Baron Schwartz, the lead author of Oreilly’s “

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Twitter turned off basic authentication. Finally. Henceforth, you can’t log into Twitter via its API in the traditional sense; accordingly, the following code, which uses Twitter4J isn’t valid any longer:

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I recently caught up with Tim Berglund and had a hip conversation with him regarding open source business intelligence. Tim points out that business intelligence tools have traditionally been a high-cost part of any enterprise’s software inventory (involving lots of golf and armies of consultants); however, options have emerged that allow teams to build credible business intelligence stacks out of entirely open-source components.

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As I’ve pointed out before, sharding isn’t for everyone, but it’s one way that relational systems can meet the demands of huge data. For some shops, sharding means being able to keep a trusted database like MySQL in place without sacrificing data scalability or system performance.

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Both MongoDB and CouchDB are document-oriented datastores.

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Cédric Beust has an interesting blog post entitled “Clojure, concurrency and silver bullets” where he takes issue with the notion that Clojure can yield code that

is multithread safe and it will automatically scale.

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I recently had the opportunity to chat with Stu Halloway (the author of “

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Sid Anand, who writes the Practical Cloud Computing blog, has a series of posts entitled “SimpleDB Essentials for High Performance Users” in which he outlines a set of best practices and conventions for effectively leveraging SimpleDB. If you are using SimpleDB or are planning to, I highly recommend reading his points as they are super hip. Check out:

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I’m excited to announce that IBM developerWorks has launched a new series of podcasts hosted by yours truly. These podcasts feature technical discussions with various (opinionated) luminaries on a diverse set of subjects ranging from Git to Clojure to Griffon and even .NET (just to name a few!).

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There’s an interesting thread of comments related to a blog post by Stephen Colebourne, who is giving a talk at this year’s JavaOne entitled “Next Big JVM language.” In particular, he and others note that the Fantom language could be the answer (I find this interesting as Fantom really wasn’t even on my radar. Until now.).

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Modeling domain objects for almost any type of application is a breeze using a relational framework like Grails, but what about SimpleDB? This article published by IBM DeveloperWorks entitled “Cloud storage with Amazon’s SimpleDB, Part 2″ shows you how to use SimpleJPA, rather than the Amazon SDK, to persist objects in SimpleDB’s cloud storage.

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I recently saw that Grails supports sharding via a nifty plugin. Briefly, sharding (as defined in Wikipedia) is a method of horizontal partitioning

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There’s an interesting interview with the creators of Twig, Objectify-Appengine, and SimpleDS, which are all ORM-like frameworks built for the GAE that facilitate working with the underlying datastore (an abstraction of Bigtable).

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As part of the Amazon Web Services family, Amazon’s SimpleDB is a massively scalable and reliable key/value datastore, which is exposed via a web interface and can be accessed using any language you’d like — from Java to Ruby to Perl to C#. In fact, Amazon has recently released a standardized SDK for both the .NET and Java platforms.

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Recently a bogue error popped up with an existing Grails project at a client site. In an effort to abstract core domain logic (i.e. business rules) for a financial application, we decided to leverage Drools; consequently, after some prototyping of rules in a non-Grails project, we decided to start evaluating the Grails Drools plugin.

After installing said plugin, however, Grails failed to start up, instead issuing the error:

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