Forrester Research company indicates that by 2020 the global cloud computing market will reach USD 160 billion, 83% of which will consist of SaaS solutions. Regardless of the accuracy of predictions, one thing is certain – SaaS will have a major impact on the ISV companies whose revenues are based on license sales.

Any magazine we open or any conference we go, we’ll certainly come across an article or a presentation on Agile. Everyone talks about Agile and agility, and the experts came in huge quantities and any company, especially in software, claims to be Agile. Skeptics remain reserved and wishing the Agile fashion would disappear. However, the „fashion” not only does stay, but also there have been more than 10 years since it first appeared and it even seeks to develop if not explode. Nokia, Microsoft, Adobe, Google, Philips, Siemens, Yahoo are big names that bet on Agile.

The agile methodologies are more and more preferred by the software companies in a world where the functional requirements, driven by the dynamics of the market, are continuously changing and the reduced time to market has a significant importance in getting the desired final results. At the same time many companies in need of software products are not software development companies and operate in a market with time and cost constraints; the vast majority of these companies require the delivery of the software products under a fixed price project.

Gogu’s blood was boiling and he felt the pressure inside his head growing slowly but irreversibly. He suddenly became aware that he will explode and the feeling filled him with an awkward tranquility. All his emotions were erased, leaving him with just a bitter taste... It was time for a reaction, now or never. He interrupted Chief:

Think of three local online brands, which started in Cluj and came to succeed at national or international level. They are not so hard to find, are they? However, if you think about the major IT centers in Romania, Cluj is in the first three. We have many IT practitioners who are absorbed by outsourcing companies. Few are the companies that have developed their own products.

In the previous issue we saw the most important changes in Google’s search algorithms. In the current issue we decided to write an article to present some of the most important techniques of search engine optimization, applicable in the area of internal SEO. These techniques, although easy to apply, offer very good results in long term – concerning the increase of the organic traffic.

As promised in the previous article I’ll continue presenting Google Guice also for web applications. In order to do this you’ll need to get the servlet extension – part of the standard distribution, along with other extensions like JMX, JNDI, Persist, Struts or Spring. Using Guice, the web.xml will be reduced at minimum - just make the Guice container start. The rest of the configurations will be easily done in Java in the same type-safe manner presented in the previous article.

A modern overview of the IT universe reveals mobile technology as a particularly dynamic domain. This market sector is presently disputed between three major competitors, namely Apple, Nokia and the extended family of Android devices (Samsung, Motorola, Sony-Ericsson, etc.). Since recently mobile devices only offered users access to basic applications (e-mail, browsers, calculator and rudimentary games), yet nowadays we are bombarded with financial, health and insurance applications, personal assistant applications and advanced graphics games.

I would like to emphasize from the very beginning that this article does not bring anything new to Android programming, but it’s rather a synthesis of the information available through the Android system. One of the problems that the Android application developers face is launching an application that works correctly on all supported platforms.

There is no better way of describing the essence of the Agile Mentality than starting from the principles of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development „We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value:
• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• Working software over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a plan
That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.”
agilemanifesto.org