Sabeer Bhatia launches free SMS app Jaxtr

Sabeer Bhatia, the founder of Hotmail.com, on Tuesday launched JaxtrSMS, a mobile application that lets users send unlimited free text messages to any other phone anywhere in the world.
He claimed JaxtrSMS is the world's first mobile-based application for sending SMS that is completely open as the recipients do not need to have the app installed

It is already available as a free download for all major mobile operating systems - iOS, Android, Blackberry and J2ME. In fact, users in 197 countries have already downloaded the app within a few weeks since the soft launch, said Bhatia, who is CEO & co-founded Jaxtr with Yogesh Patel in US. JaxtrSMS is unique in that a mobile user can send a text SMS to any mobile phone in the world without requiring the receiver to have the JaxtrSMS application installed on her phone. This "open" facet of JaxtrSMS distinguishes it from other free mobile messaging applications such as Whatsapp where messages can only be sent within a closed network to people who also have the same app installed. JaxtrSMS retains the number of the user and no new number is required while signing up for the JaxtrSMS service.

"15 years ago, we gave you Hotmail.com, the world's first webmail service that freed up e-mail from the confines of the desktop and aided the creation of a global communications network which was completely open and free for users. Today, we present JaxtrSMS which does to SMS what Hotmail did for e-mail. Now, mobile users can leverage our free and open application to send messages to their contacts anywhere across the world without having to pay anything," said Bhatia. "JaxtrSMS was completely developed in India. I am proud to showcase this as an example of Indian innovation and ingenuity," said Yogesh Patel, president & co-founder

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 Beta Available

Red Hat has just announced the availability of its Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) 3.0 public beta. This release, open to all, brings an updated KVM hypervisor based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 and scales to 128 logical CPUs and 2TB of memory for host machines.

With the latest beta, Red hat has updated its RHEV Manager application to a Java app running on JBoss. RHEV 3.0 now has a 'power user portal' that allows users to provision VMs and define VM templates.

Another important addition to RHEV 3.0 is a RESTful API that can be used to manage and configure 'all aspects' of RHEV 3.0. It also sports a new reporting engine for analysis of usage trends, and to produce utilization reports. For companies using RHEV as part of their virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), Red Hat has added some optimizations around WAN access that include better compression and automatic tuning for desktop color depth and effects.

The first beta of RHEV 3.0 was announced in August, but was not available to the general public. You needed to have an active RHEV subscription at that time. The evaluation is immediately available to anyone with a Red Hat Network account.

The installation and testing is a bit more complex than just slapping RHEL onto a server. To run the beta with the recommended evaluation, you'll need to have a RHEV manager server, two or more hypervisor servers, and shared storage for the systems. You can run the eval with just a single manager server and a single hypervisor server with local storage, however. The download consists of a RHEL 6 ISO and the RHEV Hypervisor ISO.

If you're getting started with RHEV, you might want to check out a series of posts by Red Hat's Richard W.M. Jones. These were from August when RHEV was first released into beta, but should still prove useful. So, who's downloading the beta tonight?

tese

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Tomcat 7.0 (No JDK required)

Today when i was installing tomcat 6 on my local system i noticed that it didn't asked me to install JDK first like it is use to ask in versions previous than 5.5.Most of us who install Tomcat on our development machines wouldn’t have noticed that Tomcat versions before 5.5 required the full blown Java Development Kit (JDK) to be installed on the machine. Just installing the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) wasn’t enough. The JDK is meant for developers to be able to compile Java programs, and has the development tools such as the compiler, debugger and other development libraries. Tomcat versions prior to 5.5 used the Java compiler that comes with the JDK to compile JSP pages at runtime and consequently required a full blown JDK.

Tomcat versions 5.5 and above have a Java compiler (the Eclipse JDT Java compiler) packaged along with it. Now, this is used to compile the JSP pages dynamically instead of the JDK compiler. Hence, it is enough if we just install JRE starting from Tomcat version 5.5 and above.

Java 1.7

I have been reading quite a lot about Java 1.7. There are articles about what's new, some code examples, some benchmark to compare performance with previous version of Java and discussion on when it will be released. I have decided to regroup all I have discovered in this article so that I and maybe you, won't have to spend hours surfing the web to find all this information. Don't hesitate to leave a comment if I missed something.
What's new in Java 1.7?

So what made it through is the following:
§ Strings in switch
§ Automatic Resource Management
§ Improved Type Inference for Generic Instance Creation (diamond)
§ Simplified Varargs Method Invocation
§ An omnibus proposal for better integral literals
§ Language support for Collections
§ Language support for JSR 292

These features are divided in different categories:

VM
§ Compressed 64-bit object pointers
§ Garbage-First GC (G1)
§ JSR 292: VM support for non-Java languages (InvokeDynamic)

lang
§ SR 294: Language and VM support for modular programming
§ JSR 308: Annotations on Java types
§ JSR TBD: Small language enhancements (the Project Coin I was talking about)
§ JSR TBD: Project Lambda

core
§ Modularization (Project Jigsaw)
§ Upgrade class-loader architecture
§ Method to close a URLClassLoader
§ Unicode 5.1
§ Concurrency and collections updates (jsr166y)
§ JSR 203: More new I/O APIs for the Java platform (NIO.2)
§ SCTP (Stream Control Transmission Protocol)
§ SDP (Sockets Direct Protocol)
§ Elliptic-curve cryptography (ECC)

client
§ XRender pipeline for Java 2D
§ Forward-port 6u10 deployment features
§ Create new platform APIs for 6u10 graphics features
§ Nimbus look-and-feel for Swing
§ Swing JLayer component

web
§ Update the XML stack
As you can see there is a lot of stuff. I personally tried the new Garbage Collector (G1) a few months back and was really impressed by the performance. Unfortunately the JVM was crashing every few hours so it couldn't be used for production. This GC is available in Java 1.6 as well but same thing, it crashes every so often.
I think that's it for the new features. Maybe it's a good idea to see some code examples now.

Dependency Injection

Java components / classes should be as independent as possible of other Java classes. This increases the possibility to reuse these classes and to test them independently of other classes(Unit Testing). To decouple Java components from other Java components the dependency to a certain other class should get injected into them rather that the class itself creates / finds this object.

A class A has a dependency to class B if class uses class B as a variable.

If dependency injection is used then the class B is given to class A via

the constructor of the class A - this is then called construction injection

a setter - this is then called setter injection

The general concept between dependency injection is called Inversion of Control. A class should not configure itself but should be configured from outside.

A design based on independent classes / components increases the re-usability and possibility to test the software. For example if a class A expects a Dao (Data Access object) for receiving the data from a database you can easily create another test object which mocks the database connection and inject this object into A to test A without having an actual database connection.

A software design based on dependency injection is possible with standard Java.

Google+ Approaches 18 Million Users

Google+ continues to set records as the fastest-growing social network in history, but Google’s social juggernaut is beginning to show signs that it’s losing steam.

Ancestry.com co-founder Paul Allen (not to be confused with the Microsoft co-founder of the same name) posted his most recent analysis of Google+’s growth on his Google+ account Tuesday. According to his analysis, the search giant’s Facebook competitor will likely reach 18 million users by the end of Tuesday, but its growth rate has dropped by 50% from its peak.

“Last week we saw two days where more than 2 million signed up in a single day,” Allen said in his post. “If that rate had continued, Google+ would have reached 20 million users by last Sunday night. But the last four days have averaged only 948,000 new users, and yesterday the site added only 763,000. Yesterday’s growth of 4.47% was the slowest viral growth since Google opened up invites back on July 6.”

Why is Google+’s growth slowing down? Google Trends indicates that the buzz around Google+ has died down some, which is natural for any major news item. Allen makes the important point that Google+ hasn’t been promoted by any of its other properties and that the social network is still invite-only. Once Google+ is promoted on YouTube or on Google.com, its growth may simply skyrocket.

Allen estimated that Google+ hit the 10 million user mark sometime on July 12 or 13. Google CEO Larry Page confirmed that Google+ had more than 10 million users during an investor earnings call on July 14. Its most followed user, Mark Zuckerberg, now has more than 250,000 followers, despite not posting a single public item on his Google+ account.