Google, the Internet revelation of the late 90’s with a real breakthrough in the year 2000. Apart from a revelation it was treated as a relief in the Internet world. Finally, a free service that generated good search results. Soon Google became the number one search engine, at least for Europe. But the Google success story is changing. More and more people start complaining about the strange way of indexing and recently the amount of irrelevant search results seems to increase. Other search engines like Windows’ Bing feel that there is space for competition. For Google it’s time to react. And they plan they promise to react with a dramatic new search and indexing platform. The project is called Caffeine! But why does Google need Caffeine? Is it not going to manage without?

After a short look the answer is yes. But after a little deeper digging into Groovy and Grails, I must admit that I’m simply surprised! Not only by its simplicity but also because of its decent features and the fact that Grails combines all the best from both Ruby on Rails and Java. If you worked with this couple, you should be curious by now.

If you follow the latest trends, you’ve probably heard about a new fashion that has started in advertising – it’s called Social Network Marketing. It’s a new way to promote your products using conversation rather than traditional advertising. It gives you an opportunity to show your company’s human side, strengthen your brand and get new customers. In the face of growing popularity of social network sites, this kind of promotion will probably become a core of all campaigns and business strategies. The race has begun and it’s up to you, whether you make use of social network sites or just stand aside and watch.

Nothing in life is black or white. This is applicable to outsourcing as well. Next to the advantages I described before, you have to face concerns as well. But should these risks be considered as serious disadvantages, as blockers for outsourcing or as a warning? Can we do something to turn them into pros?

Yep, it’s another scripting language for Rich Interface Application development. The first releases of JavaFX  aroused mixed feelings, in fact, these were just enhanced Swing components. But latest 1.2 release is showing some fine effects and possibilities. And as soon as I watched some presentations and examples of applications, I thought: “let’s give it a try”.

One thing that was always missing in Eclipse was a GUI designer: a graphical tool for building Graphical User Interfaces. Fortunately, there is an Eclipse project called Visual Editor and the new version was released after two years of silence (1.4.0 – latest version, nightly builds).

From yesterday we can enjoy the newest version of a great Java Enterprise development tool. And as Rod Johnson promised in April – it’s fully free. In this release – actually first one with decent enhancements since STS was made free – we can find really nice stuff. It supports Spring 3.0, offers inbuilt wizards for Spring projects, beans and XML files, graphical configuration editor, Spring Roo project wizard and dev shell for Rapid Application Development, Spring Web Flow and Spring Batch visual development tools.

Quite a Big Bang, that is a pretty good expression about a growing phenomenon of social networking. The popularity of sites like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter is increasing at astonishing rates, especially this last one. Although Twitter still has a long way to go, I am really amazed by its growth rate. Along with the one-millionth word in English language – Web 2.0 – we obtained a decent tool, which can be used in a number of ways. But they also pose new challenges!

Based on CNET it seems that yesterday’s social network downtime has been caused by an attack on the social network accounts of one single user, a Georgian blogger. Like we wrote before the attacker(s) needed to have access to a very powerful network of servers/computers. If somebody really tried to make this blogger silent, we should treat it as an attack on our rights of freedom! But somebody could cause this for his own benefit as well.

Outsourcing your IT development could be a hard decision. Very often during discussions with CxO’s, directors and business owners we conclude that despite the advantages they still don’t dare to do it. They are afraid of losing control. And this is something I fully understand. It’s like your kids growing up and then at once they decide to leave your house. But one thing is certain, eventually it will happen. So, why should you decide to outsource your IT? Below you will find 10 most common reasons.