Creating Web Services with PHP and SOAP, Part 2

In the first part of this series, I showed you how developing applications with the SOAP protocol is a great way to build interoperable software. I also demonstrated how easy it is to build your very own SOAP server and client using the NuSOAP library. This time around I’d like to introduce you to something that you will most definitely run into when working with SOAP – WSDL files.

In this article we’ll talk about what WSDL files are and how to use them. I’ll show you how to quickly build your WSDL files with NuSOAP and incorporate a WSDL file into the SOAP server and client examples from the first part.

What are WSDL Files?

Web Services Description Language (WSDL) files are XML documents that provide metadata for a SOAP service. They contain information about the functions or methods the application makes available and what arguments to use. By making WSDL files available to the consumers of your service, it gives them the definitions they need to send valid requests precisely how you intend them to be. You can think of WSDL files as a complete contract for the application’s communication. If you truly want to make it easy for others to consume your service you will want to incorporate WSDL into your SOAP programming.

WSDL Structure

Just like SOAP messages, WSDL files have a specific schema to adhere to, and specific elements that must be in place to be valid. Let’s look at the major elements that make up a valid WSDL file and explain their uses.

<definitions>

<types>

……..

</types>

<message>

<part></part>

</message>

<portType>

…….

</portType>

<binding>

….

</binding>

<service>

….

</service>

</definitions>

The root element of the WSDL file is the definitions element. This makes sense, as a WSDL file is by definition a definition of the web service. The types element describes the type of data used, which in the case of WSDL, XML schema is used. Within the messages element, is the definition of the data elements for the service. Each messages element can contain one or morepart elements. The portType element defines the operations that can be performed with your web service and the request response messages that are used. Within the binding element, contains the protocol and data format specification for a particular portType. Finally, we have theservice element which defines a collection of service element contains the URI (location) of the service.

The terminology has changed slightly in naming some of the elements in the WSDL 2.0 specification. portType, for example, has changed its name to Interface. Since support for WSDL 2.0 is weak, I’ve chosen to go over version 1.1 which is more widely used.

Building a WSDL File

WSDL files can be cumbersome to write by hand as they must contain specific tags and are usually quite long. The nice thing about using NuSOAP is that it can create a WSDL file for you! Let’s modify the SOAP server we made in the first article to accommodate this.

Open productlist.php and change it to reflect the code below:

<?php

require_once ”nusoap.php”;

function getProd($category)

else

}

$server = new soap_server();

$server->configureWSDL(“productlist”, ”urn:productlist”);

$server->register(“getProd”,

array(“category” => ”xsd:string”),

array(“return” => ”xsd:string”),

”urn:productlist”,

”urn:productlist#getProd”,

”rpc”,

”encoded”,

”Get a listing of products by category”);

$server->service($HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA);

Basically this is the same code as before but with only a couple of changes. The first change adds a call to configureWSDL(); the method acts as a flag to tell the server to generate a WSDL file for our service. The first argument is the name of the service and the second is the namespace for our service. A discussion of namespaces is really outside the scope of this article, but be aware that although we are not taking advantage of them here, platforms like Apache Axis and .NET do. It’s best to include them to be fully interoperable.

The second change adds additional arguments to the register() method. Breaking it down:

• getProd is the function name
• array(“category” => “xsd:string”) defines the input argument to getProd and its data type
• array(“return” => “xsd:string”) defines the function’s return value and its data type
• urn:productlist defines the namespace
• urn:productlist#getProd defines the SOAP action
• rpc defines the type of call (this could be either rpc or document)
• encoded defines the value for the use attribute (encoded or literal could be used)
• The last parameter is a documentation string that describes what the getProd function does

Now point your browser to http://yourwebroot/productlist.php?wsdl and you’ll see the brand new WSDL file created for you. Go ahead and copy that source and save it as it’s own file called products.wsdl and place it in you web directory.

Consuming WSDL Files with the Client

We’ve modified the SOAP server to generate a WSDL file, so now lets modify the SOAP client to consume it. Open up productlistclient.php created in the previous article and simply change the line that initiates the client from this:

$client = newnusoap_client(“http://localhost/nusoap/productlist.php“);

to this:

$client = new nusoap_client(“products.wsdl”, true);

The second parameter in the nusoap_client() constructor call tells NuSOAP to build a SOAP client to accept the WSDL file. Now launch productlistclient.php in your browser and you should see the same result as before, but now you’re using WSDL power!

Summary

In part 2 of this series on creating web services with PHP and SOAP, we went over the importance of using WSDL files for optimum interoperability. We talked about the different elements that make up a WSDL file and their definitions, and then I showed you how to quickly and easily create your own WSDL files with the NuSOAP library. Finally, we modified our SOAP server and client to demonstrate how to use WSDL in your applications.

As you can probably guess, I’ve just barely scraped the surface of what SOAP can do for you, but with these new tools you can provide an easy and well-accepted way of exposing web services to your users.

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Creating Web Services with PHP and SOAP, Part 1

Untitled Document

’As application developers, the ability to develop software and services for a wide range of platforms is a necessary skill, but not everyone uses the same language or platform and writing code to support them all is not feasible. If only there was a standard that allowed us to write code once and allow others to interact with it from their own software with ease. Well luckily there is… and its name is SOAP. (SOAP used to be an acronym which stood for Simple Object Access Protocol, but as of version 1.2 the protocol goes simply by the name SOAP.)

SOAP allows you to build interoperable software and allows others to take advantage of your software over a network. It defines rules for sending and receiving Remote Procedure Calls (RPC) such as the structure of the request and responses. Therefore, SOAP is not tied to any specific operating system or programming language. As that matters is someone can formulate and parse a SOAP message in their chosen language

In this first of a two part series on web services I’ll talk about the SOAP specification and what is involved in creating SOAP messages. I’ll also demonstrate how to create a SOAP server and client using the excellent NuSOAP library to illustrate the flow of SOAP. In the second part I’ll talk about the importance of WSDL files, how you can easily generate them with NuSOAP as well, and how a client may use a WSDL file to better understand your web service.

The Structure of a SOAP Message

SOAP is based on XML so it is considered human read, but there is a specific schema that must be adhered to. Let’s first break down a SOAP message, stripping out all of its data, and just look at the specific elements that make up a SOAP message.

<?xml version=”1.0″?>

<soap:Envelope

xmlns:soap=”http://www.w3.org/2001/12/soap-envelope“

soap:encodingStyle=”http://www.w3.org/2001/12/soap-encoding“>

<soap:Header>

…

</soap:Header>

<soap:Body>

…

<soap:Fault>

…

</soap:Fault>

</soap:Body>

</soap:Envelope>

This might look like just an ordinary XML file, but what makes it a SOAP message is the root element Envelope with the namespace soap as http://www.w3.org/2001/12/soap-envelope. The soap:encodingStyle attribute determines the data types used in the file, but SOAP itself does not have a default encoding.

soap:Envelope is mandatory, but the next element, soap:Header, is optional and usually contains information relevant to authentication and session handling. The SOAP protocol doesn’t offer any built-in authentication, but allows developers to include it in this header tag.

Next there’s the required soap:Body element which contains the actual RPC message, including method names and, in the case of a response, the return values of the method. The soap:Faultelement is optional; if present, it holds any error messages or status information for the SOAP message and must be a child element of soap:Body.

Now that you understand the basics of what makes up a SOAP message, let’s look at what SOAP request and response messages might look like. Let’s start with a request.

<?xml version=”1.0″?>

<soap:Envelope

xmlns:soap=”http://www.w3.org/2001/12/soap-envelope“

soap:encodingStyle=”http://www.w3.org/2001/12/soap-encoding“>

<soap:Body xmlns:m=”http://www.yourwebroot.com/stock“>

<m:GetStockPrice>

<m:StockName>IBM</m:StockName>

</m:GetStockPrice>

</soap:Body>

</soap:Envelope>

Above is an example SOAP request message to obtain the stock price of a particular company. Inside soap:Body you’ll notice the GetStockPrice element which is specific to the application. It’s not a SOAP element, and it takes its name from the function on the server that will be called for this request. StockName is also specific to the application and is an argument for the function.

The response message is similar to the request:

<?xml version=”1.0″?>

<soap:Envelope

xmlns:soap=”http://www.w3.org/2001/12/soap-envelope“

soap:encodingStyle=”http://www.w3.org/2001/12/soap-encoding“>

<soap:Body xmlns:m=”http://www.yourwebroot.com/stock“>

<m:GetStockPriceResponse>

<m:Price>183.08</m:Price>

</m:GetStockPriceResponse>

</soap:Body>

</soap:Envelope>

Inside the soap:Body element there is a GetStockPriceResponse element with a Price child that contains the return data. As you would guess, both GetStockPriceResponse and Priceare specific to this application.

Now that you’ve seen an example request and response and understand the structure of a SOAP message, let’s install NuSOAP and build a SOAP client and server to demonstrate generating such messages.

Building a SOAP Server

It couldn’t be easier to get NuSOAP up and running on your server; just visitsourceforge.net/projects/nusoap, download and unzip the package in your web root direoctry, and you’re done. To use the library just include the nusoap.php file in your code.

For the server, let’s say we’ve been given the task of building a service to provide a listing of products given a product category. The server should read in the category from a request, look up any products that match the category, and return the list to the user in a CSV format.

Create a file in your web root named productlist.php with the following code:

<?php

require_once ”nusoap.php”;

function getProd($category)

else

}

$server = new soap_server();

$server->register(“getProd”);

$server->service($HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA);

First, the nusoap.php file is included to take advantage of the NuSOAP library. Then, thegetProd() function is defined. Afterward, a new instance of the soap_server class is instantiated, the getProd() function is registered with its register() method.

This is really all that’s needed to create your own SOAP server – simple, isn’t it? In a real-world scenario you would probably look up the list of books from a database, but since I want to focus on SOAP, I’ve mocked getProd() to return a hard-coded list of titles.

If you want to include more functionality in the sever you only need to define the additional functions (or even methods in classes) and register each one as you did above.

Now that we have a working server, let’s build a client to take advantage of it.

Building a SOAP Client

Create a file named productlistclient.php and use the code below:

<?php

require_once ”nusoap.php”;

$client = newnusoap_client(“http://localhost/nusoap/productlist.php“);

$error = $client->getError();

if ($error)

$result = $client->call(“getProd”, array(“category” => ”books”));

if ($client->fault)

else

else

}

Once again we include nusoap.php with require_once and then create a new instance ofnusoap_client. The constructor takes the location of the newly created SOAP server to connect to. The getError() method checks to see if the client was created correctly and the code displays an error message if it wasn’t.

The call() method generates and sends the SOAP request to call the method or function defined by the first argument. The second argument to call() is an associate array of arguments for the RPC. The fault property and getError() method are used to check for and display any errors. If no there are no errors, then the result of the function is outputted.

Now with both files in your web root directory, launch the client script (in my casehttp://localhost/nusoap/productlistclient.php) in your browser. You should see the following:

If you want to inspect the SOAP request and response messages for debug purposes, or if you just to pick them apart for fun, add these lines to the bottom of productlistclient.php:

echo ”<h2>Request</h2>”;

echo ”<pre>” . htmlspecialchars($client->request, ENT_QUOTES) . ”</pre>”;

echo ”<h2>Response</h2>”;

echo ”<pre>” . htmlspecialchars($client->response, ENT_QUOTES) . ”</pre>”;

The HTTP headers and XML content will now be appended to the output.

Summary

In this first part of the series you learned that SOAP provides the ability to build interoperable software supporting a wide range of platforms and programming languages. You also learned about the different parts of a SOAP message and built your own SOAP server and client to demonstrate how SOAP works.

In the next part I’ll take you deeper into the SOAP rabbit hole and explain what a WSDL file is and how it can help you with the documentation and structure of your web service.

Working with Dates and Times in PHP

When working in any programming language, dealing with dates and time is often a trivial and simple task. That is, until time zones have to be supported. Fortunately, PHP has one of the most potent set of date/time tools that help you deal with all sorts of time-related issues: UNIX timestamps, formatting dates for human consumption, displaying times with time zones, the difference between now and the second Tuesday of next month, etc. In this article I’ll introduce you to the basics of PHP’s time functions (time(), mktime(), and date()) and their object-oriented counterparts and show you how to make them play nicely with PHP.

PHP Date and Time Functions

Much of this article will work with UNIX time or POSIX or epoch time as it is otherwise known. Time is represented as an offset in the amount of seconds that have ticked away since midnight of January 1, 1970, UTC. If you’re interested in a complete history of UNIX time, check out the UNIX time article on Wikipedia.

UTC, also known by its full name Coordinated Universal Time, also referred to as GMT, and sometimes Zulu time, is the time at 0-degrees longitude.  All other time zones in the world are expressed as a positive or negative offsets from this time. Treating time in UTC and Unix time will make your life easier when you need to deal with time zones. I’ll talk more on this later, but let’s ignore time zone issues for now and look at some time functions.

Getting the Current UNIX Time

time() takes no arguments and returns the number of seconds since the Unix epoch. To illustrate this, I will use the PHP interactive CLI shell.

sean@beerhaus:~$ php -a
php > print time();
1324402770

If you need an array representation of the Unix time, use the getdate() function. It takes an optional Unix timestamp argument, but defaults to the value of time() if one isn’t provided.

php > $unixTime = time();
php > print_r(getdate($unixTime));
Array
(
   [seconds] => 48
   [minutes] => 54
   [hours] => 12
   [mday] => 20
   [wday] => 2
   [mon] => 12
   [year] => 2011
   [yday] => 353
   [weekday] => Tuesday
   [month] => December
   [0] => 1324403688
)

Formatting a UNIX Time

Unix time can be easily formatted into just about any string that a human would want to read.date() is used to format Unix timestamps into a human readable string, and takes a formatting argument and an optional time argument. If the optional timestamp is not provided, the value oftime() is used.

php > print date("r", $unixTime);
Tue, 20 Dec 2011 12:54:48 -0500

The “r” formatting string returns the time formatted as specified by RFC 2822. Of course, you can use other specifiers to define your own custom formats.

php > print date("m/d/y h:i:s a", $unixTime);
12/20/11 12:54:48 pm
php > print date("m/d/y h:i:s a");
12/20/11 01:12:11 pm
php > print date("jS \of F Y", $unixTime);
20th of December 2011

For the entire list of acceptable formatting characters, see the page for date() in the PHP documentation. The function becomes more useful though when combined with the mktime()and strtotime() functions, as you’ll see in the coming examples.

Creating UNIX Time from a Given Time

mktime() is used to create a Unix timestamp given a list of values that correspond to each part of a date (seconds, minutes, hours, year, etc). It takes a number of integer arguments to set each part of the date in this order:

mktime(hour, minute, second, month, day, year, isDST)

You set isDST to 1 if daylight savings is in effect, 0 if it’s not, and -1 if it’s unknown (the default value).

php > print date("r", mktime(12, 0, 0, 1, 20, 1987));
Tue, 20 Jan 1987 12:00:00 -0500
php > print date("r", mktime(0, 0, 0, date("n"), date("j"), date("Y")));
Tue, 20 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0500
php > print date("r", mktime(23, 59, 59, date("n"), date("j"), date("Y")));
Tue, 20 Dec 2011 23:59:59 -0500

You can see that mktime() can be very helpful when dealing with database queries that use date ranges customized by a user. For example, if you’re storing timestamps as integers (UNIX time) in MySQL (foreshadowing anyone?), it’s very easy to set up a common year-to-date query range.

<?php

$startTime = mktime(0, 0, 0, 1, 1, date(“y”));

$endTime   = mktime(0, 0, 0, date(“m”), date(“d”), date(“y”));

Parsing an English Date to UNIX Time

The almost magical function strtotime() takes a string of date/time formats as its first argument, and a Unix timestamp to use as the basis for the conversion. See the documentation for acceptable date formats.

php > print strtotime("now");
1324407707
php > print date("r", strtotime("now"));
Tue, 20 Dec 2011 14:01:51 -0500
php > print strtotime("+1 week");
1325012569
php > print date("r", strtotime("+1 week"));
Tue, 27 Dec 2011 14:03:03 -0500
php > print date("r", strtotime("next month"));
Fri, 20 Jan 2012 14:04:20 -0500
php > print date("r", strtotime("next month", mktime(0, 0, 0)));
Fri, 20 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0500
php > print date("r", strtotime("next month", mktime(0, 0, 0, 1, 31)));
Thu, 03 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0500

PHP’s DateTime and DateTimeZone Objects

PHP’s DateTime object is the object-oriented approach to dealing with dates and time zones. The constructor method accepts a string representation of a time, very similar to strtotime() above, and some might find this more pleasant to work with. The default value if no argument is provided is “now”.

php > $dt = new DateTime("now"); 
php > print $dt->format("r");
Tue, 20 Dec 2011 16:28:32 -0500
php > $dt = new DateTime("December 31 1999 12:12:12 EST");
php > print $dt->format("r");
Fri, 31 Dec 1999 12:12:12 -0500

DateTime’s format() method works just like the date() function above, and accepts all of the same formatting characters. DateTime objects also come with a few useful constants that can be fed to the format() method.

php > print $dt->format(DATE_ATOM);
2011-12-20T15:57:45-05:00
php > print $dt->format(DATE_ISO8601);
2011-12-20T15:57:45-0500
php > print $dt->format(DATE_RFC822);
Tue, 20 Dec 11 15:57:45 -0500
php > print $dt->format(DATE_RSS);
Tue, 20 Dec 2011 15:57:45 -0500

The complete list of constants can be found on the DateTime documentation page.

Since we will soon be dealing with time zones, let’s give PHP a default time zone to use. In yourphp.ini configuration file (I have one for CLI and one for Apache) find the section that looks like this:

[Date]
; Defines the default timezone used by the date functions
; http://php.net/date.timezone
; date.timezone =

When no value is given to date.timezone, PHP will try its best to determine the system time zone as set on your server.  You can check which value PHP is using withdate_default_timezone_get().

php > print date_default_timezone_get();
America/New_York

Let’s set the time zone of the server to UTC time (date.timezone = UTC) and save the configuration file. You will have to restart Apache or the CLI shell to see the changes.

PHP DateTime objects include an internal DateTimeZone class instance to track time zones.  When you create a new instance of DateTime, the internal DateTimeZone should be set to your default provided in php.ini.

php > $dt = new DateTime();
php > print $dt->getTimeZone()->getName();
UTC

The complete list of acceptable time zone names can be found on the time zone documentation page.

You can now see the difference in times when two DateTime objects are given different time zones. For example, here’s a sample that converts from UTC to America/New_York (EST) time.

php > $dt = new DateTime();
php > print $dt->format("r");
Tue, 20 Dec 2011 20:57:45 +0000
php > $tz = new DateTimeZone("America/New_York");
php > $dt->setTimezone($tz);
php > print $dt->gt;format("r");
Tue, 20 Dec 2011 15:57:45 -0500

Notice the -0500 offset for the month of December.  If you change the the time value to a summer date, such as July 1, you’ll see it is aware of Daylight Savings Time (EDT).

php > $tz = new DateTimeZone("America/New_York");
php > $july = new DateTime("7/1/2011");
php > $july->setTimezone($tz);
php > print $july->>format("r");
Thu, 30 Jun 2011 20:00:00 -0400

Summary

Dealing with dates and time zones are an everyday part of many programmers’ lives, but it’s nothing to worry about when you have PHP’s robust and easy-to-use date libraries to work with.

You’ve seen how easy it is to get a UNIX timestamp, how to format a date into any imaginable format, how to parse an English representation of a date in to a timestamp, how to add a period of time to a timestamp, and how to convert between time zones. If there are two main points to take away from the article, they would be to 1) stick with UNIX time and 2) stick with UTC as the base time zone for all dates when working with PHP.

The idea of basing all time on UTC is not one that only applies to PHP; it’s considered good practice in any language. And if you ever find yourself working in another language, there is a good chance you will say to yourself “Dammit, why can’t they do it like PHP?”

20 Top Practical Testing Tips A Tester Should Know

Testing doesn’t stop with de bugging. It is very rare to come across all kind of scenarios at a single instant while testing. After all testers learn all these testing practices by experience and here are Top 20 practical software testing tips a tester should read before testing any application.

1) Analyze your test results Troubleshooting the root cause of failure will lead you to the solution of the problem, thus analyzing is very much needed, proper analyzing may get you out of all the possible mistakes. Bugs in softwares are introduced by both man and machine and some of the other practical reasons for the occurrence of bugs are miscommunication, software complexity, Programming errors, changing requirements, time pressures and reluctance.

2) Maximized Test coverage Make use of the entire possible tool for testing application. It can be done by trial and error method for better results, but practically it is impossible to include all the testing methods therefore it is advised to use the testing methods which gave best results earlier. Selecting a testing tool from a QA perspective will result in producing media verification, release scenario and Decision to release the product.

3) Ensure maximum test coverage Breaking your Application Under Test (AUT) in to smaller functional modules will help you to cover the maximum testing applications also if possible break these modules into smaller parts and here is an example to do so.

E.g: Let’s assume you have divided your website application in modules and accepting user information is one of the modules. You can break this User information screen into smaller parts for writing test cases: Parts like UI testing, security testing, functional testing of the User information form etc. Apply all form field type and size tests, negative and validation tests on input fields and write all such test cases for maximum coverage.

4) While writing test cases First preference should be given to intended functionality before writing a test case and then for invalid conditions. This will cover expected as well unexpected behavior of application under test.

Some of the Cases should be considered while testing web applications. • Functionality Testing • Performance Testing • Usability Testing • Server Side Interface • Client Side Compatibility • Security

5) Error finding attitude Being a software Tester or a QA engineer you must stay curious about finding a bug in an application, existence of subtle bugs may even crash the entire system. So finding such a subtle bug is most challenging work and it gives you satisfaction of your work and to remain positive.

6) Test cases in requirement analysis Designing the pre requirements about the test cases and analysis can help you to ensure that all the cases are testable.

7) Availability of test cases to developers. Let developers analyze your test cases thoroughly to develop quality application. Letting them to do your work will help them to stay vigil while coding. This is also a time consuming scenario which will help you to release a quality product.

8) To ensure quick testing If possible identify and group your test cases for regression testing. This will ensure quick and effective manual regression testing.

9) Performance testing When it comes to the case of applications it consumes critical response time, therefore it must be given highest priority by choosing performance testing. But at many instants performance testing is avoided as it requires large data volume.

10) Avoid testing your own code Developers are not good testers, none of the developers like to be blamed for their work because they remain optimistic when it comes to their product and they tend to skip their bugs as the person who develops the code generally sees only happy paths of the product and don’t want to go in much detail.

11) Testing requirement has no limits Sky is the only limit for testing an application, use all the available means for testing application to improve the quality.

12) Advantage of previous bug graph Using a previous graph will be an aid for finding bugs against different time modules, especially while doing regression testing. This module-wise bug graph can be useful to predict the most probable bug part of the application.

13) Review your Test process Keep in track with your test results, these results may teach you a lot about learning new things. Keep a text file open while testing an application and use these notepad observations while preparing final test release report. This good habit will help you to provide the complete unambiguous test report and release details.

14) Importance of code changes When it comes to the banking projects it requires lots of steps in development or testing environment to avoid execution of live transaction processing. Therefore note down all the changes done for the testing purpose, as testers or developers make changes in code base for application under test.

15) Stay away – Developers If developers don’t have access to testing environment they will not do any such changes accidentally on test environment and these missing things can be captured at the right place.

16) Role of a tester in design When you bring in testers right from software requirement and design phase it is obvious they will also become a part of development hence request to your lead or manager to involve your testing team in all decision making processes or meetings. In this way testers can get knowledge of application dependability resulting in detailed test coverage.

17) Rapport with the other testing team Holding a good relationship with your co testers from other team helps both the parties to share best of their testing experience.

18) Together testers and developers Do not keep anything verbal. To know about more details of the product, testers should relate with the developers, maintaining such kind of relationship will resolve more issues which are coming up in the product in the initial stage, make sure to communicate the same over written communication ways like emails.

19) Timing priority Analyzing all risks helps a lot to prioritize work and it is the first stage of implementing time saving method. From this you can avoid wasting time.

20) Importance of final report Testing is a creative and challenging task and do not fail to create a clear report about the bugs and possible solutions. This will remain as a record for Do’s and Dont’s in testing for future generation.’

AWS Free Usage Tier now includes Amazon EC2 instances

Amazon is excited to announce that the AWS (Amazon Web Services) Free Usage Tier now includes Amazon EC2 instances running Microsoft Windows Server. Customers eligible for the AWS Free Usage Tier can now use up to 750 hours per month of t1.micro instances running Microsoft Windows Server for free. With this announcement, customers familiar with Windows Server can gain hands-on experience with AWS at no cost. Customers can select from a range of pre-configured Amazon Machine Images with Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2. Once running, customers can connect via Microsoft Remote Desktop Client to begin building, migrating, testing, and deploying their web applications on AWS in minutes. The expanded Free Usage Tier with Microsoft Windows Server t1.micro instances is available today in all regions, except for AWS GovCloud. For more information about the AWS Free Usage Tier, please visit the AWS Free Usage Tier web page. To get started using Microsoft Windows Server on AWS, visit the AWS Windows web page.

AWS Free Usage Tier

To help new AWS customers get started in the cloud, AWS is introducing a free usage tier. New AWS customers will be able to run a free Amazon EC2 Micro Instance for a year, while also leveraging a free usage tier for Amazon S3, Amazon Elastic Block Store, Amazon Elastic Load Balancing, and AWS data transfer. AWS’s free usage tier can be used for anything you want to run in the cloud: launch new applications, test existing applications in the cloud, or simply gain hands-on experience with AWS.

Below are the highlights of AWS’s free usage tiers. All are available for one year (except SWF, DynamoDB, SimpleDB, SQS, and SNS which are free indefinitely):

AWS Free Usage Tier (Per Month):

• 750 hours of Amazon EC2 Linux Micro Instance usage (613 MB of memory and 32-bit and 64-bit platform support) – enough hours to run continuously each month*
• 750 hours of Amazon EC2 Microsoft Windows Server Micro Instance usage (613 MB of memory and 32-bit and 64-bit platform support) – enough hours to run continuously each month*
• 750 hours of an Elastic Load Balancer plus 15 GB data processing*
• 30 GB of Amazon Elastic Block Storage, plus 2 million I/Os and 1 GB of snapshot storage*
• 5 GB of Amazon S3 standard storage, 20,000 Get Requests, and 2,000 Put Requests*
• 100 MB of storage, 5 units of write capacity, and 10 units of read capacity for Amazon DynamoDB.**
• 25 Amazon SimpleDB Machine Hours and 1 GB of Storage**
• 1,000 Amazon SWF workflow executions can be initiated for free. A total of 10,000 activity tasks, signals, timers and markers, and 30,000 workflow-days can also be used for free**
• 100,000 Requests of Amazon Simple Queue Service**
• 100,000 Requests, 100,000 HTTP notifications and 1,000 email notifications for Amazon Simple Notification Service**
• 10 Amazon Cloudwatch metrics, 10 alarms, and 1,000,000 API requests**
• 15 GB of bandwidth out aggregated across all AWS services*

In addition to these services, the AWS Management Console is available at no charge to help you build and manage your application on AWS.

* These free tiers are only available to new AWS customers, and are available for 12 months following your AWS sign-up date. When your free usage expires or if your application use exceeds the free usage tiers, you simply pay standard, pay-as-you-go service rates (see each service page for full pricing details). Restrictions apply; see offer terms for more details.

** These free tiers do not expire after 12 months and are available to both existing and new AWS customers indefinitely.

Google May Acquire Groupon for $6 Billion, and It Would Be Worth Every Penny

Forget the rumor that Google acquired Groupon for $2.5 billion; the search giant is about to close a deal for the group-buying service for a whopping $5.3 billion to $6 billion, according to multiple reports. It would be worth every penny.

Groupon

The deal is worth $5.3 billion with an additional $700 million earn out based on performance, according to All Things D. The New York Times reports that a deal could be completed as soon as this week. With a price tag almost double that of DoubleClick, Google’s biggest acquisition to date, there are still plenty of ways for this deal to fall apart.

It would be worth every penny.

Earlier this year, Yahoo tried to snag the group-buying company, but failed. Google, with its $30+ billion cash reserve, reportedly then offered Groupon $3 billion to $4 billion. However, it was rebuffed, so the tech giant upped its offer.

Groupon pioneered the group-buying model through its deal-of-the-day business model. Launched in November 2008, the company has grown from an offshoot of The Point to a multi-billion dollar empire with thousands of employees worldwide. In April 2010, Groupon raised $135 million from Digital Sky Technologies, setting its value at over $1 billion.

If the Google deal does go through at a $6 billion valuation, that would mean that Groupon’s value has grown by more than $625 million per month or more than $20.8 million per day. That skyrocketing value is simply mind boggling.

Social Networking- Technical Platform and General Platform

Social networking is now known to everyone. Social networking through social media web site are second side of coin for every business, group, individual and even for small scale business. Social networking is the backbone for internet marketing.

The most interesting part that compels us to know more about utilization of social networking is the technical platforms. Now a day every technical professional, technical group, technical company holds a strong social network. This is actually very beneficial. Rather than talking in terms of only business growth when it comes to technical platform, we can earn a lot through knowledge sharing and gaining. This helps to generate management skills in technical streams and ultimately business growth.

As our blog theme is totally dedicated to technical platform especially engraving various CMS systems, languages, and tools and more, we appreciate the technical social media website like ITToolBox, linkedin and more. Properly utilizing these types of websites and connecting a network between purely technical platforms and totally general social media website is not only interesting but a very profitable task. While doing so the first motto must be sharing and gaining of knowledge. ITToolbox, a famous technical social website gives you an in depth levels to explore, share and extend technical based issues, testimonial, queries, stories, rating, blog, support and help. Simple examples are the queries submitted and answers to those which are no doubt are the finest, precise and as good as the solution found through research works and studies.

This scenario is just because of the online presence of technical experts and professionals. Right from the white papers to newsletter all levels are useful. This was all about sharing, gaining and exploring the technical issues but then why not to form a social network between such technical platform and our profiles in general social media websites? This is what the point exactly for business growth!

It’s good to let know people about your technical strength and achievement through introducing your technical profile and work on general social media websites. The biggest benefit which can be gained is through direct interaction with your clients and supporters by providing true information and work graph in technical field.

What makes us compelled to put emphasis on this point is that because many people keep their social networking restricted to “relevancy”. Surely that’s really matter a lot but why not to ensure a proper networking by appropriately navigating the technical flow to general platform but in a meaningful way? Overall this could be one of an option to utilize the social networking to its fullest.

Techmodi’s ITToolBox and LinkedIn profile

We are hiring Marketing Fresher!

Position : Trainee Marketing Executives

Positions : 5
Total Experience: 0 -1 years
Salary: Best in the industry

We are looking for individuals who have the zeal to excel into the International Sales & Marketing who are disciplined and can perform to the peak. Following are the qualities which can ensure the selection:

The candidate is required to:

• Communication : Written as well Verbal. ( No Accent/Influence )
• Flair to learn and explore the new business domains
• Versatile to learn & explore the new & current market trends
• Take care of client accounts and make sure that client relation is handled professionally.
• Maintain timely reports to be mailed to the reporting head about the targets and work.
• Analyze the international market and able to present report as per request.

An ideal candidate should:

• Be smart, presentable, articulate, fluent in English (verbal and written).
• Have flair of working on targets and must have excellent convincing skills.
• Computer/Technical savvy, career oriented, mature.
• Should have a flair of understanding the concepts and technology.
• Able to think the feasibility of any project.

Email resumes to hr@techmodi.com OR contactus@techmodi.com