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This year’s Polarising Family Day was particularly special: all of us and our families were invited to the City of Football for an entire day of fun and to live the real World Cup spirit! Portugal was still in the competition, which made it even more memorable; just like the real thing, the day started in the […]

The Polarising TALKing Heads are a group of passionate technology (and sometimes, music:) specialists. Besides their areas of expertise and daily lives at Polarising to deliver customers the best Software Development and Integration solutions, our TALKing Heads are always eager to learn. They dedicate some of their time to stay up to date with what’s […]

The FIFA World Cup tournament will start soon in Russia, that will host 32 national teams competing for the world title! One of them is Portugal, playing in group B along with Iran and two Mediterranean fellow nations, Spain and Morocco. By this time, football fans are already choosing their favorites and journalists, finding the right […]

It was really awesome to attend the Kafka Summit in London last April. First of all, because this conference is the only Apache Kafka community event that gathers the most cool data architects, DevOps engineers and developers dedicated to learn and share best practices about writing code and discuss the future of streaming technologies. So, there […]

By the end of 2018, there will be 11,2 billion connected things in use around the world, reflecting a staggering growth over the past couple of years. The forecast does not include smartphones or computers; it refers to all sorts of smart devices designed to help businesses and consumers work faster and live better. This […]

Last 5th and 6th of May a team of Polarising consultants entered the annual hackathon organized by Fundação Gulbenkian. HackForGood 2018 took place in Porto and our ‘missionaries’ went on a great adventure to create an application that can help make the world a better place. The project name was “Stay Healthy Globally” and it’s […]

Maggie: Give us what you have. Georgie: I’m afraid I can’t do that. I come bearing knowledge to trade… essential knowledge for the future, primarily in my head, and I prefer to keep that where it is. Maggie: You’re trading knowledge… Georgie: That’s what I have. I’ve made the same offer before… Fill the crates, […]

Hello and welcome to the second part of our recap of BPM Conference Portugal 2017. In the first installment, I mentioned games and BPM Processes for this one. Because this is actually a more sensory experience than mere gaming, BPM can gain from this insight. Games and BPM?! Immersive Processes! You did not expect that […]

I know what you are thinking: Amsterdam is famous for all other exciting things! We’ll get to that, just bare with me for a few more lines:) This 2017 Amsterdam was also the city that hosted the Liferay DevCon Confence, the coolest Liferay Developers concentration ever, gathering people from the United States, India, Spain, Brazil, Netherlands, […]

Last week my son asked me if Santa Claus was getting him a gift, I told him what parents usually say: – Well, first Santa will have to check if you have been a good boy and let’s see what he finds out. – How is he going to know how every children behaved? – […]

Meet Polarising’s TALKing Heads! Our technology experts continue spreading their word and bringing you the best IT knowledge; in this section you will be monthly surprised with their suggestions, blog posts and other interesting facts. You might even find some music here;-)

Meet Polarising’s TALKing Heads! Our technology experts continue spreading their word and bringing you the best IT knowledge; in this section you will be monthly surprised with their suggestions, blog posts and other interesting facts. You might even find some music here:-)

The most important BPM conference in Portugal took place in May this year and was about reacting to change in the Business Process Management sphere of knowledge from the automation point of view. One of the interesting aspects of this year Conference was the number of Portuguese speakers that contributed to the topic. Of the […]

Machine learning was limited for a long time by its inability to process raw data. For decades, machine learning had a great dependency in features engineering that transformed raw data (for example, pixels values from an image) into an internal representation or feature vector from which the learning subsystem, often a classifier, could detect or […]

As showed in the last post, machine learning is great for pattern recognition. But it’s getting so much powerful that can be used in much more areas than only pattern recognition, such as: Drug Discovery and toxicology Discovering new treatments for human diseases is one of the most complicated tasks that exist. A new compound […]

Since it’s revival in 2006, Deep learning advanced so quick that is used in many aspects of modern society such as: Deep Learning Analytics Companies such Google and Microsoft have access to large volumes of data, social media organisations such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter have billions of users that constantly generate a very large […]

One of the most known and practiced techniques of agile software development is performing iterations. An iteration is a timebox, inside which a team tries to accomplish some goal. At the end of the iteration, the team reviews what it’s produced and what it’s learned. From this, it sets a new goal and starts the […]

Analytics are great! Analytics increase organizations profit and enhance our daily life. They help us make better choices, save us time, care about our health and delight us with fantastic discoveries. They are really fun and sexy! But there’s also a dark side for Analytics… Imagine yourself in the shoes of Winston Smith, main character […]

There are several ways to process and integrate data but due the lack of standards and the heterogeneity of the “things”, a key role is played by the middleware. Middleware is application-independent software that provides services that allow communications between applications. Middleware hides the complexities of the lower layers, like operating system and network, in order […]

DevOps has become a buzzword over the last few years, meaning the integration of development and operations to remove bottlenecks in the process of implementing ideas as software. Some see this as a “Dev swallowing Ops” movement brought on by the cloud and several tools (like Continuous Integration/Delivery engines, Configuration management, etc.). The reasoning is […]

As seen in the last post, after the event of CNN’s (Convolutional Neural Networks) we step in the second AI Winter, but in 2006 this would change… 2006: Deep Learning Arises In 2006, Hinton, Simon Osindero and Yee-Whye Teh published a paper where they solved the vanishing or exploding gradient problem. In this paper, “A fast learning […]

Deep Learning is one the last iterations on the evolution of Machine Learning. One evolution that started with something as simple as Linear Regression, and despite all the difficulties and winters that grassed for, it has been an area whose advances have generated a tsunami that has waves that reached into the most varied fields […]

The 2017 TIBCO NOW Conference (held at Estrel Hotel in Berlin, Germany) included a big agenda on numerous topics and had several side events like the breakout sessions and Hand-On-Labs workshops. Most of them were focused on a certain TIBCO product or a customer presentation on their use case of TIBCO technology. On the advent […]

What should you take into account when selecting an integration platform? Technology adviser Matthias Meijer presented 4 aspects of the latest Tibco product you might want to consider.     “Easy Process, Service and API Implementation” To solve integration problems you need: A “fast and agile” workspace development environment, facilitating (usually by drag and drop) the […]

Edge computing takes localised processing a bit further than Fog Computing, because it allows for actions to be taken on-site, in the processing point. This poses an advantage over Fog Computing as there are less points of failure. Each item in the chain is more independent and capable of determining what information should be stored […]

Even though Cloud computing is a great way of processing the data generated by the “things”, it doesn’t meet all IoT’s needs. For instance, one issue that affects the quality of service (QoS) severely is network latency. Real time applications are affected by the delay caused by latency in networks [1]. For example, when the […]

Got Flux ? This was the main question (and the wi-fi password!) being asked at the Spring I/o ’17 conference that took place in the beautiful city of Barcelona. Flux and Mono were two of the main concepts talked across sessions in the conference. Reactive Programming and its support through all the Spring Framework ecosystem was […]

Wondering if you need an integration platform? Below is a list of 6 questions you should consider before making a decision: Do you need to integrate more than three applications? When you are dealing with more than three applications, the number of point-to-point connections between them starts to increase exponentially. Do you already have a […]

Last May 18th, AWS (Amazon Web Services), pioneer and leading provider of cloud services, held the AWSome Day event in Lisbon, a full day tour of its services. Since Polarising is keeping a close watch on the cloud space, I was very interested to hear what they had to say and the maturity of AWS’ […]

In the Lambda Architecture website we have a brief history and description of the architecture. “Nathan Marz came up with the term Lambda Architecture (LA) for generic, scalable and fault-tolerant data processing architecture, based on his experience working on distributed data processing systems at Backtype and Twitter. The LA aims to satisfy the needs for […]

The definition of Cloud computing provided by the National Institute of Standard and Technologies says: ‘‘Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing re-sources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service […]

From smart cities to new product releases and an entirely new series of IoT blog posts, Polarising presents our Evangelist’s suggestions of April. Welcome! *Integration & API’s powered by António Queiroz* <The Era of Real Time Data: Looking at TIBCO Streambase. Read more… <Microsoft REST API Guidelines. Read more… *DevOps & Cloud powered by Bruno Neto* <How can DevOps […]

The first time someone used the term “Internet of Things” was in 1999 by Kevin Ashton in a presentation at Procter & Gamble [1]. Since then, the steady progress of technology has produced an array of low-cost sensors and the growth of computer processing power sustained by Moore’s Law. That led to a reality where […]

Last 5th of April, some of us at Polarising attended the Front-end Lisbon MeetUp. The event sponsored by De Voorhoede, front-end specialists, introduced Progressive web Apps and Scalable Vector Graphics to audience. In the first talk, clearly targeted to a design audience, Jurgen Beliën showed how tools like Illustrator and Sketch can generate Scalable Vector Graphics. […]

Dia 1 de Abril tive a oportunidade de participar no Pitchbootcamp que decorreu no IST em Lisboa. Já me tinham dito que é uma experiência única, mas foi muito mais do que isso, sinto que me enriqueceu enquanto pessoa e profissional! Este evento, que é por excelência um acelerador de carreiras, revelou-se uma excelente oportunidade […]

Last March 27, André Ferreira, Nuno Marques, Christiano Domingues and I went to AngularJS Portugal’s Angular PT Meetup, where we learned some cool things about Angular 2. In the first talk, Rocking Forms on Angular by Daniel Leal, he talked about template-driven and react/model-driven forms and the benefits (especially when it comes to testing) of […]

Welcome to the amazing new section entirely owned by the Polarising Evangelists! Every month our technology experts give tips on what is hot, trendy and relevant in each of the areas they address. Here you can find interesting articles, register for webinars or read their own articles and blog posts. Check out March highlights and […]

Nowadays devices, sensors and applications are publishing data about events at the moment they are created. Processing data and making real time decisions about these events requires a new kind of solution: Stream processing.     “Sense, Analyze, and Respond” Companies are always interested in improving their business processes, providing customers and business partners with innovative […]

Earlier this month we had the privilege of participating in a webinar by TIBCO regarding it’s views on how to manage processes in a high innovation context of demanding customers. Its BPM tool – TIBCO ActiveMatrix BPM –  can help customers and enterprises come together to use and provide services to fulfill their expectations, it has been […]

No, it’s not a story about a spy who decides to be a double agent in the cold war:) It’s just a Mediterranean fellow (me!) that went to Gothenburg and learned about the latest advancements on Tibco Spotfire. I prepared myself for low temperatures, nevertheless I must confess I had a hard time dealing with […]

Polarising is celebrating its 11th birthday: one more happy one! Since last year, we keep on growing in every way that indicates success: around 100 people work everyday spread among the office, customers sites and different countries abroad, focused in leading innovation by delivering knowledge, expertise and quality of service. We also have embraced new technologies […]

Welcome to the amazing new section entirely owned by the Polarising Evangelists! Every month our technology experts give tips on what is hot, trendy and relevant in each of the areas they address. Here you can find interesting articles, register for webinars or read their own articles and blog posts. Check out February highlights and stay […]

Everywhere you go or read, everyone is now talking and writing about “Digital Transformation”. Although everyone seems to agree that it will be a big event in the near future, typically, as with any other hype, there are several phases that everyone goes through when absorbing a new concept or technology as described by Gartner. […]

Welcome to the amazing new section entirely owned by the Polarising Evangelists! Every month our technology experts give tips on what is hot, trendy and relevant in each of the areas they address. Here you can find interesting articles, register for webinars or read their own articles and blog posts. Check out January highlights and stay […]

Welcome to the amazing new section entirely owned by the Polarising Evangelists! Every month our technology experts give tips on what is hot, trendy and relevant in each of the areas they address. Here you can find interesting articles, register for webinars or read their own articles and blog posts. Check out December highlights and stay […]

  It’s very common people confuse Portal tools and CMS when they need to decide what kind of tool they need to implement some features. On my career, based on Liferay Portal, I saw many bad uses of Portal, because many companies want to re-invent Liferay instead of use features that already exists on Liferay. […]

The first RedHat Digital Enterprise Conference took place yesterday, right here in Lisbon. It was very interesting and entertaining, since it brought up some key aspects that challenge Enterprises nowadays: Why change to an OpenSource backed solution with RedHat The case for Enterprise OpenSource Why now? Nowadays, enterprise IT has to be agile or the […]

Polarising was at the Web Summit ’16 represented by a strong team of 8 people, including our CEO, Nuno Vilar Moreira. Covering all 3 pavilions with over 20 stages plus the Centre Stage at the Meo Arena wasn’t an easy task, however it was possible to attend the most remarkable keynotes such as the very interesting view for Facebook for […]

iPaaS (integration Platform-as-a-Service) is emerging as a response to the cloud integration challenge. iPaaS is a suite of cloud services and enables users to create, manage, and govern integration flows connecting a wide range of applications or data sources without installing or managing any hardware or middleware [1]. These features consolidate as runtime containers and […]

An Event Driven Architecture is one that has the ability to detect events and react intelligently to them. An event is a state change, which draws the attention of systems and is evaluated by them to decide whether trigs or not an action. An example of an event-driven system is the thermostat. It turns the […]

With the mobile applications “boom”, and because they rarely are standalone, it came the necessity to create ways to the mobile applications incorporate access to external data and functionalities [1]. A Web API-base architecture is used when is necessary to integrate applications with websites or other applications. This architecture pattern made it easier to integrate unfamiliar […]

There are several ways of implementing a SOA integration, but let us focus on two. Web Services Web services are the most common way to implement a SOA. They are based on protocols such as HTTP, FTP and SMTP. There are two main styles of web services, SOAP and REST. The SOAP web services use […]

SOA can be defined as an architecture which goal is to achieve decoupling among interacting software agents [1]. From the SOA point of view, systems expose their functionalities as a set of services, typically as a set of Web services. It does not matter which technology platform the system sits on or what development language […]

Message Brokers allow the information flow between applications. Following this type of middleware, we advance to an integration architecture that is based on message brokers. As the applications universe grows and the Point-to-Point architecture is no long a viable option, the necessity of middleware is obvious. One of the possible architectures to implement the middleware […]

In the last chapter we introduced the notion of middleware, why we need it and how it turns integration easier. So today we are going to talk about the different types of middleware. And let us start with one vert used in point-to-point integration: RPCs (Remote Procedure Call) Middleware RPC exists since the 1970s and […]

For years, information systems have been built as “stovepipes” [1], creating monolithic self-contained applications that have not been designed for integration with other applications. These systems were built with very specific requirements and not using standard data storage and application development methods [2]. However, even years after its implementation, they continued to be critical although […]

Today’s applications integration is of great concern for organizations. Due to the large flow of existing information, an increasing specialization of the applications and the great speed at which it is necessary to implement the various requirements that allow organizations to continue to operate successfully, it became crucial to create mechanisms for quickly make the […]

In the next five to ten years the way people and businesses make decisions, may change dramatically. Data and the knowledge people can get from it will be the centre of this process. Unconceivable amounts of data will be produced by individuals, corporations or devices. Vendors and software will provide tools to extract knowledge from […]

The registrations for the September Champions Academy are now officially open!  This is already the 4th edition and we are very pleased with the results: from the fifteen (15) graduates we had from every edition so far, ten (10) were recruited to join Polarising as Junior Consultants. You see, for us it only makes sense to have an […]

Since we’ve launched the Champions brand, the Academies have became even more exciting at Polarising! Not only we have the most cool and differentiated communication supports, but also our students bring more of what they always have delivered: true passion and commitment to the program.  That was exactly what I saw at Instituto Superior de Leiria […]

For some years now I’ve been reading and debating about the worth for a software developer or a company to get into mobile development. I’m not talking about mobile first and all that jazz. Let’s say you’re a company who’s got a product or service that is already well established on the web. You have customers […]

Last 7th of April we have hosted our 1st Elastic community Meetup. There we were at ZBD (Galeria Zé dos Bois, in the typical Lisbon Bairro Alto), welcoming all Elastic developers and lovers, partners and customers. The agenda was pretty simple, as all the Meetup concept suggests: informal talks about how you can explore your company’s data […]

Iot is all the buzz right now. But what does that mean for Enterprises and, in this case, to the Enterprise’s BPM practitioners? Traditional BPM integrations within an enterprise ecosystem are generally handled through an old fashioned SOA layer, and thus very brittle in terms of adapting to the new trends and new ways of gathering data […]

I have a career of 12+ years as a full stack web developer, and for the last few years I’ve been trying to focus on the front end part of this stack. Why? It’s a long story… How full stack of a developer was I really? I’ve always been able to code my way through […]