Update: Sun has expanded its Cloud Computing portfolio with the recent acquisition of Qlayer, a cloud computing company that automates the deployment and management of both public and private clouds.  The Q-layer organization, based in Belgium, is now part of Sun's Cloud Computing business unit which develops and integrates cloud computing technologies, architectures and services.

Cloud computing is about managing petascale data. Sun's server and storage systems can radically improve the data-intensive computing emerging in the cloud. Some clouds are closed platforms that lock you in. Sun's open source philosophy and Java principles form the core of a strategy that provides interoperability for large-scale computing resources. Sun's virtualization solutions for advanced …

Hi, all. This is tentative. You know draft. But here is the list of things we're thinking of doing around database tooling for the next release of NetBeans.

Don't expect anything more than what is listed in the "P2" section. The P3 section is an unordered list of other ideas, and if we have time, we'll pick some of them off. If there are specific things that you really want, please let me know. And of course, any other feedback you have is always much appreciated.

The two main themes are: add more SQL integration with the PHP editor, and improve our overall UI experience.

We also would like to produce a plugin for a visual E/R tool (what I am calling a Visual Database Explorer to distinguish it from a full E/R tool like MySQL Workbench). We want people to test drive …

A compilation of today's news of interest:

Gads, someone else asking for E/R diagram support. We have 36 votes for this in Issuezilla. What is it with you guys?

First of all, MySQL Workbench really owns this space. Yes, I know, right now it only runs on Windows, but the next release will fix that. And, yes, I know it only works for MySQL, but the promise is that they will fix that too, albeit not right away. 

Secondly, NetBeans DB tooling has a huge opportunity because we're part of the IDE.  An E/R diagram tool doesn't really leverage that advantage.  There are things we can do that will make your day-to-day experience of slogging code for database applications really nice.  But we can't be doing that if we're spending all our time writing an E/R tool.

That said, we're looking very …

Hey, all. Petr Pisl, the technical lead for PHP support in NetBeans, and I will be giving a MySQL University webinar tomorrow entitled "Working With PHP and MySQL in NetBeans." We'll be demonstrating the PHP and database tooling features available in NetBeans.

The webinar is live, and you can ask questions via a chat-based interface. It's at 9:00 am San Francisco time, you can see what that is in your local time here.

The webinar is limited to 20 people, so it will be first come, first serve. Apologies about the small "classroom" size -- MySQL University just started using …

I have accepted invitation from David Van Couvering to attend his session and present the PHP features in NetBeans. The session will take place this Thursday, 23rd October and will start at 9:00 Pacific Time (18:00 CET, 17:00 BST). We will use DimDim presentation system so everybody can attend. But  the session has limited capacity of attendees. More info about the session you can find here.

If you are interested, attend the session.

The next MySQL University session will take place this Thursday, 23rd October. David Van Couvering will show how to use NetBeans with MySQL.

Note that this session will start at 9:00 Pacific Time (18:00 CET, 17:00 BST).

For this session, we'll use a new presentation system that we hope will make things much easier for both presenters and attendees: Dimdim (www.dimdim.com). If it works out as expected, Dimdim will replace our current presentation system which required attendees to open a browser, connect to an IRC channel on Freenode, and open some fancy URL with a voice streaming application. With Dimdim, all that needs to be done is point your browser to a URL, and that's it. …

CIO published an article highlighting 5 cheap (or free) software that can be afforded during financial crisis. Their recommendations are:

• Open Office ($0) instead of Microsoft Office ($110 for basic version)
• Mozilla Thunderbird ($0) instead of Microsoft Outlook (lots of security issues)
• GnuCash ($0) instead of Quicken ($30 for starter edition)
• Alfresco ($0) instead of Sharepoint ($5K for five licenses)
• …

A compilation of today's news of interest:

TOTD #42 explained how to create a simple Java Server Faces application using NetBeans 6.1 and deploy on GlassFish. In the process it explained some basic JSF concepts as well. If you remember, it built an application that allows you to create a database of cities/country of your choice. In that application, any city/country combination can be entered twice and no errors are reported.

This blog entry extends TOTD #42 and show the list of cities, that have already been entered, starting with the letters entered in the text box. And instead of refreshing the entire page, it uses JSF Extensions to make an Ajax call to the endpoint and show the list of cities based upon …