On February, 8^th we will roll out an update of our gadget view handling logic which will enhance and simplify the current usage of views.

Summarized there are three big changes:

• Separation of Canvas view in Groups and in Profiles which results in a new view GroupCanvas
• Simplified Owner concept:
  • The views Integration, Group, GroupCanvas and Popup have no owner
  • If the current viewer has the gadget installed and looks at a gadget in one of these views one of the following views will be rendered instead: IntegrationInstallation, GroupInstallation, GroupCanvasInstallation, PopupInstallation.
    In these views the owner of the gadget is the current viewer.
  • If the …Installation view is not defined, the „normal“ view will be rendered as a fallback
• The view logic in the sandbox including the requestNavigateTo now behaves exactly like the live platform

At http://developer.studivz.net/wiki/index.php/Gadgets_Views_Tech we composed a detailed list of available views, their sizes, their position on the platform and their owner.

Existing gadgets should be compatible with these changes but our support team will check each currently online app for compatibility regardless. If your app needs any changes, you will be notified via mail.

At the next Berlin Google Technology User Group Meeting we will do a session on writing OpenSocial Gadgets for VZ-Netzwerke. We will cover the OpenSocial basics, People and AppData Services, the OpenSocial REST Api as well as the VZ-Gadget-Sandbox and deployment process.

The meeting will take place at Zanox GAP Campus (Stralauer Alle 2, 10245 Berlin) on Tuesday, 9/Feb/2010, 18:30.

For the full agenda and registration see http://www.amiando.com/Berlin-GTUG-201002.html

Am 21. Jänner 2010 um 22:00:20 war es soweit. 16 Millionen User in den VZs.

Wir haben mindestens 1101 Schüler 2500 VZ User mit einem kleinen Geschenk glücklich gemacht und euch die Gruppenlimits erhöht:

Grüße vom Engineering :)

VZnet Netzwerke Ltd. is proud sponsor of the Hadoop Get Together which takes place in Berlin on a regular basis.
In the following video taken at the last Hadoop Get Together in Berlin Jörg Möllenkamp explains why Hadoop is interesting for Sun – and why Sun Hardware might be a good fit for Hadoop applications:

Hadoop Nikolaus Pohle from Isabel Drost on Vimeo.

Hadoop Richard Hutton from Isabel Drost on Vimeo.

Hadoop Jörg Möllenkamp from Isabel Drost on Vimeo.

In a blog post published after the event, Jörg gives more details on his idea of Parasitic Hadoop he introduced at the meetup.

Während der letzten GeekNight haben wir es angekündigt, nun machen wir es wahr: am 07.12.2009 schalten wir OpenSocial live und feiern dies mit einem GeekNight Spezial. Wie immer in der Volksbar, wie immer um 19:30 Uhr, geht es  los. Alle Entwickler, Agenturen und Menschen, die sich für das Thema OpenSocial begeistern sind herzlich eingeladen. Kommt zahlreich um die ersten Apps und ihre Entwickler kennenzulernen oder um im Gedankenaustausch mit den VZ Developern zu versinken! Näheres zu diesem Event und zu den bisherigen Veranstaltungen der GeekNight Reihe finden sich auf unseren Edelprofilen bei studiVZ und meinVZ.

Vom 15.11. bis zum 18.11. finden nächste Woche in Karlsruhe die International PHP conference und die Webtech Conference statt. VZ Netzwerke unterstützt diese Konferenzen als Silber Sponsor und ist mit einem Stand, vier Sessions und einer Keynote vertreten:

• Push-Implementierung in der studiVZ iPhone App
  Max Horváth, Steffen Irrgang
  In dieser Session berichten wir, wie studiVZ die Push-Funktionalität auf der iPhone- und auf der Serverseite implementiert hat. Wir zeigen, wie der Client sich über das studiVZ-API anmeldet und über welche Architektur Push-Nachrichten auf dem iPhone landen. Dabei wird näher auf die AMQP-Queue-Infrastruktur von studiVZ eingegangen und gezeigt, welchen Fluss eine Benachrichtigung bei studiVZ durchlebt, bis sie auf dem iPhone eines Nutzers ankommt.

  Download Slides

  16.11.2009 | 09:45 – 10:45

• OAuth – ein offener Standard für die sichere Authentifizierung in APIs
  Bastian Hofmann, Max Horváth, Andre Zayarni
  In dieser Session widmen wir uns dem offenen Standard OAuth. Er wird für die sichere Authentifizierung in APIs genutzt. Wir zeigen, wie man OAuth implementiert und wieso es sinnvoll ist, Drittanwendungen über OAuth an die eigene API anzubinden. Außerdem gehen wir darauf ein, wie eine eigene Webapplikation mittels OAuth mit anderen Services verbunden werden kann.

  Download Slides

  16.11.2009 | 14:30 – 15:30

• OpenSocial in der Praxis
  Sebastian Galonska, Bastian Hofmann
  OpenSocial bietet vielfältige Möglichkeiten, die Funktionalität eines Social Networks zu erweitern. Dabei sind die Konzepte zur Entwicklung von Gadgets einfach zu erlernen. In dieser Session geben wir Einblicke, wie Gadgets für die VZ-Netzwerke, aber auch jeden anderen OpenSocial-kompatiblen Container, erstellt und veröffentlicht werden können. Dabei berücksichtigen wir auch Aspekte wie Skalierung und Sicherheit.

  Download Slides

  17.11.2009 | 10:30 – 11:30

• Best Practices bei der Entwicklung von öffentlichen APIs
  Steffen Irrgang, Max Horváth, Andre Zayarni
  In dieser Session soll praxisnah erörtert werden, welche Fallstricke und vor allem welche Best Practices in Bezug auf die Entwicklung von öffentlichen APIs zu beachten sind. Dabei konzentrieren wir uns auf RESTful Web Services sowie auf den offenen Authentifizierungsstandard OAuth.

  Download Slides

  17.11.2009 | 16:30 – 17:30

• Keynote: Bugfree, agil und überhaupt
  Jodok Batlogg
  In his keynote Jodok will highlight some insights on studiVZ. How important are agile processes? Is studiVZ really bugfree or is there a need for a bugtracking system? Why should one additional line of SQL require 10 additional servers and how can good profiling save you 20 of them?
  18.11.2009 | 11:45 – 12:30

We would like to announce the December-2009 Hadoop Get Together in newthinking store Berlin.

When: 16. December 2009 at 5:00pm
Where: newthinking store, Tucholskystr. 48, Berlin, Germany

As always there will be slots of 20min each for talks on your Hadoop topic. After each talk there will be a lot time to discuss. You can order drinks directly at the bar in the newthinking store. If you like, you can order pizza. We will go to Cafe Aufsturz after the event for some beer and something to eat.

Talks scheduled so far:

Richard Hutton (nugg.ad): “Moving from five days to one hour.” – This talk explains how we made data processing scalable at nugg.ad. The company’s core business is online advertisement targeting. Our servers receive 10,000 requests per second resulting in data of 100GB per day.

As the classical data warehouse solution reached its limit, we moved to a framework built on top of Hadoop to make analytics speedy, data mining detailed and all of our lives easier. We will give an overview of our solution involving file system structures, scheduling, messaging and programming languages from the future.

Jörg Möllenkamp (Sun): “Hadoop on Sun”
Abstract: Hadoop is a well known technology inside of Sun. This talk want to show some interesting use cases of Hadoop in conjunction with Sun technologies. The first show case wants to demonstrate how Hadoop can used to load massive multicore system with up to 256 threads in a single system to the max. The second use case shows how several mechanisms integrated in Solaris can ease the deployment and operation of Hadoop even in non-dedicated environments. The last usecase will show the combination of the Sun Grid Engine and Hadoop. Talk may contain command-line demonstrations ;).

Nikolaus Pohle (nurago): “M/R for MR – Online Market Research powered by Apache Hadoop. Enable consultants to analyze online behavior for audience segmentation, advertising effects and usage patterns.”

We would like to invite you, the visitor to also tell your Hadoop story, if you like, you can bring slides – there will be a beamer. Thanks for Isabel Drost who is organizing this event and for Newthinking Store for providing Space. VZnet Netzwerke is sponsoring the video recording of the talks.

Registration:

Key-value-stores and other non-relational databases are a hot topic right now, as it increasingly turns out that the traditional (= relational) approach is difficult to scale horizontally. In other words, it may be time — as Bob Ippolito put it — to “Drop ACID and think about data”.

If you couldn’t make it to the first “NoSQL Meetup Berlin” which recently took place at newthinking store — all the talks have been recorded and are on vimeo now:

• Consistency in Distributed Key/Value Stores, Monika Moser
  
• Redis — Fast and Furious, Mathias Meyer
  
• Peer to Peer Applications with CouchDB, Jan Lehnardt
  
• Riak, Martin Scholl
  
• MongoDB, Mathias Stearn
  
• 4th Generation Object Databases, Prof. Stefan Edlich
  

Heise has a good summary (in german).

Here at StudiVZ we are following this topic very closely and are actively investigating some of the alternatives. At the moment, Cassandra looks very promising to us.

Some more links:

• Quick Reference to Alternative data storages
• Comparing Key/Value Stores, Round 2
• NoSQL East 2009 – Summary of Day 1, Day 2

Yesterday we had our 2nd GeekNight and it was at least as successfull as our first event of that manner. It was a premiere in two ways:

• We broadcasted the sessions live through uStream
• Our partner Wooga showed BrainBuddies, the first OpenSocial Gadget running on our platforms. It will become available when we launch OpenSocial

We had about 70 visitors at the Volksbar and over 30 people watched the live stream.
As requested you can download our presentations on the vCard and on BrainBuddies in German.

Watch out for upcoming dates so you can come and join us next time!

Today you have the last chance to get your hands dirty! Our friends at Box119 open their doors for DevHouseBerlin.

DevHouseBerlin is a fun-packed weekend of hacking and sharing knowledge. The Box119 office is open for a weekend and invites hackers of all sorts to join us working on projects, sharing code and ideas and just hanging out among fellow geeks.

DevHouseBerlin is highly influenced by the SuperHappyDevHouse:

SuperHappyDevHouse is a non-exclusive event intended for creative and curious people interested in technology. We’re about knowledge sharing, technology exploration, and ad-hoc collaboration. Come to have fun, build things, learn things, and meet new people. It’s called hacker culture, and we’re here to encourage it.

VZ is happy to provide you with first class Spreeschnittchen Catering. Enjoy!