From the monthly archives:
September 2005
Daily Del.icio.us for Sep 17, 2005
- java.net: Receive Application Errors via Yahoo Messenger » Receive Application Errors via Yahoo Messenger
- Online Extra: Steve Ballmer Shrugs Off The Critics » BusinessWeek interviews Steve Ballmer
- BEA seeks open source accommodation | InfoWorld | News | 2005-09-16 | By Paul Krill » BEA pledges support for free software efforts
Related posts
Daily Del.icio.us for Sep 14, 2005
- techno.blog("Dion"): Implicit Local Variables and Lambda comes to C# » Implicit Local Variables and Lambda comes to C# via Dion & Ben
- Married with children; C# 3.0: Relational Language Operatings, Type Inference, and More » C# 3.0: Relational Language Operatings, Type Inference, and More
- Google Blog Search » Google Blog Search - Search technology focused on blogs
- Singapore and Katrina - New York Times » A Must-Read article by Thomas Friedman from the NY Times
Related posts
Ruby Ruby Ruby Ruby!!
After playing with Ruby for a while now, I am starting to play with Rails to see what the buzz is all about. Here are some interesting resources in addition to the Rails Wiki:
- Rolling with Ruby on Rails by Curt Hibbs — The Ruby community is abuzz about Rails, a web application framework that makes database-backed apps dead simple. What's the fuss? Is it worth the hype? Curt Hibbs shows off Rails, building a simple application that even non-Rubyists can follow.
- Rolling with Ruby on Rails, Part 2 by Curt Hibbs — Curt Hibbs introduced Ruby on Rails by building a simple but functional web application in just a few minutes. Does the ease of use continue? He thinks so. In the second of two parts, Curt completes his example Rails application in merely 47 lines of code.
- Ruby on Rails: An Interview with David Heinemeier Hansson by Edd Dumbill — Few can have missed the rise of the programming world's latest star platform–Ruby on Rails. Rails' creator, David Heinemeier Hansson, already wowed the crowds at this year's OSCON, and is set to keynote the European O'Reilly Open Source Convention in Amsterdam this October. O'Reilly Network talked with him about Rails' success and future.
- Ajax on Rails by Curt Hibbs — XMLHttpRequest and Ruby on Rails are two hot topics in web development. As you ought to expect by now, they work really well together. Curt Hibbs explains the minimal Ajax you need to know and the minimal Ruby you need to write to Ajax-ify your Rails applications.
Related posts
Daily Del.icio.us for Sep 12, 2005
- A List Apart: Articles: JavaScript Logging » JavaScript Logging
- Recycled Knowledge: Tutorials at XML 2005 » RESTful Web Services: building them without WSDL, SOAP, or tears
- Getting Started With JasperReports
- J2EE Programming with Passion! Class Root Page » Free J2EE Programming Online Course and tutorial
- TWiki . Javawsxml . Rome » New version of Rome - Still no OPML support
- Is Drupal right for you? | drupal.org » Is Drupal right for you?
- tagschema » Database technology for tag based applications
Related posts
Daily Del.icio.us for Sep 11, 2005
- Developing a J2EE Architecture with Rational Software Architect Using the Rational Unified Process
- Google Firefox Extensions
- Sam Ruby: The Case for Dynamic Languages » The Case for Dynamic Languages: Ruby
- Random thoughts » Rickard Oberg rolls his own WRSP implementation
- A Java Geek's Diary : Weblog » Principle of SOA
- Otaku, Cedric's weblog: Why unit tests are disappearing » Why unit tests are disappearing
- wsfinder - FrontPage » The Wiki for Finding Web Service and Open APIs
Related posts
Going to BEAWorld
I'm making my annual pilgrimage to everything WebLogic or rather BEA at the conference formally known as BEA eWorld. For some reason, it's now called BEAWorld and its being held on 5 cities all over the world. I am attending the one in Santa Clara, just outside of San Francisco at the end of September. The other cities are London, Paris, Prague, Tokyo and Beijing and I wish I could go to one of those cities instead.
At BEAWorld, hoping to meet the usual cadre of geeks and learn a lot more about WebLogic 9.0, EJB 3.0, Portal 9 (?) and JRockit. Unlike JavaOne, BEA's conference is always very technical and the content is truly relevant if you are using their products in your enterprise. I am also hoping to learn more about the Plumtree acquisition and see how that will affect the existing Portal product. I am also hoping to learn more about WebLogic's roadmap for EJB 3.0, JAX-WS and some of the other emerging standards. I am also slated to participate in a panel discussion about SOA - should be interesting.
Related posts
Spring AOP & AspectJ come together?
Are Spring AOP and AspectJ coming together? Will AspectJ become Spring AOP or vica versa? Interesting developments going on in the AOP space lately. First Jonas Bonér and now Adrian Colyer – Jonas is founder of the AspectWerkz AOP project which recently merged with AspectJ has left BEA and is joining startup Terracotta. And now Adrian Colyer, who leads up the AspectJ at IBM, has resigned and joined Interface21, Rod Johnson's Spring startup company. In the eWeek article, Rod Johnson is quoted saying "Part of what he [Colyer] will be doing is laying out a comprehensive roadmap for AOP, from Spring AOP through to enhanced Spring/AspectJ integration.".
Related posts
Ruby On Rails at the Tipping Point?
Cobbie just sent me a link to David Geary's article entitled Tipping Rails. David is wondering out loud if Ruby on Rails has reached a tipping point and is about to break out and garner mass adoption. I don't really have any opinion on this topic but I do know that Ruby is stealing a lot of mind share from Java and even .NET. Dave Thomas introduced me to Ruby like thousands of others at one of the NFJS events and I've loved learning more and developing in Ruby. My copy of the Pickaxe book is looking pretty worn which is unbelievable as most technical books have a shelf life of about 3-4 weeks, if that.
I wish Ruby on Rails really gives Java a run for the money as competition is great and I hope Java and Rails force each other to get better. But I still see Java and Rails solving different problems. While Java or specifically Enterprise Java's sweet spot is the large, distributed, scalable applications (See Cameron Purdy's trading systems post on TSS), Ruby on Rails can fill the niche for small to medium web applications where time-to-market is the most critical item. I guess time will tell – In 2 years, the Ruby Insurgency will have taken hold and displaced Java and the must-learn language. And if Sun keeps coming up with more technologies like JSF, Rails will be the dominant web development framework. 
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JRockit Testimonials
Looks like my JRockit Testimonial made it on dev2dev.bea.com along with my goofy picture. Yikes - Sure to scare people away from JRockit now 
The picture is courtesy of Marquette University and the Master of Science in Computing program
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WebLogic 9.0 - First look at the GA release
BEA released the latest version (v9.0) of their flagship application server, WebLogic in early August. I have been playing with the latest release of WLS to see what's new, what's cool and what are the features that will make me push to upgrade ASAP.
In addition to J2SE 1.5 or Java SE 5.0 support, WLS 9.0 is also fully compliant with the J2EE 1.4 Specification and is fully buzzword compliant. This release includes support for EJB 2.1, Web Services 1.1, JMS 1.1, JMX 1.2, JDBC 3.0, WS-Security, SAML 1.1, Profile 1.0, WS-Policy, WS-Reliable Messaging and WS-Addressing among others. The specification notably missing is EJB 3.0 – WLS 9.0 does not support EJB 3.0 and will support it as a service-pack, when EJB 3.0 JSR finally gets approved. This was kind of disappointing as WebLogic has always been on leading/bleeding edge in terms of specifications. I know I would have used the built-in support for the 3.0 spec, knowing full well that things may change and break with service-packs. The reality is that we won't be pushing apps in production under 9.0 till SP1 is out and we've truly gone through and understood all the changes from 8.1 and their impact to our applications and processes. (More information of all the API alphabet soup is available here here).
One of the newest and biggest additions to WebLogic is the new functionality called 'Production Deployment' or 'side-by-side deployment'. This new feature allows you to redeploy a new, updated version of a production application without affecting existing clients of the application that have valid sessions, and without interrupting the availability of the application to new client requests. So all the old users continue to use the old version of the application and any new users get directed to the new application. As old sessions timeout and/or users log out, the old application is retired. This also works in a clustered environment where you may have many WebLogic instances. The one thing I haven't tested yet is whether in-memory (session) replication still works as before. The scenario I hope to test soon is where Server A and Server B participate in a cluster. User 1 comes in and logs into Server A – in-memory replication will replicate User 1's session over to Server B. While User 1 is still active, I deploy a new version of the application to the cluster. Once the application is deployed, I kill Server A and then have User 1 attempt to use the application. Will the old version of the application still be there on Server B even though it didn't have any users using it?
WLS 9.0 also includes a completely new administration console built on top of the WebLogic Portal framework as a set of JSP's with Struts and Beehive. This allows you to extend the console and add your own custom admin screens. I think this is a pretty useful concept as developers can add custom JMX hooks in their applications and then surface that data via the custom admin console interface. I've always built custom admin-consoles for applications to turn on/off things, resources inside the applications or failover, etc. Being able to add that functionality inside the console gives you the additional authentication and authorization capabilities to your custom admin screen. WLS supports JMX 1.2 and JMX Remote API 1.0 (JSR-160) in this release, which deprecates BEA's proprietary API for remote JMX access, MbeanHome.
One of the nicest new features is the ability to create 1 log file for 1 day. This was always a missing feature that annoyed me to no end as you could rotate logs based by time but it was always elapsed time and so you couldn't create 1 log file for 1 day that automatically rotates to a new log file at midnight. That is now enabled and all I can say is that it's about time.
Another great enhancement is the use of DataSources instead of connection pools by default. Instead of configuring a JDBC connection pool and then configuring a data source to point to the connection pool and binding to the JNDI tree, you configure a data source that encompasses a connection pool. Before JDBC 2.0 and the concept of DataSource, people created a connection-pool and then used the pool driver (JDBC) to get a connection. But now everything is in the context of a DataSource and so you have to create a DataSource to create the underlying connection pool and that will force people to rewrite their legacy code that gets a connection from the pool directly. It's a good thing, as it will make their code more portable.
There are quite a lot of simple enhancements that I find useful. For example, hitting CTRL-C to interrupt a running server that you were running inside a DOS window or UNIX shell used to just kill the server. Now the start script catches the interrupt and calls the WLS shutdown hook. Another minor but useful thing is that the auto-generated start scripts have support for JPDA (Java Platform Debugger Architecture). The command line includes all the parameters needed to fire up the debug listener on port 8453 but it's configurable at each startup script level.
I know I've only scratched the surface with WebLogic 9.0 in the weeks of playing. I'll continue to blog about anything that's interesting or cool or broken.
Links of Interest:
- WebLogic 9.0 Release Notes
- What's new in WebLogic 9.0
- Upgrading Applications for 9.0
- WebLogic 9.0 documentation
- WebLogic Server blogs on dev2dev