John D. Mitchell's Blog

May 2007 Archives

JaveOne 2007, Enterprise Search-Driven Developement

One of the most exciting things at the show this year is that my company, Krugle, announced the beta of an enterprise search appliance for development teams.

After all the months of labor, I can finally share our little bundle of joy with the world. :-)

In my experience, one of the biggest problems that enterprise developers face every day is finding useful information across the bazillion different silos of information that we have to deal with just to be able to work on our projects. Specifications, design docs, source code, issue trackers, mailing lists, notes, blogs, wikis, souce code control systems.... Mixing in time-to-market pressures, cost reduction, reuse goals, agile methodologies, and the like pushes us to a just in time way of life.

Finding relevant information amid that chaos is all too often painful and labor intensive. So, the core feature of the Krugle Enterprise appliance is to pull all of those silos together and make information available via search. This search-driven development approach is how development teams really work these days -- developers looking for example code, QA looking for bug fixes, maintainers trying to figure out the impact of making a change, managers looking at risk indicators, etc. -- we're bringing it all together.

Of course, I'm totally biased so ignore my blathering and check it out for yourself and your team.

JaveOne 2007, Keaton

Keaton is a new java.net project for integrating Apple's QTKit with Java. I.e., make it possible for Java developers to leverage the latest Quicktime support (since Apple seems to have abandoned Quicktime for Java) to be able to do cool media applications.

The project is looking for developers to join up and help out.

The presentation was given by java.net's own Chief Chief, Chris Adamson. I know I can't do any justice to Chris's presentation but it was informative and incredibly funny and everybody who wasn't there missed out on a real treat. Examples like this are the best reason that coming to shows in-person makes all the difference in the world.

JaveOne 2007, Java Puzzlers Points Out Problems with Kitchen Sink

Josh Bloch and Neal Gafter have been doing their wonderful Java Puzzlers shtick at JavaOne for the last 4 years. This year, Bill Pugh has stepped in for Neal to keep the puzzlers puzzling.

The puzzles point out all sorts of interesting and exasperating gotchas in the Java language and libraries that linger for ages waiting to humble us all.

This year's set of puzzles include a slew of problems that come as a direct result of the addition of auto-boxing/-unboxing of primitives to/from their object wrapper types (int and Integer, for example). Maybe it's just me but I seem to recall a lot of us who said how bad the consequences would be of adding auto-boxing to Java and yet here they are causing exactly the worst kinds of insidiously non-obvious problems.

The moral of these puzzles isn't merely "be careful of using wrapper types with the ternary operator", but that auto-boxing is evil and should have never been added to the language in the first place.

Of course, it goes without saying that this is just one example of how new "features" added to a mature language are very dangerous. One of the big, currently brewing brouhahas is over the proposed addition of closures to Java. Perhaps folks might want to pause their rampant fervor for a bit and actually look at the history of these attempts and realize just how costly these changes really are. Especially when there are plenty of alternatives like using other languages which have their pet features which target the underlying JVM.

As Josh so eloquently put, "APIs, like diamonds, are forever."

JaveOne 2007, Where's Apple?

As noted by various people, including Malcolm Davis, there's a lot of Apple laptops in evidence at the show this year. In particular, a whole slew of them on-stage for the keynote sessions.

But where's Apple? Really?

For all of Apple's pledges that Java is a first class citizen, Java support on OS X has been tardy, at best. Each new, major release of Java takes many months (as in over a year) to show up on Apple machines. That's just plain retarded.

Of course, it always takes two to tango so I have to also ask "what is Sun doing to help or hinder Java on OS X?"

JaveOne 2007, Community One

Sun is, as everybody knows, struggling to get mindshare around their products. This is especially true as they try to get uptake as they open source more of their stuff -- such as Solaris.

Hiring Ian Murdock of Debian fame is a pretty good idea to me. One of the biggest hurdles to (Open) Solaris uptake is the fact that so many things in dealing with Solaris are so annoyingly odd to all the folks who are used to the relatively consistent GNU userland experience and the usable package managers on Linux and *BSD distributions.

Another item that came through over and over again throughout the day was that one of, if not the key reason to use Solaris is DTrace. DTrace is an efficient execution tracing framework and if you haven't used it, you're missing out. Story after story from a wide variety of developers, sys admins, QA folks, etc. touted how using DTrace allowed them to get insight into the actual running of their systems and how big a difference that can make. While it's an open question of whether/when this will make it to Linux, DTrace is already in the next version of OS X and will be in the *BSDs sooner rather than later.

I must say that I was surpised how little I saw emphasizing the coolness of ZFS. It's a modern filesystem designed for the current disk storage and usage reality rather than how things were 20 years ago. Coupling ZFS with Sun's Thumper box is, IMHO, a compelling reason to actually buy Sun hardware. There's no really good filesystems in the open source world if you actually care about your data and want good performance and manageability. ReiserFS is pretty much orphaned and while the ext family are okay for desktop and non-critical servers, they just don't cut it when the data really matters.

Of course, for Java developers, the question is pretty much moot as to whether it's any advantage to go with Linux or Open Solaris. Java runs well on both. It was quite funny to hear some pushback to Greg Luck's (of ehcache) comment that OS doesn't really matter -- just a good JRE implementation. That's just playing out the old Java mantra of "write once, run anywhere" in the real world. Of course, operating system choice does matter to a point -- Greg's own company is an example of moving from ASP.net to Java because of scalability / performance reasons and days vs. months and years of uptime.

For me, I've used all of them for so long that it's mostly just a question of using what works for any given need. I'm hoping that the continued opening up of Solaris will help spur improvements in the Linux world and that many of the things that we love about the OSS operating systems will help improve Solaris so that moving around from one to the other is even easier.

JavaOne 2007, Startup Camp 2

Is this really JavaOne? Walking around downtown San Francisco in May wearing a t-shirt and shorts and not freezing to death? Record setting heat must be boiling my brain!

I spent most of Monday at the Startup Camp 2 festivities over at the old Argent Hotel. Startup Camp is an open space unconference hosted by Sun and run by the nice folks over at Mass Events Labs. If you've never participated in an open-space style conference, you definitely should -- but don't expect to just sit there -- it's really exactly what you make of it. Note that the notes from each section should eventually make it up to the wiki so check that out for more information.

I went to a session lead by Josh Berkus that was about MySql vs. PostgreSQL. It was much less contentious than I expected. :-) It's great to see PostgreSQL getting more exposure -- especially given how much (undue) credit MySQL gets around being "open source" when it's not completely true. I.e., when it comes down to it, the single biggest reason to chose one or the other is licensing. PostgreSQL's BSD license is a Very Good Thing(tm). In terms of performance, there's definitely a lot afoot with both projects... MySQL is getting better at vertical scaling and PostgreSQL is getting more horizontal support (for things like "clustering").

Another session that I went to was lead by Jason Hoffman of Joyent about the tradoffs of hosted vs. building and managing your own data centers especially as your service starts to grow and you need to start worrying about scale. What made this session cool is what open space conferences are all about -- audience participation. Lots of experienced folks in the audience sharing their war stories.

The money quote of the day came from Josh Berkus (gee, am I a stalker?): "Databases scale poorly." This basic sentiment came up over and over when talking about how to effectively and efficiently get better performance for those hard-earned (or hard-begged :-) startup dollars. Databases don't scale linearly in terms of cost. Moving business logic out of the database leads to up to a 5X improvement in terms of cost (according to a study by Sun). That's a big deal but I'll leave further exploration of that to a future blog.

The wackiest thing at Startup Camp 2 was the "Speed Geeking" general session. Think: speed dating for startups. Each startup that wanted to present itself was given a big round dinner table and had a few minutes to make their pitch/demo/whatever to each small group of interested people. I'm sorry but the Rate My Poop idea is not something that I even want think about -- I'm going to have nightmares.

I also attended a session on pricing of SaaS/"on demand" services. Alas, I hosed my notes of who was running that session -- my apologies. Lots of good discussion but two key takeways were to remember that it's not just "software" but also a "service" and that trust is a key component to any relationship.

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