At App47, our production MongoDB instance is managed by MongoHQ — that is, we use their PaaS to host our data and leave the details of running and maintaining MongoDB instances up to them. It’s a handy service and worth the money at this point in our company’s evolution (eventually we might need more control over our instances and thus might look to take on some of these responsibilities, etc).

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MongoDB is a scalable, high-performance, document-oriented schemaless database. This short demo, entitled “An Introduction to MongoDB“, provides a quick tour of its use, and helps you understand where it’s most applicable. You’ll see first hand how to leverage Mongo’s shell and use its JavaScript syntax to CRUD data.

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Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) borrows what it needs from message-oriented middleware (MOM) but doesn’t lock you in to any one implementation language or framework. In this article, entitled “Cloud-based messaging with Amazon SQS” learn how to use Amazon SQS to alleviate the burden of installing and maintaining a message-queuing system, while leveraging the pay-as-you-go scalability of AWS.

Follow along as this demo, entitled “An introduction to Amazon SimpleDB“, guides you through an introduction to SimpleDB, a massively scalable, highly available key/value datastore.

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Java developers have historically perceived JavaScript as a toy language, both too lightweight for real programming and too clunky to be of use as a scripting alternative. And yet JavaScript is still around, and it’s the basis of exciting web technologies like GWT and Node.js.

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Amazon’s Relational Database Service (RDS) offloads the work of maintaining a database to Amazon Web Services, which makes it exceptionally easy to increase or swap out your application’s data storage. This article, entitled “Play-ing with Amazon RDS” revisits a location-based cloud-to-mobile application, swapping the original NoSQL datastore for a traditional RDBMS. It’s a breeze using the Play framework and the AWS console.

Considering moving into the cloud are you? Well then, have I got something for you! Not too long ago, I had the opportunity to catch up with Paul Duvall, the CTO of Stelligent and we, indeed, talked about this very lofty subject. In this podcast, Paul details the many considerations and options a company must investigate to migrate its infrastructure smoothly and safely.

I recently caught up with my old friend, Dan Allen, who is a Red Hat principal software engineer and open source evangelist. In this podcast, he explains how Arquillian eases integration testing by providing a test harness to abstract away container life cycle and deployment from test logic.

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A few interesting pieces of data:

• 70% of the world’s population has a mobile phone
• over a million Android devices are activated weekly
• 1/2 of all local searches are done on a mobile device
• over 90% of mobile Internet access is social media related

Clearly, if you aren’t building mobile apps today, you will be soon.

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Not too long ago, I wrote about JavaScript; specifically, I espoused it as a language worthy of a Java developers attention mainly due to the fact that JavaScript, while about as old as Java, is arguably the more popular language. Yes, you’ve read that correctly — JavaScript itself is probably one of the widest leveraged languages ever — scores of developers know it whether they be PHP programmers or Ruby developers or even .NET developers.

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A few weeks back, I was interviewed by Scott Laningham, Editor & Host of The developerWorks Podcast.

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I’m a huge fan of git-flow; it’s branching model facilitates a release model, supporting multiple versions and branches, quite nicely. For instance, during a development phase, all commits are made to the develop branch; consequently, when it’s time to push a release into production, a release branch is created, which essentially merges everything in develop into master.

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Gretty is one of a new school of ultra-lightweight frameworks made for building web services. Built on top of the blazingly fast Java NIO APIs, Gretty leverages Groovy as a domain-specific language for web endpoints and Grape’s Maven-style dependency management. In this article, get started with using Gretty to build and deploy Java web service applications.

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I recently had the opportunity to chat with Loggly CTO and co-founder Jon Gifford about the concept of logging as a service and how it allows for easier log management and manipulation. Loggly’s service is amazingly easy to stand-up — in fact, we’re using Loggly heavily at App47.

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EC2 is essentially a virtual computer running the OS of your choice along with various options for memory, CPU speed, and storage. EC2 is an Infrastructure as a service: itʼs bare bones computing power without the need for you to go out and buy a bunch of servers because someone (amazon.com, man) already did that for you! In fact, with EC2, you essentially rent computing resources in a data center managed by someone else.

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