Let’s Answer The Question: What is Cloud Computing?
Buzzwords and acronyms are a mixed blessing.  On one hand, they are a very useful shorthand for those who are ‘in the know’.  However, for those who have no idea what it means, a phrase like “Web 2.0″ or an acronym like “SEO” can be a barrier to understanding, and for those who are too ashamed of their ignorance to ask, they risk using these terms incorrectly.

One of the newer phrases being bandied about is “Cloud Computing”.  In order to take the mystery out of the term (and allow us to use the term correctly), let’s answer that question:  What is Cloud Computing?

Getting Virtual With Your Servers
To understand Cloud Computing, first you have to understand the concept of Virtualization. Virtualization is the ability to run several standalone disk images on the same server.  Being able to create an image of your machine is technology that we’ve been using for years.  A typical machine backup involves making an image of the machine and pushing it to another server.  Then, when you need to restore your data, you can simply load the disk image onto your new hard drive.

Virtualization is just like this, except you take this disk image and you run it.  It’s like having an OS inside of another OS.  So you might have a Linux machine that is running several different Virtual machines, disk images that were created and loaded onto the server and assigned an IP address so that you can hit that virtual machine directly.

A Traditional Server Is A Great Big Desktop Computer On Steroids
A traditional server is a great big desktop computer on steroids, with hundreds or even thousands of different websites running on it.  They usually will share a single SQL server, run under the same OS, and everything on the server rises and falls together.  So if Site A has a big day and receives a hundred thousand requests, it can impact the performance of Site B because Site B resides on the same server and shares resources with Site A (and about a hundred other sites).

There are notable downsides to this traditional approach, namely:

• Hardware Expense- When hardware breaks or gets old and obsolete, you’re going to reinvest in the server that’s been purchased.
• Inefficiency- Of the 100 sites on a server, do all of them really need access to 16GB of RAM?  You’re usually increasing your server resources to account for 1 or 2 very busy/intensive sites on a server.
• Shared Risk- When the hard drive of your server fails, every site on the server is going to suffer.  When the OS encounters a “blue screen of death” sort of error, it’s going to bring down the entire server.  Why should 99 sites suffer for the failure caused by a single site?

There Is A Better Way Up In The Clouds
“There’s got to be a better way!” cries our paid sponsor, and there is.  Virtualization offers us the ability to grant every site its very own server, at a fraction of the cost.  The hardware doesn’t really matter, because you’re only going to allocate a small portion of system resources to each virtual machine.  So even though the server might have 16GB of RAM available, “Bob and Jo’s Kitty Cat Site” might only need a max of 256MB of RAM to run smoothly.  If we need to ’scale up’ and provide extra system resources for Bob and Jo’s Kitty Cat Site, we can do that easily and tell our server to allocate 512MB of RAM to the server instead.

This resolves the issue of shared risk, since if Bob and Jo’s Kitty Cat Site encounters a horrible error that requires a restart, you’re only restarting the Virtual Machine that runs on the server, rather than the entire server itself.  Service Interruption for a single client, rather than everyone on the server.

This also resolves the issues of efficiency and hardware expense, because at a more granular level you can assess the resource requirements of a site and limit a site to only using the resources it needs, rather than infringing on the resources needed by a more resource-intensive site.

With these advantages, it is no wonder so many companies are moving apps into “the cloud”.  Cloud providers like Amazon EC2 and Rackspace offer a very tempting proposal:  Create as many servers as you want for a fraction of the cost of doing things “the old way”.  Backups and maintenance on the hardware are handled already by the cloud providers, all that a web hosting company has to do is make sure that everything is running smoothly within the virtual machine itself.

Cloud Computing Offers An Inexpensive & Hassle-free Solution
Hopefully this has de-mystified some of the questions regarding Cloud Computing.  ArcStone has been using this capability for some time in managing our own servers, and after all of the advantages provided to using this method, it’s hard for us to imagine ever going back.

Of course, this solution is not the right one for all situations, and you should first evaluate the pros and cons of hosting a physical server of your own versus utilizing a cloud computing strategy.  In most web apps, however, cloud computing offers an inexpensive and hassle-free solution for your hosting needs.

If you’re interested in learning more about ArcStone’s hosting options see our email and web hosting services page.

Any web developer will tell you that they love Firefox and we are no different. Firefox is an open-sourced web browser, that has promoted innovation and creativity in the web development community for the last five years. As we invent better ways of doing things, Firefox molds and evolves to keep up with us. Today, Firefox officially celebrates its 5th birthday.

Mmmmm, Firefox cake…

We would like to wish the folks of Mozilla a happy Firefox birthday because it has been a favorite platform for us to make our award-winning websites. Here is to the next 5 years and beyond… Cheers!

Firefox, currently at version 3.5, is a free web browser that can be downloaded at http://www.firefox.com.

As was recently announced, Railo, the open source CF engine, has finally given ColdFusion to the masses.  March 31st saw the release of the first 3.1 public beta, providing full feature compliance with Adobe’s ColdFusion 8 standard, and allowing developers to begin porting over existing sites to Railo.  The ability to port over existing sites, or to spin up entire servers for a client without running into the pesky licensing costs of ColdFusion is one of the developments that has me the most excited about Railo.

Previous versions of Railo (including the promising but ultimately not CF8-compliant and buggy 3.0) have been known to provide phenomenal speed increases, but without the ability to fully support the CF standard there have been compatibility issues with web software firms attempting to make a move to Railo.  This, combined with a lack of true enterprise capabilities led many to dub the platform unready for prime time.  Railo 3.1 is about to change all of that, at least once it is finally out of beta.

I have not yet had time to play with Railo 3.1 too much, but they provide an express install that isn’t really an install, so it has been very easy.  Just extract to a folder, double click the ’start’ script to start the application/web server, and then you can immediately browse to it at http://localhost:8888.  Drop code into the Railo webroot folder, and you can start testing existing apps against Railo.  The administrator for Railo 3.0 was very sparse compared to the CF administrator that ColdFusion developers know and love.  Not so with Railo 3.1.  The server adminstrator which manages the more global settings has a separate password from the web administrator, and there are numerous settings available, many specifically tailored towards compatibility with CF8, but there are also enhancements beyond what Adobe provides. Additional enhanced selections within the administrator, such as “convert 0000-00-00 MySQL dates to NULL” seem like a sensible upgrade to the default behavior of CF, others probably depend on the needs of your application.  Missing at this point in the release is the much ballyhooed cfvideo tag, a cluster scope (though Railo supports J2EE sessions at this point), and clustered caching.  With a CF license costs no longer at issue, expect Railo’s clustering functionality to get a full workout in the coming months.

Installing extensions, and restarting the cf service are available within the administrator as well.  Things like Galleon forums, the Mach-II framework, and other open source CF goodies.  Additional providers can be added via the server, too, (this works very similarly to how plugin providers are added via the Eclipse IDE) and updating the server software is also possible within the Railo admin itself.  One of the weirdest things for anyone that has restarted a ColdFusion service before is that Railo’s cf restart is darned-near instantaneous.  Everyone gets logged out on the server, as sessions and other scopes are cleared, but other than that, there is no painful delay waiting for the service to kick in while site visitors are crashing into technical looking 500 server error screens as is so often the case with a typical ColdFusion restart.  It’s…eerie.  It is also a distinct improvement, but performance has always been Railo’s most promising and consistent offering in their platform.

You can bet that many people across the internets have been tinkering with Railo 3.1 lately, especially in tandem with Amazon’s EC2 or similar cloud service, in order to provide things like open source load-balanced J2EE session-scoped cluster farms.  Suddenly, stunningly, ColdFusion developers are now enjoying something that PHP developers have been able to enjoy for years.  I welcome an open CF8 standard (whether Adobe has created or simply joined the CF standard is unclear) and a fully-featured open source ColdFusion application server.  It is clear that this can only mean good things for CFML and ColdFusion developers in the future.

What is not so clear, however, is how Railo’s other open source competitor Blue Dragon has fared, but with many members of the Blue Dragon team leaving (and some of them joining the Railo team), chances are that it will not fare very well.  Equally unclear is Adobe’s opinion on Railo, and how its official release might come to affect its bottom line.  Whatever the case, the cat is out of the bag now.  We’ve seen the future, and the future is open source.

Viva la Revolucion!

One of the things many of us like about ArcStone is the flexible work environment. Flexible means (at least to me) a recognition that to be most productive and effective you need to have a sensible work / life balance. Sometimes people will be more productive at night, want to work in the early morning, need to take a half-day with little warning, take a two-hour lunch to fit in a work out, etc.

This “flexibility” has been an ongoing experiment. Despite my best intentions and knowing that it benefits everyone from employee to customer – it still occasionally annoys me.

As a manager I frequently need to have short status / update conversations with my fellow ArcStonians. The flexible work schedule sometimes gets in my way and forces me/us to be slower to respond than I would like. I think this is a common feeling for those in management roles over here.

A couple of days ago my frustration level hit a peak and I sent a long, whiney email to the entire office, ranting about needing better communication and consistency so that we can work together more efficiently.

I asked for feedback and help from people and yea, verily yea, I got it.

Over the last few days I’ve been able to reflect, collect, and review the responses from my coworkers. I’ve compiled a partial list below and thought I’d share our efforts with the world. Hopefully they will be of use…

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In the past, it was pretty clear who you went to for developing and implementing a cross-media marketing campaign — the ad agency. You went to an interactive firm when you only needed web work, or you had to integrate complex web applications that traditional agencies could not effectively manage.

Today, the web-based projects are a critical component for major marketing initiatives. The lines between ad agency, interactive agency, and web development firms overlap. So when it comes to online marketing efforts, who do you go to? Do you go directly to the ad agency? Or do you find a company specializes in custom web development, design, and consulting? Do you separate out the web portion of your project and hand-pick a specialized web company? Or do you let your agency find their own vendor?

Good questions. Here’s a few indicators you may want to consider working directly with a company that specializes in web development:

1. You need more than a public marketing site. If your project involves anything more than a public-facing website, there’s a good chance the traditional agency is going to be lost.
2. You want to streamline your business processes through web applications. Ad agencies won’t help you build web-based software to manage your members, for example. ArcStone, on the other hand, can build you a member management system with online dues payment, member communications, and more, all integrated into a public facing website. (That’s just one example – the possibilities are pretty much endless.)
3. You want to implement search engine marketing. Agencies don’t typically build SEO into their campaigns. SEO campaigns are their own special beast — they can be very time-consuming, the rules are constantly changing, and they require specialized skills that ad agencies typically don’t cover.
4. You need a full-service solution. Using five different agencies for your design, programming, SEO, email, and hosting can be a logistical nightmare. If you find an agency that accomplish all of your online objectives, you’re going to save yourself a heck of a lot of time, money, and headaches.
5. You need heavy interactivity and broad support. Agencies are great at designing the generalities of the user experience but struggle with the details. A development company is going to follow interface best practices and bring years of experience to the table. A typical web development shop has done hundreds of different user interfaces and has a good idea of what works and what doesn’t. Another example of a sticky interface issue is multi-browser compatibility. The intricacies of modern browsers makes it very difficult to make a consistent user experience across all the major browsers. Web developers have special expertise in scripting and style sheet languages that agencies don’t.

ArcStone is a great fit for clients who need custom web solutions or a full-service technology solution provider. We do web consulting, development, design, hosting, email, search engine marketing, file management, email marketing, and more. We’re interactive, we’re programming-heavy, and we excel at building custom web solutions to help streamline business processes.

Ad agencies recognize that most mid-sized to large organizations have some form of online most often need to sub-contract out web development work. It’s a good system, as long as the web portions of the project are pure marketing. Introduce anything else and the traditional agency is out of its element.

The web is a complicated enough beast these days; don’t trust your marketing guru with your web technology. It behooves businesses and organizations to recognize the strengths and weaknesses in both types of firms.

Last week, Adobe officially announced the release of AIR – Adobe Integrated Runtime. My December post on the power and integration of AIR only scratched the surface of what it is capable. In fact, it may have only tilted some heads and failed to communicate the potential of the new technology…

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Who knew auto-fill could be so dangerous?

You start entering a name or email address in the “to” field, and auto-fill completes the rest for you. But in your haste, before you even check if the correct “Spock” is chosen from the auto-fill list, you’ve tabbed down to the subject line and are on your way to sending the email.

Shortly thereafter, Dr. Spock the child-rearing guru is calling to ask why you sent him blueprints for a starship, and you sheepishly have to explain that those files were meant for a Vulcan’s eyes only.

Thankfully, I am not in the habit of sending love letters or lewd jokes via email, or I might be hiding in the server room pretending I didn’t exist. Still, auto-fill is a hazard for those who must regularly send potentially sensitive materials. It behooves us all to make sure we are actually sending our email to the intended recipient.

On the other hand, predictive text software on mobile phones now rewards those who leave an incorrect word unchanged. Presumably out of laziness, texters intentionally don’t correct mis-predicted words. Yes, suddenly it’s cool to get your mords wixed up.

Predictive Text Gives Birth to “Textonyms”

Here’s an example: You mean to write “home,” so you punch the corresponding numbers “4663″ on your cell. The predictive text feature thinks you meant “good,” but you leave it as is and continue your message. According to some sources, avid texters will still know exactly what you mean. They’re called textonyms.

I’m not sure I quite believe the apparent popularity of these textonyms. This article cites the use of the word “carnage” when the word “barmaid” was intended. I mean, really — who uses the term “barmaid” while texting? But who knows, maybe there are merely some very poetic texters out there.

Technology has really spoiled us.

According to a recent published study, libraries are apparently cool again, and the biggest user demographic is the Y Generation. The credit goes to technology — visitors prefer to get their information via computers rather than old-fashioned books, and libraries today provide easy access to ample digital resources.

That reminded me of this funny video, How to Open A Book…

Have you grown tired of the same old two-dimensional web browsing? If so, this should really pique your interest. If not, I think you’ll be equally impressed. (more…)

Looking for some computer equipment for that ‘webmaster’ in your life? In need of some downgrades for the office, perhaps? Check out these phenomenal deals this week at your local BIZMART, your one-stop shop for all of your hardware and software needs! Don’t let these specials pass by – A MUST SEE!

NOTE: ArcStone card shown to prove authenticity of photos.
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