n this two part article series by Xuekun Kou, we will discuss how to configure clusters for the GlassFish Server, and use a load balancer to distribute load across the server instances in the cluster. We will also discuss the High Availability (HA) options supported by GlassFish, and how to enable HA. The goal of this article is to help you gain the knowledge necessary for planning and creating a production-ready GlassFish Server deployment.

Cloud computing and software development for handheld devices are two very hot technologies that are increasingly being combined to create hybrid solutions. With this article, learn how to connect Google App Engine, Google's cloud computing offering, with the iPhone, Apple's mobile platform. You'll also see how to use the open source library, TouchEngine, to dynamically control application data on the iPhone by connecting to the App Engine cloud and caching that data for offline use.

This article explains how to set up a continuous delivery environment using build pipelines with Jenkins and Ant.

This article examines the whys and wherefores of continuous integration, and examines two of the leading (open source) tools for providing this service: Draco.NET and CruiseControl.NET. You will see how to get each up and running, and compare their strengths and weaknesses to determine when each is a better fit for your organization.

The basics of installing and configuring the Hudson continuous integration engine to continuously build and test Oracle Application Development Framework applications

The inception of the Extreme Programming methodology has brought test-driven development and continuous integration into mainstream Java development practices. Applying these techniques to Java server-side development can quickly become a nightmare if you don't have the right tools. This article describes how to deal with continuous integration and how to use DbUnit in conjunction with JUnit to control the test environment end-to-end by setting up the state of the database before each test.

The simple fact that Java applications need a JRE to run makes their deployment a more complicated task than if they were native executables. This article presents the ways of transforming a Java program into a native executable, as well as alternative ways to achieve the same goals. The Resources section points to numerous related documents, articles and tools.

Explore the creation of a framework, called Butterfly, that runs in PHP 5 and facilitates the applications of chains of XSLT stylesheets to XML source documents. This provides transparent caching of the transformed results. Inspired by the Java™-based Apache Cocoon project, so named because it houses and manages the transformation of data from one form to another (turning caterpillars into butterflies), this much lighter-weight framework is named Butterfly. With the Butterfly framework, you can set up an XML configuration file to define chains of stylesheet transformations, and then instantiate Butterfly objects that can each produce the result of an XSLT transformation chain. This article will also look at the nature of framework design in general as it sketches out this framework in particular.

XML seems like a natural format for passing Ajax data. However, to work with XML in JavaScript using the Document Object Model (DOM) is not always the best way to handle this kind of data. This has given rise to other choices, such as JSON, which provide a more object-like feel for developers. Now ECMAScript for XML (E4X) combines many of the best features of the DOM with extremely easy data binding to provide a more straightforward way to deal with XML in the browser. In this two-part article series, you'll learn to use both E4X and the Prototype JavaScript library to create a simple Ajax mindreader application that plays Twenty Questions and learns about new objects as it goes along. Part 1 shows you how to create a system that takes an existing knowledge base and analyzes it to determine what the user may be thinking.

In this article series, the sample application will be less sophisticated. Instead, you will implement a simple binary search, an algorithm that works on the theory that if you continue to eliminate as many non-suitable items in a set as possible that you'll eventually get to the one that you want. In fact, the name "twenty questions" stems from the theory that a set of everything in the universe can be narrowed down to just one item using about 20 different yes-or-no questions to narrow things down. In Part 2, you'll start to train the system for new items. If it guesses wrong, the system asks what the correct item was and how to distinguish it from the rest of the knowledge base. It then adds that item to the knowledge base and starts again. Finally, you'll integrate that functionality with an external database so that everybody benefits from what the system learns from others.