John D. Mitchell's Blog

John D. Mitchell is the Chief Architect of Krugle -- a search engine for developers. Along with developing and rescuing distributed enterprise systems, John advises investors and executives on technology and high-tech companies. Over the past 15 years, he has been the CTO of ElasticMedia, HealthLogic.com, jGuru and the MageLang Institute. John co-authored Making Sense of Java: A Guide for Managers and the Rest of Us. He was the founder and contributing editor of the Tips & Tricks column at JavaWorld. John writes extensively on complex systems, development processes, computer languages and protocols, open source and intellectual property, and technological business risk management.

JPC: x86 Emulator on the JVM

Okay, I must be slipping... I can't believe that I've either totally missed this or completely forgotten about it:

At each JavaOne, I end up asking lots of people what, if anything, they've seen that's particularly cool, interesting, etc. This year, I was chatting with Cliff and he mentioned JPC -- an open-source emulator for x86 code.

JPC is written Java and so you can run all sorts of old DOS programs on any machine that supports the JVM. This includes a lot of old DOS games. [And now I feel old for playing too many of them when they were new.]

Hmm... I wonder if I can find some old GEOS disks and get it installed and running. :-)

FindBugs in Anger

If you aren't already using Findbugs then hopefully you've at least heard about it by now and have some idea of how useful it can be.

If not, then let me say that FindBugs is a must have tool in the arsenal of any Java developer and any development team that's not using it as part of their regular development practices is incompetent.

Bill Pugh has done a fantastic job making FindBugs a great F/OSS tool which helps detect a large variety of all too common programming mistakes in Java.

You can find an online demo, slides from last year's FindBugs introduction , and can even run FindBugs over the web.

If you aren't yet convinced that FindBugs is really useful, let me point out that I've used FindBugs as an expert witness in cases where outsourcing projects had gone wrong and people were arguing about the quality of the delivered code (among other things). You have been warned. :-)

Go wild!

JavaOne Day 4: Urgent Public Health Warning: Stomach Flu

The JavaOne conference team has been notified by the San Francisco Department of Public Health about an identified outbreak of a virus in the San Francisco area. Testing is still underway to identify the specific virus in question, but they believe it to be the Norovirus, a common cause of the "stomach flu", which can cause temporary flu-like symptoms for up to 48 hours. Part of the San Francisco area impacted includes the Moscone Center, the site of the JavaOne conference which is being held this week. We are working with the appropriate San Francisco Department of Public Health and Moscone representatives to mitigate the impact this will have on the conference and steps are being taken overnight to disinfect the facility. We have not received any indication that the show should end early, so will have the full schedule of events on Friday as planned. We hope to see you then.

Please see the attached notification from the Department of Public Health.

For further information, as well as Frequently Asked Questions related to the Norovirus, please visit the San Francisco Department of Public Health website at http://sfcdcp.org/norovirus.cfm

JavaOne 2008: Day 1, The Good, The Bad, and The Lame

Another year, another JavaOne.

It's always great to see so many old friends again.

This year seems to be continuing the attendance growth trend of the last couple of year so that's a good sign. Also, I've been able to find enough actually interesting and useful talks to keep from going back to sleep and that's an even better sign. In particular, this is starting to show how the "Java community" is growing up and outwards to encompass more than just the same old things.

Here's my list of the key things from Day 1:

JavaFX... NOT!

What a joke. JavaFX was announced with great fanfare at last year's JavaOne and yet what has actually been released in a year? Nothing of value. Just more hoopla and blah blah blah. Way too little, way too late. Especially now that Adobe has started opening up Flash and friends.

Indeed, with all of the improvements to the world of JavaScript/Ajax libraries, frameworks, and tools and most especially with the growing capabilities around the support of canvas in browsers, there's very little real reason to use those wretched "Rich Internet Application" packages like Flash and JavaFX.

JavaScript

Yep, there are now a number of sessions at JavaOne covering various aspects of JavaScript. Large rooms filled with Java developers who are using JavaScript is an interesting site to see.

As Roberto Chinici said in his talk, JavaScript Programming Language: The Language That Everybody Loves to Hate, JavaScript is basically yet another Lisp-1 language. Alas, as was so clearly shown in his talk, JavaScript is a really horrible implementation of Lisp-1 -- so many nasty corners, gotchas, and just plain bizarre things. That said, given JavaScript's ubiquity in web clients and its growing use on the server, it is pretty much required for all web developers to learn JavaScript.

JAX-RS: RESTful services in Java

Yes, REST is here to stay. JAX-RS is the attempt to standardize how to build RESTful services in Java. Basically, the approach is to use a number of new bits of library (such as the URI builder that makes working with URIs actually not a completely bug-inducing nightmare) and a bunch of new annotations.

There are already at least a few implementations out in the wild including the "Jersey" reference implementation and one for the Restlet framework.

The JAX-RS (aka JSR-311) draft specification has just been released for public review -- check it out and send in your comments.

As with JavaScript, everybody doing any web services in Java needs to at least check out JAX-RS (and Restlet).

Concurrency

Is there anybody left out there in Java-land that hasn't yet gotten the memo that concurrency is a big issue today and is becoming a huge issue moving forward?

Brian Goetz's talk, Let's Resync: What's New for Concurrency on the Java Platform, Standard Edition, was primarly about one key way to solve a number of problems was very well attended and people should check it out online.

Basically, coming in Java v7 is an addition to the java.util.concurrent library which adds a lot of support for building Fork-Join style concurrency solutions. For those who can't wait, check out Doug Lea's existing implementation that is part of his util.concurrent library.

Java v7 looks to have some nice features that both allow for very general Fork-Join solutions as well as things like the ParallelArray class which makes it ridiculously easy to concurrently process arrays of information. Joe Bob says: Check it out.

June 2008

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Recent Entries

JPC: x86 Emulator on the JVM

FindBugs in Anger

JavaOne Day 4: Urgent Public Health Warning: Stomach Flu

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A Look Back at JavaOne
This year's JavaOne conference attendence was about the same size as last year, with about 12,000 attendees, but the mood was upbeat. People are moving forward to make things happen. Barring some new huge shock to the system, author John Mitchell is taking this as a leading indicator that we've reached the bottom are heading back up. Jun. 27, 2003

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