Last year we created a system called « call for paper », which allows anyone to propose their session and be part of the official program! Its success was made apparent through over 50 proposed sessions and nearly 20 callbacks!

Once again this year, we invite you to propose your session, with the deadline set on the 4th of March, 2013:

• Do you have a biography, a session title and resume, and a high-definition picture?
• Are you an opinion leader, a referent on one or more IT subjects, a super geek, a manager, or part of IS department?

Then you’re ready! We need your contibutions, your ideas, and your knowledge to make the 5th yearly USI an event as great as the reputation that proceeds it. As many as 700 guests are expected this year!

The USI team will determine, after having studied your proposition, the length of your session (20 or 40 minutes). For a callback, the first criteria will be the quality of the proposed session’s resume (depth and form). Thus we count on you to send your best work, one that will astound members of the jury.
The USI team will study every proposition and select those that seem the most interesting. You may be invited to come present your session beforehand, and the final list of accepted candidates will be announced at the end of March 2013.

You can also see the list of proposed sessions online, and vote for the ones that you most want to see at USI 2013. The USI site has everything you need to post sessions on popular social networks, allowing you to easily share your session with those around you. So don’t hesitate!

Click here to submit a session for USI

A glass to your candidacy then, and thank you!
The USI team

This is the END.

We created an iPad app for Keytrade Bank, and we just launched it!, You can download it here.

Please contact us if you what to talk with us about this reference & our expertise!
 

Mixed feelings: happiness because it’s really a major achievement, nostalgia because we really loved building this app and now we are just slightly nervous as we hope users will love to consult their accounts, transfer money and trade using the Keytrade app as much as we enjoyed creating it.

For the banking part, this app allows one to customize accounts (rename accounts, assign pictures to each account), to consult the list of transactions, to transfer money and to visualize the monthly In & Out of an account with clear charts.

With respect to trading, our app offers a heatmap updated in real time with all the markets and all companies (when available from provider) and, of course, buying and selling stocks is possible from within the app. One can also consult the personal portfolio containing an overview of all trades.

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I had a job opportunity recently to work as an SOA architect, on SOA projects, in the SOA team of a consulting company. As many companies still make it their marketing, at OCTO we get annoyed with the negative effect of SOA term usage in lots of situations. Such situations include confusing marketing purposes, global IT strategy of a company, or SOA compliant architectures of many kinds. These approximations tend to hide weaknesses behind this term. We rather prefer to discuss on concrete solutions with respect to customer needs, and SOA is all but concrete with its abstractions.

Most discussions about SOA are sterile, because nobody is giving the same meaning to this acronym. Talking about it generates more confusion and misunderstanding than bringing real life problems to light. The goal of this article is not to propose one more SOA definition, but to analyze recurrent perceptions of what SOA could be. These perceptions are indifferently observed at various actors, as IT end users, software vendors and consulting companies. Do not feel offended if you recognize yourself in one of the given cases. We all forge our perception of what SOA really means, as a mix of all these points of view, and more.

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After applying as much as possible the DevOps principles for more than a year on the run of a highly business critical project of one of our customers, here are some golden rules we eventually found out and tried to stick with. Items are here presented from an Ops perspective.

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As the Apache Hadoop ecosystem grows while its core matures, there are now several companies providing business-class Hadoop distribution and services. While EMC, after it acquires Greenplum, seem the biggest player other companies such as Cloudera or MapR are also competing.

This article introduces Datastax Brisk, an innovative Hadoop distribution that leverage Apache Hive data warehouse infrastructure on top of an HDFS-compatible storage layer, based on Cassandra. Brisk try to reconcile real-time applications with low-latency requirement (OLTP) and big data analytics (OLAP) in one system. “Oh really ?”
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It’s been a while since we last blogged about Apache Cassandra. Let’s catch up with the new features available from version 0.7+.

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I’m starting today a new series of articles called Classical Issues. In it, I’ll address, one after the other, classical issues encountered through my software engineering years.

This first article is targeted to demystify computing and give some best practices for an enterprise application. By enterprise application, we mean an application working on things like money, prices and quantities. It will be in two parts. This one is about explaining the root of the problem. The second one will show how to handle it in Java and .Net.

Bill is developing a software doing commission payments. He needs to add 1.2$ to each transaction. He codes a method doing just that and the unit test coming along.

 @Test
 public void testAddCommission() {
  double actual = addCommission(1000000.1);
  assertEquals(1000001.3, actual, 0);
 }

 public static double addCommission(double nominal) {
  return nominal + 1.2f;
 }

java.lang.AssertionError: expected:<1000001.3> but was:<1000001.3000000477>

“Darn! It’s not working!”.

What’s going on?
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