New Products

The hardworking community of developers and users of open-source geographic information systems (GISes) is sorely underserved, so it's fortunate to see the new Manning publication PostGIS in Action by Regina Obe and Leo Hsu. PostGIS in Action is the first book devoted entirely to PostGIS, a freely available open-source spatial database extender, which can answer questions beyond those possible with a mere relational database. PostGIS' feature set equals or surpasses proprietary alternatives, allowing for the creation of location-aware queries and features with just a few lines of SQL code. Readers with experience in relational databases will find a background in vector-based GIS that enables quick ramp-up to analyzing, viewing and mapping data. The advanced will learn how to optimize queries for maximum speed, simplify geometries for greater efficiency and create custom functions suited specifically to their applications.

www.manning.com/obe

Opera Software's Opera Dragonfly is a new suite of open-source debugging tools for Web developers and designers that got its name because “it eats bugs”. The suite covers the full debugging work flow, from inspecting network access and downloaded resources to correcting JavaScript issues and seeing how CSS rules apply to the DOM. Opera Dragonfly supports all the newest Web technologies, including SVG and HTML5 APIs, such as Web Storage. Product benefits, sayeth Opera, include a superior JavaScript debugger, a network inspector to discover why a site “turns to molasses” and a storage inspector to uncover how a site handles the data it collects. Opera Dragonfly loads automatically when one downloads the Opera browser.

www.opera.com

The advent of the digital camera has truly transformed photography and made it more accessible to all, especially us geeks. Although we geeks might be good at manipulating images with The GIMP and organizing them with digiKam, we may not be proficient at the mechanics of good exposure, a requirement that has not changed with digital photography. Enter the new book Capture: Digital Photography Essentials, written by Glenn Rand, Chris Broughton and Amanda Quintenz-Fiedler. The text addresses both the opportunities and limitations of digital photography, and how to work with those opportunities and around the limitations. Readers will learn to maximize the potential of their images through an understanding of the core principles and more advanced aspects of the digital photographic process.

www.rockynook.com

One of your more direct routes to the cloud is by hopping a ride onto Cloud.com's CloudStack open-source cloud computing platform, now in version 2.2. CloudStack, says Cloud.com, is a comprehensive, open-source software solution that accelerates the deployment, management and configuration of highly scalable, public or private infrastructure as a service clouds. Data-center operators can build cloud services within their existing infrastructure to offer on-demand, elastic cloud services. Version 2.2 of CloudStack offers features such as improved hypervisor support (VMware vSphere 4, Citrix XenServer 5.6 and KVM), advanced networking configuration, an AJAX Web interface and borderless scalability. The federation of managed and hosted availability zones can be managed within a single CloudStack deployment. The new CloudBridge feature enables applications to interoperate with other cloud solutions including Amazon EC2 and S3 APIs, as well as the upcoming OpenStack API. CloudStack is available for immediate download.

www.cloud.com

Keeping our heads in the clouds, let's take note of another cloud-based platform, the Logicalis Enterprise Power Cloud for IBM Power 770 Systems. The solution is for IBM users who require more than Windows and Linux support. It provides a “data center in the sky” with all the capabilities found in on-premises data centers and more. Key benefits include support for AIX and i5/OS, enterprise-class management skills for legacy systems, flexible computing capacity, lower infrastructure and maintenance costs, elasticity to respond to changing business needs, 24x7 monitoring and management, and reduced carbon footprint and energy consumption.

www.us.logicalis.com/cloud