New Release of Leading Transaction Management Software Makes SOA Transactions Safer and More Reliable

MECHELEN, BELGIUM–(Marketwire – May 11, 2009) – Atomikos, a leading provider of transaction management software for SOA, XTP and Open Source environments, announced today the latest release of its commercial software product, Atomikos ExtremeTransactions®. Version 3.6 of Atomikos ExtremeTransactions® introduces new and advanced web services support aimed at making transaction management in SOA environments faster, safer, and more reliable.

Strategic SOA-based business services are becoming a dominant element in business transformation, allowing businesses to flexibly respond and react quickly to changing business conditions. SOA-based transactions are defined as tasks that are composed of one or more operations or related interactions that may need to be cancelled or “rolled back” after the point of execution.

SiteQuarters have just launched a new online service for dynamic PDF generation. Online PDF Printer is a service that lets developers integrate custom, dynamic PDF creation and downloading into their web-enabled applications with just a few lines of code; the examples are in PHP, but it’s actually language-agnostic.

All you have to do is sign up for an API key, upload your document templates and POST data to their server. OnlinePDFPrinter will handle everything else. A stream of PDF data is passed back to your application and you can save it as a file, prompt the user to download it right then and there or push it into a database. Free and premium accounts are available, depending upon a user’s needs.

jsDraw2D is a pure JavaScript library to draw 2D graphics on web pages inside web browser without using SVG or VML. JavaScript developers, web developers and webmasters can take advantage of the library to add graphics drawing functionality to their web applications or websites using the library. The library is entirely written in JavaScript and does not need any plug-in or additional software to run/execute. The JavaScript source code of the library is open and free under a “Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported” License.

The library provides the option to set co-ordinate system, origin, scale, and many other interesting features. Below a sample code using jsDraw2D :


//Create jsGraphics object
var gr = new jsGraphics(document.getElementById("canvas"));


//Create jsColor object
var col = new jsColor("red");


//Create jsPen object
var pen = new jsPen(col,1);


//Draw a Line between 2 points
var pt1 = new jsPoint(20,30);
var pt2 = new jsPoint(120,230);
gr.drawLine(pen,pt1,pt2);


//Draw filled circle with pt1 as center point and radius 30.
gr.fillCircle(col,pt1,30);


//You can also code with inline object instantiation like below
gr.drawLine(pen,new jsPoint(40,10),new jsPoint(70,150));

Sun and Oracle announced today a definitive agreement for Oracle to acquire Sun for $9.50 per share in cash. The transaction is valued at approximately $7.4 billion, or $5.6 billion net of Sun’s cash and debt. An agreement that will make of Oracle the first competitor to IBM by having Sun technologies in hardware, Java, Operation system (Solaris), Open Office and even the most popular open source database for the web MySQL !

“The acquisition of Sun transforms the IT industry, combining best-in-class enterprise software and mission-critical computing systems,” said Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. “Oracle will be the only company that can engineer an integrated system – applications to disk – where all the pieces fit and work together so customers do not have to do it themselves. Our customers benefit as their systems integration costs go down while system performance, reliability and security go up.”

The deal could have very positive effect on Oracle business as mentioned Oracle CEO, especially by providing full solution from hardware, operation system, Java, in addition to Oracle business and database solutions. But until the deal close and real result of this acquisition become visible, things might gets worse before it gets better.

Darren pointed to a new feature in Google images search letting you to filter results by color ! The results looks very accurate that you will be interested to know how google are indexing colors ? Are they using image recognition techniques to index every image in their database ? That will be crazy if you think about it, but the answer could be easily found in something launched about three years ago, an ajax game, letting everyone to tag images and get scored on that : The image labeler.

Because the results are very accurate and fast, it can only be something based on a real human indexing ! You can see below for example if you search for a car model, you can get the result you are looking for, but imagine you want to see only gray cars in results, the filter can really give you what you are looking for. While if you used “gray” as keyword in search you will get something else completely different.

I find the color filter implementation very successful. Image search is getting more and more powerful search features and I expect to see more amazing filtering options, who knows !