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. :-)

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!

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

]]> 2008-05-08T02:13:50Z 2008-05-08T02:13:10Z tag:weblogs.java.net,2008:/blog/johnm/19.9738 2008-05-08T02:13:10Z

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.

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.

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."

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?"

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.

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.

Of course, with Jonathan Schwartz taking over for Scooter, the key question for a lot of people is: "Will Sun 'open source' Java?" Well, perhaps a better way to phrase the question is: "How will Sun deal with the issue of 'open sourcing' Java? Will Sun continue pretending that Java is already "open source" or will they actually take a true leadership role in moving Java forward?

Frankly, given Jonathan's latest blog entry, it sounds like he's going to continue Sun's delusional posturing. If so, he's going to have lost his best opportunity to ensure Sun's continuance as a company, let alone as any kind of leader. We need look no further than the most recent round of SGI's implosion to see a very clear example of what happens when a once-dominant company gets so entrenched in their own delusions of grandeur that they fail to adapt to the reality all around them.

Hopefully, Sun will be able to overcome its own fear so as to be able to make the next step.

Jonathan Schwartz will continue as President and become the top dog. Personally, I think this is a really good move. Jonathan has embraced a much more clueful approach, especially relative to the big, corporate behemoth that is Sun. :-)

A few weeks ago, I attened a Sun "VC Event" where they were pitching the new servers to VCs and their various portfolios companies down in the Valley. [The best part of getting there on time was getting time to chat with James Gosling because no suits are ever on time. :-?] Jonathan gave a strong pitch for Sun's new world view. Not just the words and slides but his presence and presentation gave off a much better tone than Scooter (let alone full-on psychos like Ballmer :-). Good luck!

Okay, honeymoon is over...

Hint to Jonathan: Sun sucks at follow through... Alas, I'm still waiting for delivery of a T2000 server to check out and there's nothing good about making people who really want to try out your products wait and wait and wait. But I'll talk a lot more about that stuff once I actually receive the demo box.

ObJava: The $64,000 question is still: what are you going to do with Java? Your presentation was full of lots of talk about how Sun is not only embracing but driving lots of open source but the family jewels, Java, is still firmly under lock and key.

What we're creating with Krugle is a search engine for software developers. I.e., no more pawing through pages and pages of Google searches, hunting around various web sites, etc. trying to find useful results for technical information. We're crawling millions of technical pages and sucking down terabytes of source code using Nutch, processing pages with Antlr-based parsers, and serving up the search results using Lucene.

The site is currently in a limited beta and we're getting great feedback. I just saw that we're the most anticipated launch on the Museum of Modern Betas. Heck, that's even cooler than winning a DEMOGod award.

So, if you know any take-no-prisoners, hardcore people who want to work on a project that's actually making developers' lives better... Krugle is hiring.

Kevin Lawrence (and the Agitar crew) talk about the philosophical contention between the notions of For All and There Exists. That is, the difference in mindset of existentialists vs. universalists. Looking at debates in e.g., the extreme programming world, there's a lot of confusion and arguments back and forth that stem from this constructivist vs. deconstructivist conflict.

The biggest tragedy in these debates, IMHO, is that people on both sides of the fence polarize and calcify in their self-righteous positions. The fact is that we need some amount of both approaches to succeed. For example, writing test-first leads to horrible code if you don't also refactor as you go. Accretive unit tests that aren't themselves refactored leads to big, ugly and unmaintainable test suites. More simply, positivist (aka "garden path") tests must be balanced with deconstructivst (test (to) destruction) tests.

Stepping up a level or three, it's even better if, rather than merely mitigating and ameliorating problems, we change the game such that it's hard/impossible to even articulate bad ways and trivial/easy to articulate the garden paths. That is one of the biggest benefits to taking a linguistic approach to development.

Updates:

Note that folks using non-Gecko based browsers are not able to view or add comments about the draft on the web site but you can submit comments via email.

For those who can't read the draft easily on the official website, Tim Bray has put up an easy to read version that is suitable for printing.

Simon Phipps and Danese Cooper co-wrote their notes from the release presentation.