will be expanded to include NG-PON2 technology, including both fixed and tunable optics, across the full range of subscriber applications - from business services to MDU and SFU residential applications with Carrier Class Wi-Fi. Compass software-as-a-service applications will also be expanded to support these technologies and bring a true multi-gigabit experience to subscribers. Access Infrastructure: The award winning E7 portfolio will be enhanced by NG-PON2 cards that support both 10 Gbps fixed and TWDM wavelengths with pluggable optics. Optimized for areas of high bandwidth demand and congestion, these cards will support the delivery of multiple wavelengths of symmetrical 10 Gbps services. Data Center / Central Office: The E7 portfolio will be augmented by new high capacity cards that tap into new levels of performance in both system switching and uplink capacity. "Calix has a long history of new innovations in the fiber access industry, making key contributions to fiber access standards and making the fiber access business model work for service providers," said Teresa Mastrangelo, principal and founder of Broadbandtrends LLC. "Now as we move into the emerging era of next generation PON, it's no surprise to see Calix announcing a comprehensive portfolio addressing a range of applications. It is clear that NG-PON2 is going to be the PON technology that enables the multi-gigabit experience of the future, and Calix looks to be ready as this market emerges with a robust solutions oriented strategy." The new Calix innovations, including its new next generation PON and recently announced G.fast solutions for MDU applications, will be highlighted at the Calix booth #413 this week at the FTTH Conference & Expo in Anaheim, California.

You are working on a big project, developing rules, events and processes at your enterprise for mission critical business needs. Part of the requirements state that a certain business unit will be providing their data model for you to leverage. This data model will not be designed in the JBoss BPM Suite Data Modeler but you need to have access to it while working on your rules, events and processes from the business central dashboard. For this article we will be using the JBoss BPM Travel Agency demo project as a reference, with it's current data model built externally to the JBoss BPM Suite business central. The external data model is called the acme-data-model and is found in the project directory: This data model is built during installation and provides you with an object data model as a Java Archive (JAR) file which is installed into the JBoss BPM Suite business central component by placing it into the following location: jboss-eap-6.4/standalone/deployments/business-central.war/WEB_INF/lib/acmeDataModel-1.0.jar Authoring --> Artifact repository. This way of deploying the data model means that it is available to all projects you work on in JBoss BPM Suite business central, something that might not always be preferable. What we need is a way to deploy external data models into JBoss BPM Suite and then selectively add them to projects as needed. Within JBoss BPM Suite there is an Artifact Repository that is made just for this purpose. We can upload through the business central dashboard UI all our models and then pick and choose from the repository artifacts (your data model is one artifact) on a per project basis. This gives you absolute control over the models that a project can access. Choose external data model file. There are a few steps involved that we will take you through here to change the current installation of JBoss BPM Travel Agency where the acmeDataModel-1.0.jar file will be removed from the previously mentioned business central component and uploaded into the Artifact Repository and added to the Special Trips Agency project. Here is how you can do it yourself: obtain and install JBoss BPM Travel Agency demo project remove current data model from global business central application: $ rm ./target/jboss-eap-6.4/standalone/deployments/business-central.war/WEB_INF/lib/acmeDataModel-1.0.jar Upload external model jar file. start JBoss BPM Suite server after installation as stated in the installation instructions login to JBoss BPM Suite at http://localhost:8080/business-centralwith: u: erics p: bpmsuite1! go to AUTHORING --> ARTIFACT REPOSITORY go to UPLOAD --> CHOOSE FILE... --> projects/acme-data-model/target/acmeDataModel-1.0.jar --> click button to UPLOAD this puts the external data model into the JBoss BPM Suite artifact repository Select dependencies to add to project. got to AUTHORING --> PROJECT AUTHORING --> OPEN PROJECT EDITOR in project editor select GENERAL PROJECT SETTINGS --> DEPENDENCIES in dependencies select ADD FROM REPOSITORY -> in pop-upSELECT entry acmeDataModel-1.0.jar This will result in the external data model being added only to the Special Trips Agency project and not available to other projects unless they add this same dependency from the JBoss BPM Suite artifact repository. If you build & deploy the project, run it as described in the project instructions you will find that the external data model is available and used by the various rules and process components that are the JBoss BPM Travel Agency. As a closing note, this works exactly the same for JBoss BRMS projects.

At Bloomfire’s User Conference in May, I had the pleasure of listening to City of Austin’s Chief Innovation Officer Kerry O’Connor present on how government knowledge management is changing. The Innovation Office focuses on internal and public service innovation, as well as open government. O’Connor has worked in the public sector for many years – at the U.S. Department of State, the Office of Management Policy Rightsizing and Innovation, and several U.S. Embassies. She talked about seeing firsthand that the government is changing from a “need to know organization” to a “need to share organization.” O’Connor argues that disruption is inevitable, and will come whether in the form of opportunity or threat – and there’s no script. “When there’s no script,” O’Connor says, “we have to be intentionally improvisational.” O’Connor defines innovation as any project that is new to you and has an uncertain outcome. She talked about how important knowledge is in supporting innovation. As the first person to ever fill this role, her goal for her first year in office was to set up an innovation infrastructure. This included putting into place the processes, teams, and skills and information to create an environment that fosters innovation. O’Connor recommends that to facilitate intentional improvisation, you must frame the problems you want to solve first. Once you know the goal, look for innovation technology infrastructure that helps you manage contacts, relationships, projects, knowledge, ideas, and insights. We live in a world that is increasingly interconnected and disrupted, and O’Connor says that organizations are naturally becoming more networked, human-centered, and improvisational. She encouraged attendees to “use what you have; we must connect, coach, mentor, share, and experiment.” To ensure that citizens can interact with the knowledge that city employees have, the City of Austin created online public spaces. These spaces, created on Bloomfire, offer the opportunity for citizens to participate in a conversation with employees around innovation, data, and city orientation. I was inspired by O’Connor’s presentation, and proud to live in a city that is so forward thinking about how information is shared. It made me want to get more involved in finding ways to solve some of problems Austin is facing as a result of our rapid growth. As a result of her talk, I’m going to try to make it to this weekend’s ATX Hack for Change. If you would like to watch O’Connor’s entire presentation, you can access it on the Bloomfire Community. Like this post? Click here to subscribe to our blog and receive the latest content on social learning, customer support, sales enablement, or all three.

this afternoon i got a review copy of the book creating symmetry: the artful mathematics of wallpaper patterns . here’s a striking curves from near the beginning of the book, one that the author calls the “mystery curve.” the curve is the plot of exp( it ) – exp(6 it )/2 + i exp(-14 it )/3 with t running from 0 to 2π. here’s python code to draw the curve. import matplotlib.pyplot as plt from numpy import pi, exp, real, imag, linspace def f(t): return exp(1j*t) - exp(6j*t)/2 + 1j*exp(-14j*t)/3 t = linspace(0, 2*pi, 1000) plt.plot(real(f(t)), imag(f(t))) # these two lines make the aspect ratio square fig = plt.gcf() fig.gca().set_aspect('equal') plt.show() maybe there’s a more direct way to plot curves in the complex plane rather than taking real and imaginary parts. updated code for the aspect ratio per janne’s suggestion in the comments. related posts : several people have been making fun visualizations that generalize the example above. brent yorgey has written two posts, one choosing frequencies randomly and another that animates the path of a particle along the curve and shows how the frequency components each contribute to the motion. mike croucher developed a jupyter notebook that lets you vary the frequency components with sliders. john golden created visualizations in geogerba here and here . jennifer silverman showed how these curves are related to decorative patterns that popular in the 1960’s. she also created a coloring book and a video . dan anderson accused me of nerd sniping him and created this visualization .

We’re going back to the classics this month, with the latest enterprise collaboration news round-up focussing on cloud strategy and considerations and benefits when it comes to implementing collaboration software. Mashable shared an infographic it created in conjunction with Hewlett Packard, which compiles data and research suggesting that the use of hybrid and private cloud computing is on the rise. The article quotes statistics from Rightscale, which states that 82% of enterprises have a multi-cloud strategy already, and of these 14% use multiple private clouds, 13% use multiple public clouds, and 55% use hybrid clouds. Mashable quotes Technology Business Research, which states that “there is continued migration of enterprise vendors in mature markets such as the U.S. to hybrid and private cloud platforms to provide software vendors an opportunity to generate adoption for management technologies, as customers require next-generation tools to manage heterogeneous IT infrastructures efficiently.” In his article for eWEEK, Chris Preimesberger outlines 10 ways IT and business leaders must collaborate on cloud strategies. Chris explains that a decision to use cloud services is no longer simply down to the IT department. During the last nine years, he says, entire businesses have become necessarily immersed in IT strategies in order to harness the cloud for economics, innovation, operations and growth. He shares a slide show which provides advice for how technical and business leaders can collaborate to build a secure cloud strategy. The slide show states that usage indicate that private clouds are expected to grow at double the rate of public cloud, a result of ongoing concerns about data security and privacy. Gary Audin asks the question cloud economics or flexibility? in his article for No Jitter. Gary explains that although the cost of cloud can be attractive, that might not be the real draw for enterprises. He states that knowing what costs to consider as part of a cloud service implementation is vital to making the right decision about cloud. Gary points out the benefits of the cloud as being far more than simply a matter of cost. He explains that the cloud allows rapid response for an enterprise as it contends with change due to situations such as staff growth or reduction, market fluctuations, financial limitations, or new opportunities. Above all, Gary explains, the cloud delivers flexibility and it is this which makes it the most attractive option for enterprises. In his article for MSP Mentor, Michael Brown reveals the result of a recent report on cloud adoption in the enterprise. The report, by Skyhigh Networks, revealed that enterprise cloud adoption grew by 43% in 2014. Michael highlights findings on the file sharing front, revealing that 37 percent of employees were found to be uploading sensitive business data to consumer file sharing services. Consumer file sharing services are one element of a growing trend towards BYOC (bring your own cloud, content and collaboration). Robert Bamforth explains that BYOC is an evolution of BYOD (bring your own device) which posed a challenge to IT departments since the rise of the smartphone. Robert explains that BYOC is a new challenge for IT departments in controlling their organisation’s digital assets while liberating employee productivity and information sharing. Robert states that the BYOC conundrum should change as enterprise-strength security features and tools continue to evolve to have more consumer-like interfaces, which will make asking employees to use enterprise tools much easier. He gives some suggestions to help enterprises in the mean time: understand the appeal of consumer tools, make sure everyone understands security risks, forget trying to apply strong rules to trivial information, get a mobile-ready solution, look for and pre-plug data leaks, and above all don’t stop collaboration if it’s happening. In his article for ZDNet, Dion Hinchcliffe reflects on the state of the digital collaboration industry. Far from maturing, Dion says, the collaboration tool space is busier than ever evolving, branching out, and multiplying. But, he asks, are organizations able to adopt so many different ways of working together? Dion observes that instead of settling down, the collaboration software space is actually get more interesting and varied, and he is seeing new technologies, such as applications that focus on optimizing collaboration for mobile devices or for team analytics. It’s now time for organizations to design a strong foundation for digital collaboration, says Dion, as the near future promises many key new innovations that must be considered and incorporated to stay competitive, both to customers and the workforce. When businesses do decide to adopt one or more digital collaboration platforms, Andre Bourque offers some helpful ways in which to measure ROI. Andre quotes a Mashable report which states that cloud collaboration drives creativity and engagement, leading to happier employees and a better company culture, but this is not a metric that is easily measurable. Andre explains that it’s hard to find definitive examples of ROI, as most are anecdotal or “in process”, and merely counting user adoption rate of a collaborative platform is inadequate. Instead, Andre quotes Angela Ashenden, of MWD Advisors, who offers the following metrics to consider: reduced travel time and costs; creating new business opportunities and services; increased employee retention rates, cost savings across the organisation, and faster on-boarding for new users. Do you have any metrics that you find useful to measure ROI on your collaboration platform in your organisation?

If you are building mobile apps then you are connecting to some REST API. For example, if you want to resolve an address to a latitude/longitude information to display on a map, you might use the Google Geocoding API: Google Geocoding API: https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/json?address=San Francisco,CA&key=AIzaSyDvFMYGjeR02RH If you are invoking the API from the client, then the API key also has to be present on the client. But, this is also the problem. It’s very easy to look at the app source in the browser and get access to the API key. If someone has access to your API key, they can send requests on your behalf (without you knowing), and use up your request quota. Even if you are building a hybrid app, it’s still the same problem. A hybrid app is HTML/JavaScript inside a native wrapper, it’s possible to download the app, un-package it and gain access to API keys or any sensitive information stored in the app. Even native apps are not immune to this. For example, an Android app is just a Java application and a Java application can be de-compiled to view the original source. The next image shows how to get access to an API key in the browser: Viewing app source in browser A good solution is to never expose the API key (or any other sensitive data) on the client. How do you do that? You keep the API key and any other sensitive information on the server. Appery.io Secure Proxy Appery.io Secure Proxy (part of Backend Services) enables app developers to keep sensitive app data on the server. Your API keys or any other data is never exposed on the client. Watch this 5-minute video on how to use Secure Proxy: Before using the Secure Proxy, you need to store the data on the server. To store the data you are going to use the Appery.io Database. It’s as simple as creating a collection with two columns. The first column is the value name, the second column is the actual value. This is how the database looks when storing the API key for Google Geocoding API: Saving API key in database As this key is stored on the server, no one (but you) has access to it. You can store other data as well such as URLs, tokens or anything else that shouldn’t be exposed on the client. The next step is to setup the proxy that will use the information stored in the database. This step is also very simple, this is how it looks: Secure proxy linked to a database You give the proxy a name and then link it to a database which stores your data. The above proxy is linked to Secrets_db database, Credentials collection, and secretName, secretValue columns. The last step is to link a REST API service to the proxy. In the service editor you select the secure proxy created: REST API service using secure proxy then in the Request tab you reference the API key stored in the database (the name stored in secretName column): Request parameter substitution will happen on the server and that’s it. When the API service is invoked, the call will go through the secure proxy (server) where the API key will substituted: API key is not exposed on the client For web apps, you can add an extra layer of security by specifying from which page URLs the proxy should accept requests: URL-based security The proxy will only accept requests from page URLs listed in the table. Another option to keep API keys private is to invoke the API from the server using Server Code, I will cover this in another post. Setting up an using the Appery.io Secure Proxy is simple. It provides a very important feature by allowing to keep sensitive and private data on the server, never exposing it on the client, and adding an extra security layer to your app.

In this article, we go over several commands developers and data scientists can use to create data frames using existing data frames.

Occasionally we are asked about JBoss BPM Suite integration with other products and layers in an enterprises architecture. We have published articles talking about how to achieve this with various aspects such as: Microservices integration Data integration Articles are one thing, but seeing is believing, so we have done a few webinars to show you live how to tackle integration: Data integration webinar PEX webinar Along with these articles we have always published demo projects that give you a closer look and chance to get hands on with these integration strategies: JBoss BPM Suite & JBoss Fuse Travel microservices story JBoss BPM Suite & JBoss Data Virtualization integration Imported Signavio Process Editor mortgage workflow. There is another integration story yet to be told about how one can leverage other tooling together with JBoss BPM Suite. This article will introduce one such company,Signavio, that provides a Signavio Process Editor so"...you can start modeling and engaging your organization in improving operational efficiency through the development of optimal models..." The following demo project provides a working example of how you can model an example mortgage process in Signavio Process Editor and then bring it into JBoss BPM Suite where you can add implementation details, integration details and other implementation details to finally execute the mortgage process end-to-end. Demo project As always we bring you not only a story, but a reusable demo project you can easily spin up yourself to explore the details around how a JBoss BPM project would integrate with the model designed in Signavio Process Editor. The project is called the JBoss BPM Suite & Signavio Process Editor Integration Demo. The project installs JBoss BPM Suite 6.1 with an example mortgage project with rules, process, forms and other artifacts. It also includes a copy of an exported Signavio Process Editor mortgage process that we then show how to import. Final mortgage workflow project with implementation details and integration details completed. Ready to run! This gives you the initial starting point after importing the Signavio process and the completely integrated final mortgage project that you can run side-by-side. To setup this project there are just a few simple steps to get going and will be up and running minutes: Installation Download and unzip. Add products to installs directory. Run 'init.sh' or 'init.bat' file. 'init.bat' must be run with Administrative privileges. Start JBoss BPMS Server by running 'standalone.sh' or 'standalone.bat' in the /target/jboss-eap-6.1/bin directory. Login to http://localhost:8080/business-central - login for admin, appraisor, broker, and manager roles (u:erics / p:bpmsuite1!) Mortgage Loan demo pre-installed as project. Using process designer, import the Signavio process that was exported to the file found in: support/MortgageDemoSignavio.bpmn Looking to Automate your business? See screenshots provided in project for how this should look and note that the JBoss BPM Suite process designer included validation that puts messages about tasks not specified, this is correct as at this point you need to start implementing the process tasks. You can examine the imported process and note the various details captured during initial workshops have been put into the process details for each step in the workflow. After implementing these steps you will find the final process ready to run. You can now explore the final project by deploying it and starting a new instance. We hope you enjoy this example project and feel free to browse for more at JBoss Demo Central.

business sphere nowadays has become an extremely competitive arena. dynamics change in a blink. times have become highly unpredictable and hence; businesses today need to be agile while being equipped with reliable, accurate, relevant and actionable business intelligence. every business venture has its own fair share of ebbs and tides. it becomes more of a challenge to prove your capabilities and achieve a strong hold in the market; especially when you have just started taking your first step in. for startups, getting the minutest nuances of how to run a business; right from the day one, forms the most crucial part! to smoothly sail through this enormously competitive space; startups need to perform above and beyond the expectations right from the very beginning. the initial barriers can be easily overcome when your business is armed with smallest details of the market. but how to catch the nerve of market, you will ask? - data extraction or data mining services is the answer! data mining equips you with rich business intelligence that in turn gives a firm control of things and empowers you to make informed business decisions as well as create more targeted, applicable and growth-oriented business strategies. data extraction services gather huge volume of data that is highly varied, precise, and relevant. most importantly - it is very useful for your new startup . a meticulous study of this database allows you to analyze things in great details and arranging this scattered information into meaningful clusters; helps you get the whole picture! which are the different ways for startups to effectively use web data mining? web data mining is a wide array, which can be employed for a variety of purposes to generate various kinds of important data to gain actionable insights. in fact, for a startup, the most critical part is to decide where and how to use this powerful technique to get valuable information which can help in creating a difference for overall future prospects of the company. let’s check out on some of those interesting avenues; where you can apply impactful web data extraction techniques: digging information for social rankings and backlinks for any startup; the most crucial business process is to analyze its competitors. this is one area where web data extraction comes across an instrumental enabler. many startups, in the past, have effectively used data mining to fish out critically useful information related to social rankings of competing companies. social ranking is equally important factor, since any ‘social actions’ on the internet are building blocks of several opinions as well as builds a reputation in this day and age. keeping these things in mind, you can use web data extraction to dig out for social rankings related to content created by your competitors in the cyber space. with thorough analysis; you can get a very clear picture of the entire situation and it helps you to arrive to a concrete conclusions in terms of what your competitors are doing well at, and what sells the best. obtaining contact information building strong networking is the best bet which helps you to get through the volatile market; specifically when you are a newbie in the market. whether it is with prospective or existing customers, industry peers, associates, or competitors; excellent networking is the driving force where there is open and transparent communication, ensures success of your startup. and to have such an effective communication and networking channel, you need a huge, robust list of contact information that is in sync with - your exact requirements. mining data from multiple web sources is by all means a perfect method to achieve this. in a short period of time you can easily collect rich contact information that can be leveraged in a number of ways. you can form a long lasting business relationship or make potential customers know what you offer; this information gives a thrust to your startup and propels it to new levels of recognition. for building brand, promotion and advertisement for startups, the very first wave of promotion is the key that builds a strong brand value in the market and ensures long-term business success. it is during this initial phase that the first and foremost public perception of your company is created, and the essentials of public opinion starts shaping up. for this reason, it is required to be precise with your marketing and promotion these formative years. to achieve this, you need a strong, in-depth understanding of the audience that you need to target. you require to classify your target audience based on factors like age, gender, income, demographics, and preferences. such detailed understanding can be attained only when you have a voluminous social data related to the targeted audience. and there is no better way to achieve this, other than web data extraction. with such a powerful weapon in your arsenal, you can certainly boost up your startup and take it a long way with clever decisions and timely implementations. web data extraction can be the absolute tool that a startup may ever have! its appropriate use should give you tons of required and relevant business intelligence, which should help you to shine in this competitive market.

I have project where I need to output some reports as CSV-files. I found a good library called CsvHelper from NuGet and it works perfect for me. After some playing with it I was able to generate CSV-files that were shown correctly in Excel. Here is some sample code and also extensions that make it easier to work with DataTables. Simple report Here’s the simple fragment of code that illustrates how to use CsvHelper. using (var writer = new StreamWriter(Response.OutputStream)) using (var csvWriter = new CsvWriter(writer)) { csvWriter.Configuration.Delimiter = ";"; csvWriter.WriteField("Task No"); csvWriter.WriteField("Customer"); csvWriter.WriteField("Title"); csvWriter.WriteField("Manager"); csvWriter.NextRecord(); foreach (var project in data) { csvWriter.WriteField(project.Code); csvWriter.WriteField(project.CustomerName); csvWriter.WriteField(project.Name); csvWriter.WriteField(project.ProjectManagerName); csvWriter.NextRecord(); } } Of course, you can use other methods to output whole object or object list with one shot. I just needed here custom headers that doesn’t match property names 1:1. Generic helper for DataTable Some of my projects come from service layer as DataTable. I don’t want to add new models or Data Transfer Objects (DTO) with no good reason and DataTable is actually flexible enough if you need to add new fields to report and you want to do it fast. As DataTables are not supported by default (yet?), I wrote simple extension methods that work on DataTable views. When called on DataTable it selects default view automatically. The idea is – you can set filter on default data view and leave out the rows you don’t need. If you just want to show DataTable to screen as table then check out my posting Simple view to display contents of DataTable. public static class CsvHelperExtensions { public static void WriteDataTable(this CsvWriter csvWriter, DataTable table) { WriteDataView(csvWriter, table.DefaultView); } public static void WriteDataView(this CsvWriter csvWriter, DataView view) { foreach (DataColumn col in view.Table.Columns) { csvWriter.WriteField(col.ColumnName); } csvWriter.NextRecord(); foreach (DataRowView row in view) { foreach (DataColumn col in view.Table.Columns) { csvWriter.WriteField(row[col.ColumnName]); } csvWriter.NextRecord(); } } } And here is simple MVC controller action that gets data as DataTable and returns it as CSV-file. The result is CSV-file that opens correctly in Excel. [HttpPost] public void ExportIncomesReport() { var data = // Get DataTable here Response.ContentType = "text/csv"; Response.AddHeader("Content-disposition", "attachment;filename=IncomesReport.csv"); var preamble = Encoding.UTF8.GetPreamble(); Response.OutputStream.Write(preamble, 0, preamble.Length); using (var writer = new StreamWriter(Response.OutputStream)) using (var csvWriter = new CsvWriter(writer)) { csvWriter.Configuration.Delimiter = ";"; csvWriter.WriteDataTable(data); } } One thing to notice – with CsvHelper we have full control over a stream where we write data and this way we can write more performant code. Related Posts .Net Framework 4.0: string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace() method Exporting GridView Data to Excel Code Contracts: Hiding ContractException How to dump object properties My object to object mapper source released The post Generating CSV-files on .NET appeared first on Gunnar Peipman - Programming Blog.

New Integration Provides Seamless Connections Between Perforce Helix and Leading Application Lifecycle Management Systems WOKINGHAM, UK. (June 24, 2015) – Perforce Software, the leader in software configuration management (SCM) and collaboration, and Go2Group, an Atlassian Platinum and Enterprise Expert, today announced the Perforce ConnectALL Adapter. The new adapter for Go2Group’s ConnectALL ALM Router connects Perforce Helix to Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) systems supported by ConnectALL. The companies also announced that they have expanded their partnership, which first began in 2002. “Very few SCMs can handle binary data, and no other SCM solution supports large file formats that scale across globally distributed enterprises like Helix,” said Brett Taylor, president of Go2Group. “Our customers demand future-proof solutions, and with Perforce we know they don’t have to worry about outgrowing their systems—it will serve them well whether they’re a team of 50 or 50,000.” With the Perforce adapter, ConnectALL automatically synchronises data and workflow with other ALM systems and integrates ALM systems components within minutes. “We’re excited to be a part of the ConnectALL ecosystem of adapters and to enable companies to more easily design, configure, synchronise, manage, and monitor their integrations with Perforce,” said Dave Robertson, vice president of Channels at Perforce. “We’re glad to extend our partnership with Go2Group to new technologies and markets.” Go2Group is part of Perforce’s network of sales partners across Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia Pacific and India. Perforce partners serve customers in more than 100 countries worldwide. The Perforce ConnectALL Adapter is available for purchase from the Go2Group website.

Combining BioConnect with Digitus server cabinet access control makes biometric identity management more effective and easier ENTERTECH SYSTEMSandDigitus Biometricshave just announced a new technology partnership between ENTERTECH’S BioConnect identity management platform and the Digitus db Bus and db Cabinet Sentry for server cabinet access control. The result is a new, fully-integrated solution called db BioConnect. The newdb BioConnectlets company data centres, co-location data centres and IT room customers simplify biometric implementation, enrollment and management for access control of perimeter doors, interior rooms, cages and now server racks all integrated into one identity platform. This game-changing solution now extends enterprise access security platforms into the data centre, making investments in Access Control Management Systems far more economical and effective. “Digitus Biometrics is the leader in providing biometric access control to the critical infrastructure market," said Rob Douglas, ENTERTECH SYSTEMS CEO. "With Digitus technology integrated to BioConnect, all 15 of our certified access control partners will now be able to offer it to their customers. For the first time, end users will have access to an integrated biometric solution that secures access control from the data centre entrance to the server cabinet instead of having to deal with stand-alone systems.” The list of BioConnect certified access control partners can be found atwww.bioconnect.com/partners. ENTERTECH SYSTEMS’BioConnectis the most advanced identity management platform on the global market today. Simple, secure and scalable, it provides Suprema biometric authentication across leading access control systems. As an application for security professionals, BioConnect helps enterprises successfully implement identity solutions by making deployment and use of biometrics easier than ever. BioConnect addresses deployment challenges by reducing costs, overcoming complexity and making it easier to on-board users. The platform provides seamless synchronization of data such as new cardholders, changes and deletions, and is tailor-made for enterprises where true identity is critical for secure access to physical facilities and software applications. “Our biometric access control solutions are designed to meet the needs of a diverse range of clients," said David Orischak, Digitus Biometrics CEO. "This technology integration to create db BioConnect will let us offer a single, centralised, highly advanced access control solution that's easy to deploy and use. An industry first, our customers will be able to use one centralised system facility-wide to secure a company’s critical infrastructure and data." db Bus ServerRack Access Controlis designed for data centres needing to secure large volumes of server cabinets with only one small component per cabinet. A single db Bus controller allows the user to secure up to 32 racks with a single 48V power supply and may be infinitely scaled.db Cabinet Sentryis designed for data centres with a structured cabling scheme. It is Digitus’ most compact, cost-effective and energy-efficient means of securing server cabinets. This extremely versatile unit can be deployed in networked or stand-alone environments, using power over Ethernet (PoE) or an external power supply.db BioLockis a server cabinet lock that uses biometric identification with prints for up to 10 fingers per user. Through this new technology partnership, these db products will be integrated with BioConnect to create the new integrated db BioConnect solution. “Digitus’ use of leading Suprema biometric technology in their server cabinet access control solutions is a natural fit for ENTERTECH SYSTEMS as the operating partner for Suprema in the US, Canada, UK, Ireland and Puerto Rico,” added Douglas. “The implications to the market are significant," added Orischak. "The integrated db BioConnect solution can be used to manage any cabinet system where biometric access control is warranted – even SCIF’s and locked areas housing sensitive assets such as pharmaceuticals, hazardous materials, intelligence archives, customer and patient records, as well as critical IP.” For more information on the db BioConnect integrated solution, visitwww.bioconnect.com/db.

IoT is really hot, but can also be a bit confusing. Read about these 8 development key findings.

while at fluent conf this year, i was walking by the new relic booth when i noticed something interesting – a product called new relic browser. back when i converted my blog to wordpress, i ran into a lot of problems. my server went down, wordpress crashed, it was a bit frustrating. (much like how lemonade in a paper cut is a bit frustrating.) one of the tools i used to help diagnose my server was the new relic server monitor . outside of a few issues installing, i was really impressed with the level of detail the monitor provided. while it wasn’t the final solution for fixing my problem, it definitely helped me pinpoint what was sucking up all the ram on my box, and helped me check my changes to ensure things were going well. best of all, this was entirely free. i’ll give them huge props for offering such a powerful tool for no up front money. because i had such a good experience with them on the server side, i thought i’d give their browser product a try as well. as you can guess, this tool is meant to help you gain insights into how well your web application is performing. i decided to try it on my blog, which, admittedly, is probably not the best use case for this product. wordpress isn’t something i need to hack up and outside of the performance issues i had on the server side, i figured the client side was pretty much good enough. it certainly seemed good enough to me. but at the same time, my blog gets quite a bit of traffic so i figured it would also provide a good set of data to dig into as well. setup is relatively simple. you begin by selecting a deployment method: i selected copy/paste as i figured that would be simpler. on the next page, i said i was not using apm, even though i guess i kinda was. i was trying to test this as someone who was not also using the server side product, so there may be things i missed out on. typically when i try products like this though i try to keep things as simple as possible. the final step was copying a ginormous javascript string into my wordpress template. so that was that. i copied in the code, cleared my wordpress cache, and then promptly forgot about it for a week or so. i then took a look back at my stats. there’s a tremendous amount of information you get right on the front dashboard. first off – note the browser load times. i’m averaging 6.8 seconds or so which is quite high and not what i expected. for over ten years i ran my blog with very precise knowledge of what i had going on within my templates. with wordpress, i’ve kinda gotten lazy about it and have given up being so deeply involved. this gives me a clue that maybe i need to take a closer look at my template and plugins and see if i need everything i’ve got. also note the error graph. on average, 2% of my pages have javascript errors. the real question is – how often do those javascript errors impact the core thing people need to do on my site – read a blog post. as i said, the dashboard is pretty packed, but let’s go deeper. first, the page views report. this report shows recent pages and which page requests are consuming the most load time. you can mouse over each line item for a detailed view: you can also switch the “sort by” to show average page load time: and yes – that twenty plus second item on top there made me crap my pants. honestly i’m not sure why that page averaged so high as it is relatively simple, but it does give me something to dig into deeper. the next link, session traces , is not what you may think. i had assumed this was a report of a ‘session’ for one visitor to my blog. instead, it is a deep look at one particular web page. and when i say deep, i mean deep. here is a top level report for one session: note all the detail in the chart. you can then scroll through the session and look at every particular darn thing in the one request. for example, here i can look at what google analytics is doing. the next report shows you the ajax requests your web app is making. you get details on what is making requests as well as throughput and data size. i can say from experience that the data size chart could be really useful. back when i first learned ajax i made the mistake of not considering the size of my packets and my applications suffered through it. this is a rather long page so i’ve split the screen shot into two parts. i’m thinking that in ‘real’ web app the ajax report will be the number one place you’ll find nuggets of information. of similar importance is the js errors report. clicking on a particular item will give you details: if you click on the instance details, you can see the line number where this error was thrown. while not this particular error, earlier i found an issue with gravatar. i didn’t think i was using gravatar, but it turned out one plugin was making use of it and throwing an error. i modified the plugin and the error went away. the browsers report gives you details about what types of browsers are hitting your site and how well they perform. i mentioned how i was a bit surprised by the page load times on my site, well in this report i can see what browsers are having the worst issues with page load: look at that jump for ie and opera! that’s fascinating to me. it doesn’t necessarily mean those are bad browsers, but it gives me an area to focus in if i were to start digging into my site performance. you can then go to the geo report to see how different areas of the world (and america) handle your site. along with just reporting, you can also create alerts too. you get a default alert policy out of the box and can define your own as well. this is fairly similar to what you get in the server product as well. from what i can see, this is a really darn good tool, and as i said, i had great success with the server tool. so how much does it cost? here is the price plans as of the time i wrote the post: 150 a month isn’t necessarily cheap, but heck, that’s my rate for development (yes, that’s what i charge by the hour) and considering how much data you get the forensic information is easily worth it. the free (lite) version also has fewer reports. if you go to their pricing page you can see what you don’t get at that tier, but note that you get 14 days of free access to the top tier to see if it is worth it.

London, UK – June 23, 2015 – Information Builders, a leader in business intelligence (BI) and analytics, information integrity, and integration solutions, today announced a new webcast series, “Summer Shorts,” designed to provide viewers quick overviews of the hottest topics in BI and analytics. Information Builders’ Summer Shorts will help enterprises rethink information strategies in a world transformed by the forces of mobile, social, cloud, advanced analytics, and big data. In each session, an Information Builders expert will offer a fun, informative presentation on a different BI and analytics discipline. Viewers can join one or all of the sessions below to learn tips for leveraging emerging technologies for better BI. 8 July | 14:00 BST / 15:00 CET | The Art of Dashboard Design for Business Intelligence – What are your dashboards telling you and your customers? Peter O’Grady will walk through design theories, design and layout considerations, and form-factor awareness and responsive design. Be empowered to change your data visualisation strategies, practices, and processes. 22 July | 14:00 BST / 15:00 CET | Advanced Data Visualization – Data visualisation is red hot, and for good reason. Companies in all sectors are finding hidden insights with sophisticated data visualisation. In this webcast by Porter Thorndike, attendees will learn advanced tips for data analysis, visualisation plug-in architecture, polished finished examples, and visualisation-based InfoApps™ from Information Builders. 5 August | 14:00 BST / 15:00 CET | Social and Feedback Analysis – Join this social media analytics webcast to learn how to better understand customer sentiment and behavior. Dan Grady will discuss how to capitalise on the opportunities presented by social media, including integrating social data with enterprise data, improving customer engagement, and picking the right platform to consolidate and share this information. 19 August | 14:00 BST / 15:00 CET | 5 Hot Trends for Business Intelligence – Mobile, social, cloud, advanced analytics, and big data aren’t just big trends, they also raise big questions in BI and analytics. Chris Banks will describe in this webcast why BI is vital to making these trends work for companies. It will cover how to build once and responsibly deploy BI to mobile devices, how to expose relevant analytics to customers and partners, and best practices for harnessing big data.

Survey of open source PostgreSQL users found adoption continues to rise with 55% of users deploying it for mission-critical applications Bedford, MA – June 23, 2015 – EnterpriseDB (EDB), the leading provider of enterprise-class Postgres products and database compatibility solutions, today announced the results of its “PostgreSQL Adoption Survey 2015,” a biennial survey of open source PostgreSQL users. Conducted by EnterpriseDB, the survey found PostgreSQL adoption continuing to rise, with 55% of users – up from 40% two years ago – deploying it for mission-critical applications and 77% of users are dedicating all new application deployments to PostgreSQL. These findings give voice to end users and confirm such industry indicators as increasing job listings and monthly rankings on DB-Engines that have pointed to rising interest in and demand for PostgreSQL, also called Postgres. The growing popularity of Postgres also comes as traditional software vendors suffer setbacks in the marketplace. The enterprise-class performance, security and stability of Postgres, on par with traditional database vendors for most corporate workloads, meanwhile have helped position Postgres among the solutions from the world’s largest vendors. The opportunity to transform their data center economics has helped fuel downloads of Postgres as well. End users reported cutting costs with Postgres, with 41% reporting they had first-year cost savings of 50% or more. They’re using Postgres to build web 2.0 applications using unstructured data as evidenced by the 64% of respondents who said they were working with JSON/JSONB and the 47% who said they were using Postgres for collaboration applications. “Postgres is empowering organizations to transform the economics of IT. IT can invest in the customer engagement applications that differentiate their operations from their competition instead of continuing to pay the steep and rising licensing and support fees charged by traditional database vendors,” said Marc Linster, senior vice president of products and services of EnterpriseDB. “With the expanding adoption, EnterpriseDB has experienced dramatic growth year over year, providing the software, services and support that organizations need to be successful with Postgres.” Database Migrations, Replacements The findings also support statements in a recent Gartner report that reflect the widespread acceptance of open source databases. “By 2018, more than 70% of new in-house applications will be developed on an OSDBMS, and 50% of existing commercial RDBMS instances will have been converted or will be in process,” according to the April 2015 Gartner report, The State of Open-Source RDBMs, 2015.* Among Postgres users, the survey findings show migrations are already under way with 37% reporting they had migrated applications from Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server to Postgres. Many users were still planning further migrations, with 37% of PostgreSQL users saying they will gradually replace their legacy systems with Postgres, compared to 29% who said that in the 2013 survey. Further, end users predict their deployments of Postgres will expand significantly, with 32% saying they anticipate production deployments of Postgres to increase by at least 50% over the next year. The survey, conducted by EnterpriseDB using an online tool in May 2015, queried registered users of PostgreSQL and drew 274 respondents worldwide from government organizations and companies ranging in size and industry. *The State of Open-Source RDBMs, 2015, by Donald Feinberg and Merv Adrian, published on April 21, 2015. Connect with EnterpriseDB Read the blog: http://blogs.enterprisedb.com/ Follow us on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/enterprisedb Become a fan on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/EnterpriseDB?ref=ts Join us on Google+: https://plus.google.com/108046988421677398468 Connect on LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/company/enterprisedb

[This article was written by Kevin Casey] Welcome to This Week in Modern Software, orTWiMS, New Relic’s weekly roundup of the need-to-know news, stories, and events of interest surrounding software analytics, cloud computing, application monitoring, development methodologies, programming languages, and the myriad of other issues that influence modern software. This week, our top story goes inside President Obama’s secret team of tech geeks, 140 of them and counting: TWiMS Top Story: Inside Obama’s Stealth Startup—Fast Company What it’s about:If the President of the United States walked into the room and personally recruited you to rebuild the country’s technology infrastructure, could you turn him down? He’s serious, and that room is theRoosevelt Room in the West Wing of the White House, by the way. AsLisa Gelobtersays: “What are you going to say that?” Gelobter’s answer was “Yes”—she’s now chief digital officer for the US Department of Education, part of a 140-person-and-counting tech team that’s functioning something like an elite startup embedded inside the federal government. Its business? Only modernizing the technical infrastructure, applications, and processes of just about every federal agency. Why you should care:What was once something of a tech desert—the federal government—is beginning to draw top private-sector talent inside the Beltway. The team, led by Mikey Dickerson (who helped lead the team that rescuedHealthcare.gov) andformer US CTO Todd Park, also includes the likes of former Googler Matthew Weaver, and it hopes to hit 500 people by the end 2016, shortly before President Obama will leave office. Its challenges are immense, from tackling government bureaucracy (to test just how entrenched the suits were, Weaver requested the official title “Rogue Leader”—and he got it) to the fact that its recruiting pitch includes the phrase: “You’ll have to take a pay cut.” But its mission is both noble and necessary, and the appeal of working on major problems with enormous public impacts appears to be working. Recommended reading. Further reading: Mikey Dickerson’s 10 Tips for Dealing with Bureaucracy—New Relic Blog [Video] Airbnb Open Sources Software to Lure Talent Amid ‘Insane’ Competition—CIO Journal What it’s about:Airbnb added three new apps to its open source portfolio earlier this month, but the motivation wasn’t just trying to give employees the best business tools or contribute to the software community at large. Sure, that might have been part of the equation, but the rental booking site hopes open-sourcing some of its toolkit will help recruit the best software talent in the face of what director of engineeringMike Curtiscalls “insane” competition in the Silicon Valley labor market. Why you should care:In the software arms race, any little edge counts. Curtis tellsCIO Journalthat Airbnb will keep the proprietary stuff closely guarded, of course. But it will open source “generic” tools with wider industry use cases, such as its recently releasedAerosolvemachine-learning package and itsAirpalcloud-based data querying tool. The latter, which works with Facebook’s open sourcePrestoDB, aims to simplify SQL queries to the point where you don’t need to be a big data wonk or business intelligence guru to run it. Indeed, one in three Airbnb employees have run a query on it in the year since it launched. Airbnb has contributed a dozen open source tools on its aptly namedNerds site(gotta love that!) to date, something the company hopes both contributes to greater good but also advertises its software innovation to potential hires. Google Is Wielding Its Own Secret Weapon in the Cloud—The New York Times What it’s about:In thecutthroat competitionfor public cloud business, Google may be its own best customer testimonial. In advance of this week’sOpen Network Summit, theTimes’Bits bloglooked at Google’s plan to not only unveil cloud customers such as HTC but reveal much more than ever before about its own infrastructure. Google did just that on Wednesday, offering a look inside itsdata center networking, including its massive-capacity, lightning-fast Jupiter network. Why you should care:As major cloud players continue to zap prices with their shrink-rays, it’s increasingly clear that features and underlying platforms will distinguish one from the other when enterprise users make their pick. Google is taking a big step toward writing its own story in this regard, and the synopsis might read something like: “We’re pretty good at this stuff.” Its Jupiter fabrics deliver 1 petabit per second of bisection bandwidth, according to Google, or “enough for 100,000 servers to exchange information at 10Gb/s each, enough to read the entire scanned contents of the Library of Congress in less than 1/10th of a second.” If it sounds like a bit of bragging, well, yeah—it is. But it’s bragging with a purpose: Attracting devs who want access to the same technology without having to build it themselves.Google’s Amin Vahdat connected the dots in a blog post: “The same networks that power all of Google’s internal infrastructure and services also power Google Cloud Platform.” Move Over, Meeker: Byron Deeter’s State of the Cloud Report—Bessemer Venture Partners What it’s about:With a nod to Mary Meeker’s classicState of the Internet report,Bessemer Venture Partners’Byron Deeterchecks in with his 2015 State of the Cloud Report. Given cloud computing’s relative youth and rampant ascension, it’s no surprise the stats are staggering. Here’s one to start: Cloud revenues have increased tenfold in the last six years, from a scant $5.6 billion in 2008 to more than $56 billion in 2014. And it’s going to double again in the next four years, according to BVP’s projections, to $127.5 billion in 2018. Why you should care:Deeter’s full presentation is worth a weekend watch or read, but it’s the forward-looking slides that may be most compelling for software pros. Deeter notes both the immense risks and opportunities in cloud security, unveiling a 10-point security plan for cloud startups on slide 37. To underscore the security landscape, Deeter quotes an unnamed cloud CEO who says aDDoSattack that took down the firm’s API caused more customer churn in one day than in the rest of its history. Wow. He also addresses the exploding market for cloud services built specifically for developers including, yes, New Relic. And for mobile developers, slide 44 underscores something we’ve talked about before in this space:the real money’s in enterprise apps, and it’s still a largely untapped market. Click through thefull slide deck hereorwatch video of Deeter’s presentation here. Bandwidth: The Next Frontier of Cloud Computing—ZDnet What it’s about:Is networking the next big thing in the everything-as-a-service age? It just might be, as firms likePacnetvie to deliver networking capacity on a pay-for-what-you-use model that some industry folks say better suits cloud environments facing significant but uneven networking needs. Why you should care:As author Drew Turney notes, there’s a common blind spot when it comes to cloud computing’s many shapes and sizes: Moving all that data from points A to Z, and everywhere in between, which can cause both performance problems and undue financial pressures. The promise of Networking-as-a-Service (NaaS), industry execs tell Turney, is that it can provide more efficient, scalable networking for short-term usage bursts such as customer traffic spikes or large cloud backup-and-storage jobs, enabling companies to later dial down their capacity as needed. Combined withSoftware-Defined Networking (SDN),NaaS makes it possible to build intelligent applications that manage their own networking needs, which might be the most significant enterprise potential of NaaS, saysNuage NetworksarchitectMarten Hauville. Page Bloat: Average Web Page Now More Than 2MB—The Performance Beacon (SOASTA) What it’s about:Do you need to put your website on a diet? Apparently so: The average Web page topped 2 MB as of May 2015, according to ongoing tracking atThe Performance Beacon. That’s double the average page weight from just three years ago. The site projects average page weight will exceed 3 MB in late 2017. Why you should care:Performance, performance, performance:Slow speedsare a killerin the modern software era. While author andSOASTAUX evangelistTammy Evertsrightly notes that page weight is not the only factor in Web optimization, we’re simply not paying it enough attention when designing and building Web pages. Images are the big culprit in the Web’s expanding waistline: they comprise nearly two-thirds of the average page’s weight, and video is a growing part of our Web diet, too. But other factors such as custom fonts play a role, adding weight even as the Web sheds previous performance hogs like Flash. The ideal weight? 1 MB, she says, which will save crucial seconds in load times. Sounds like it’s time to hit the virtual treadmill.

If you have been confused by Rx-java ObservablesubscribeOn and observeOn, one of the blog articles that helped me understand these operations is this one by Graham Lea. I wanted to recreate a very small part of the article here, so consider a service which emits values every 200 millseconds: package obs.threads; import obs.Util; import org.slf4j.Logger; import org.slf4j.LoggerFactory; import rx.Observable; public class GeneralService { private static final Logger logger = LoggerFactory.getLogger(GeneralService.class); public Observable getData() { return Observable.create(s -> { logger.info("Start: Executing a Service"); for (int i = 1; i <= 3; i++) { Util.delay(200); logger.info("Emitting {}", "root " + i); s.onNext("root " + i); } logger.info("End: Executing a Service"); s.onCompleted(); }); } } Now, if I were to subscribe to this service, this way: @Test public void testThreadedObservable1() throws Exception { Observable ob1 = aService.getData(); CountDownLatch latch = new CountDownLatch(1); ob1.subscribe(s -> { Util.delay(500); logger.info("Got {}", s); }, e -> logger.error(e.getMessage(), e), () -> latch.countDown()); latch.await(); } All of the emissions and subscriptions will act on the main thread and something along the following lines will be printed: 20:53:29.380 [main] INFO o.t.GeneralService - Start: Executing a Service 20:53:29.587 [main] INFO o.t.GeneralService - Emitting root 1 20:53:30.093 [main] INFO o.t.ThreadedObsTest - Got root 1 20:53:30.298 [main] INFO o.t.GeneralService - Emitting root 2 20:53:30.800 [main] INFO o.t.ThreadedObsTest - Got root 2 20:53:31.002 [main] INFO o.t.GeneralService - Emitting root 3 20:53:31.507 [main] INFO o.t.ThreadedObsTest - Got root 3 20:53:31.507 [main] INFO o.t.GeneralService - End: Executing a Service By default the emissions are not asynchronous in nature. So now, what is the behavior if subscribeOn is used: public class ThreadedObsTest { private GeneralService aService = new GeneralService(); private static final Logger logger = LoggerFactory.getLogger(ThreadedObsTest.class); private ExecutorService executor1 = Executors.newFixedThreadPool(5, new ThreadFactoryBuilder().setNameFormat("SubscribeOn-%d").build()); @Test public void testSubscribeOn() throws Exception { Observable ob1 = aService.getData(); CountDownLatch latch = new CountDownLatch(1); ob1.subscribeOn(Schedulers.from(executor1)).subscribe(s -> { Util.delay(500); logger.info("Got {}", s); }, e -> logger.error(e.getMessage(), e), () -> latch.countDown()); latch.await(); } } Here I am using Guava's ThreadFactoryBuilder to give each thread in the threadpool a unique name pattern, if I were to execute this code, the output will be along these lines: 20:56:47.117 [SubscribeOn-0] INFO o.t.GeneralService - Start: Executing a Service 20:56:47.322 [SubscribeOn-0] INFO o.t.GeneralService - Emitting root 1 20:56:47.828 [SubscribeOn-0] INFO o.t.ThreadedObsTest - Got root 1 20:56:48.032 [SubscribeOn-0] INFO o.t.GeneralService - Emitting root 2 20:56:48.535 [SubscribeOn-0] INFO o.t.ThreadedObsTest - Got root 2 20:56:48.740 [SubscribeOn-0] INFO o.t.GeneralService - Emitting root 3 20:56:49.245 [SubscribeOn-0] INFO o.t.ThreadedObsTest - Got root 3 20:56:49.245 [SubscribeOn-0] INFO o.t.GeneralService - End: Executing a Service Now, the execution has moved away from the main thread and the emissions and the subscriptions are being processed in the threads borrowed from the threadpool. And what happens if observeOn is used: public class ThreadedObsTest { private GeneralService aService = new GeneralService(); private static final Logger logger = LoggerFactory.getLogger(ThreadedObsTest.class); private ExecutorService executor1 = Executors.newFixedThreadPool(5, new ThreadFactoryBuilder().setNameFormat("SubscribeOn-%d").build()); @Test public void testObserveOn() throws Exception { Observable ob1 = aService.getData(); CountDownLatch latch = new CountDownLatch(1); ob1.observeOn(Schedulers.from(executor2)).subscribe(s -> { Util.delay(500); logger.info("Got {}", s); }, e -> logger.error(e.getMessage(), e), () -> latch.countDown()); latch.await(); } } the output is along these lines: 21:03:08.655 [main] INFO o.t.GeneralService - Start: Executing a Service 21:03:08.860 [main] INFO o.t.GeneralService - Emitting root 1 21:03:09.067 [main] INFO o.t.GeneralService - Emitting root 2 21:03:09.268 [main] INFO o.t.GeneralService - Emitting root 3 21:03:09.269 [main] INFO o.t.GeneralService - End: Executing a Service 21:03:09.366 [ObserveOn-1] INFO o.t.ThreadedObsTest - Got root 1 21:03:09.872 [ObserveOn-1] INFO o.t.ThreadedObsTest - Got root 2 21:03:10.376 [ObserveOn-1] INFO o.t.ThreadedObsTest - Got root 3 The emissions are now back on the main thread but the subscriptions are being processed in a threadpool. That is the difference, when subscribeOn is used the emissions are performed on the specified Scheduler, when observeOn is used the subscriptions are performed are on the specified scheduler! And the output when both are specified is equally predictable. Now in all cases I had created a Scheduler using a ThreadPool with 5 threads but only 1 of the threads has really been used both for emitting values and for processing subscriptions, this is actually the normal behavior of Observables. If you want to make more efficient use of the Threadpool, one approach may be to create multiple Observable's, say for eg, if I have a service which returns pages of data this way: public Observable getPages(int totalPages) { return Observable.create(new Observable.OnSubscribe() { @Override public void call(Subscriber subscriber) { logger.info("Getting pages"); for (int i = 1; i <= totalPages; i++) { subscriber.onNext(i); } subscriber.onCompleted(); } }); } and another service which acts on each page of the data: public Observable actOnAPage(int pageNum) { return Observable.create(s -> { Util.delay(200); logger.info("Acting on page {}", pageNum); s.onNext("Page " + pageNum); s.onCompleted(); }); } a way to use a Threadpool to process each page of data would be to chain it this way: getPages(5).flatMap( page -> aService.actOnAPage(page).subscribeOn(Schedulers.from(executor1)) ) .subscribe(s -> { logger.info("Completed Processing page: {}", s); }); see how the subscribeOn is on the each Observable acting on a page. With this change, the output would look like this: 21:15:45.572 [main] INFO o.t.ThreadedObsTest - Getting pages 21:15:45.787 [SubscribeOn-1] INFO o.t.GeneralService - Acting on page 2 21:15:45.787 [SubscribeOn-0] INFO o.t.GeneralService - Acting on page 1 21:15:45.787 [SubscribeOn-4] INFO o.t.GeneralService - Acting on page 5 21:15:45.787 [SubscribeOn-3] INFO o.t.GeneralService - Acting on page 4 21:15:45.787 [SubscribeOn-2] INFO o.t.GeneralService - Acting on page 3 21:15:45.789 [SubscribeOn-1] INFO o.t.ThreadedObsTest - Completed Processing page: Page 2 21:15:45.790 [SubscribeOn-1] INFO o.t.ThreadedObsTest - Completed Processing page: Page 1 21:15:45.790 [SubscribeOn-1] INFO o.t.ThreadedObsTest - Completed Processing page: Page 3 21:15:45.790 [SubscribeOn-1] INFO o.t.ThreadedObsTest - Completed Processing page: Page 4 21:15:45.791 [SubscribeOn-1] INFO o.t.ThreadedObsTest - Completed Processing page: Page 5 Now the threads in the threadpool are being used uniformly.

Opsmatic Inc., a company with a focus on creating tools to improve the effectiveness of development and operations teams, announced today the expansion of its live-state monitoring service to include Enterprise and On-Premises Editions. Opsmatic officially came out of stealth last month and continues to deliver on the promise of supporting the needs of DevOps teams, whether in the cloud or inside a corporate firewall. The Opsmatic live-state monitoring service is the only solution that provides a precise, real-time picture of the detailed configuration and changes that affect an enterprise’s computing infrastructure. The new offerings include all the features of the Professional Edition (announced last month), with the addition of a single sign-on and dedicated support in the Enterprise and On-Premises Editions. 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Alerts can also be posted to Slack, HipChat, DataDog and PagerDuty, to better support team collaboration and communication. “Our new single sign-on capability gives the entire technical team access to a central source of truth, reducing the number of configuration-related issues while increasing team velocity,” said Jim Stoneham, CEO, Opsmatic. “Our customers have said that incident triage that used to take them hours now takes minutes.” Opsmatic live-state monitoring features include: Real-time insight The Opsmatic service monitors the state of every host in real-time, providing a current and accurate picture of the configuration, as well as an instantaneous feed of any changes happening to that host. Any variation, or “drift” in configuration across host groups is also immediately visible to enable teams to fix minor issues before they escalate into downtime events, saving hours of detective work and remediation. 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Availability Opsmatic Enterprise Edition is sold as a monthly subscription, with billing based on usage: $7 per host, per month, based on the peak number of hosts being monitored each month. The Opsmatic On-Premises Edition is sold as a yearly contract by quote at [email protected]. The company offers an unlimited-use, 30-day free trial of Opsmatic Professional that is available at www.opsmatic.com/signup. No credit card is required for the free trial. General inquiries should be directed to [email protected]. About Opsmatic Inc. Opsmatic provides real-time visibility of any change in the live state of computing infrastructure and intelligently alerts users before trouble begins. The SaaS service is built on an underlying data platform with a robust API, and is integrated with popular monitoring and code automation tools to give customers complete context and provide the shared visibility required by modern DevOps teams. Founded in 2013, the Opsmatic team comprises experienced development and operations professionals who were involved at the beginning of the DevOps movement at major web-scale companies. The company is backed by leading investors in the cloud technology space, including AME Cloud Ventures (Jerry Yang), Freestyle Ventures, Illuminate Ventures and Index Ventures. For more info, please visit opsmatic.com or follow @Opsmatic on Twitter.