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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