Richard Monson-Haefel's Blog

November 2003 Archives

The Rebel Alliance: Apache / ObjectWeb Join Forces

ObjectWeb, if you haven't heard of it, is an organization similar in purpose to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). They have a fairly large offering of their own, but until recently they have predominantly used a LGPL license, which is simply incompatible with the Apache's BSD-style license. When Geronimo was announced back in August, some of the engineers from ObjectWeb approached us (I'm a Geronimo team member) about collaborating on some projects. Their JOnAS and JOTM development teams are also working toward J2EE Certification so they are creating a lot of the same components (EJB container, Transaction Monitor, Messaging, etc.) that the Geronimo folks are working on. The ObjectWeb engineers suggested that we collaborate on facilities common to both projects. The Geronimo team was very interested and agreed to meet with ObjectWeb at ApacheCon. That meeting took place last night.

The synergy, other than licensing, between ObjectWeb JOnAS/JOTM and Apache Geronimo appears to be excellent. Our development cultures are admittedly different but the differences actually strengthen our alliance rather than weaken it. The JOnAS/JOTM folks are, on average, older and more experienced in big-iron (mainframe kind-of stuff). Their depth of knowledge is really incredible – David Egolf of ObjectWeb kept Geronimo developers mesmerized for hours after the BOF talking about mainframe transaction processing. It was, for me at least, like finding my own Obi-Wan Kenobi. Given the chance I would have spoken to him all night.

While the depth of knowledge exhibited by the JOnAS/JOTM teams is extraordinary, the ObjectWeb folks tend to be slower out the gate than Geronimo. This is because they are more methodical. They are, in essence, the old men of the sea. The Geronimo team, on the other hand, is younger. These young-upstarts tend to develop solutions quickly and redesign often. But the output form the Geronimo folks is staggering. For example, the Gerionimo team is close to having an alpha release of the J2EE Geronimo platform four months after starting development. The technical expertise of the Geronimo folks is nothing to sneeze at either – almost everyone I've been working with has developed at least one successful open source container system before Geronimo.

So how will these teams work together? We will leverage each other's unique cultures and experience to co-develop common components for our J2EE container systems. The best, and first, example of this is JOTM. JOTM is ObjectWeb's transaction processing monitor. Transaction processing monitors are notoriously tricky critters to get right, and being able to plug in an existing and – according to Dain Sundstrom – excellent implementation like JOTM is a huge win for Geronimo. In addition, the JOTM people will go on to develop journaling and recovery, which is perhaps the most difficult and most critical aspects of a enterprise transaction manager – it's what makes transaction managers truly reliable. No open source project today offers a real journaling and recovery system. JOTM will be the first. Since the JOnAS/JOTM folks have more depth in this area, the Geronimo team is happy to endorse and support their development efforts. From this point forward, Geronimo and JoNAS will co-develop, maintain, and utilize JOTM for their transaction processing monitors. Of course, this would not have been possible if the JOnAS team had not agreed to change the license of JOTM from LGPL to BSD-style at the meeting last night. That was the last barrier to collaboration between the groups, and it turned out not to be a barrier at all.

For their part, ObjectWeb is thrilled to have the support of the Geronimo team and just as importantly, they are excited about the prospect that their software will be reused outside of ObjectWeb. This is open source after all; we believe in sharing software, exchanging ideas, and cross development. Geronimo will be contributing resources and unparalleled expertise in the Java platform – no one leverages byte code complication like the Geronimo team.

It's been an interesting turn of events. Before the BOF with ObjectWeb last night, the Geronimo folks worked together 16 hours a day at ApacheCon and were inseparable. As of today all that has changed. Now it’s the Geronoimo and ObjectWeb folks that are inseparable: The old men of the sea share their decades of hard-won big-iron wisdom; the young Geronimo upstarts share their passion, container development experience, and Java platform expertise. The feeling of camaraderie is sincere and an unadulterated. This is the start of a powerful alliance and the beginning of many new friendships.

The State of Geronimo

What does that mean? Well, it means that Geronimo, when it's ready, can be tested against Sun's Technology Compatibility Kit (TCK). An application server has to pass the tests in TCK in order to be called "J2EE Compliant". The fact that Sun has extended this license to Apache, is a huge vote of confidence in the Geronimo project. It says that Sun believes that Geronimo is a legitimate application server that may, provided it passes the TCK, be called "J2EE Compliant." Although, ObjectWeb (another open source organization) was given the TCK scholarship (something Geronimo still needs), Geronimo is the first open source project to receive the license. The license gives you permission to run tests against the TCK, but it normally costs a butt-load of money to label an application server as compliant – that licensing fee is one of the ways that Sun realizes income on J2EE. The scholarship, on the other hand, is designed to support non-profit organizations. It basically waves the costs that commercial vendors are required to pay in order to use the "J2EE Computable" branding.

But wait! That's not all … it was also announced that Geronimo will be using OpenEJB as it EJB container system. Actually, several of the Geronimo folks have been hard at work on a new OpenEJB branch that can be used by Geronimo and the established OpenEJB community. This is an item close to my heart, as I co-founded the OpenEJB project with David Blevins four years ago. It's been a blast working with the OpenEJB code base again. My hat is off to David and the rest of the OpenEJB community – the fact that the Geronimo folks chose to use OpenEJB, rather than develop their own EJB container system is a huge endorsement of that project.

There is more to this, specifically about Geronimo collaborating with ObjectWeb, but I'll cover that tomorrow …

ApacheCon Hackathon: Rediscovering my religion.

Fortunately, I was saved here at ApacheCon in Las Vegas. I rediscovered my religion, programming. For the past 36 hours I've been working along side some of the smartest people I've met. Hanging out at the ApacheCon Hackathon (an informal communion of Apache committers) with the likes of David Blevins, Dain Sundstrom, Jeremy Boynes, James Strachan, David Jencks, Bruce Snyder, Hiram Chirino (in no particular order) and many others. These guys have been banging away on their keyboards for the past 48 hours working furiously for the shear pleasure of it. Watching them work together from early morning until ... well early morning, was incredible. I've never seen a more motley crew (the dirty half dozen) come together in such perfect harmony. This is what team work is supposed to be. These are the guys every recruiter dreams about. I'm surrounded by the hardest working, most intelligent and personable people I've met in years. Geek took on new meaning for me this past weekend. Its not about all those geek stereo types, its about passion. These developers are passionate about writing really good software and they are probably most capable people you will ever meet.

It was exhilarating to work along side these people. It was also humbling, but in a good way. I learned that you can still be excited about your work. That coding is an end in-and-of itself. That open source software is to commercial development what fine art is to commercial art. It's pure. It's free from business managers and sales people and apathy. If you've lost your love for programming, then get involved in open source.

I've rediscovered why I became a developer in the first place. I had forgotten what its like to work with great software engineers and to be excited about solving technical problems. I had forgotten my religion. Well, I'm back.

Note: I don't know why people would be interested in this sort of thing, but the folks at java.net seem to think someone will. If you feel like you just wasted the last three minutes of your life, then I apologize. If, however, this blog starts even a single person on a pilgrimage similar to mine, it will be well worth it.

Amazon.com reviews are a farce.

When a book is sold on Amazon.com anyone can post a review about it whether they read it or not. All you need to do is create an account on Yahoo or HotMail and then create a new Amazon.com account with that e-mail address. You can be a Fred Smith, Barney Rubble, or anyone you want - you can even impersonate someone. Amazon.com doesn't seem to care. It's a prefect set up for fraud, and for people with no scruples it represents a simple way to pump up their own ratings while knocking down their competitors.

More recently, I've become aware that some individuals have gone a step further by posting fake five-star reviews on their own books using the names of famous people in our industry. If you think that's stupid, let me assure it happens. In fact, I found one book that had at least one (probably three) reviews impersonating well known figures in our industry. How do I know they were fakes? I asked the people I suspected were being impersonated. I myself was impersonated on Amazon.com in a slightly different manner.

A couple months ago I discovered two book recommendation lists that were posted under the name "Richard Monson-Haefel" on Amazon.com's Listmania page. One was called "Great Books on Web Services" and the other was "Books I wish I had Written". Both lists had one of my competitors book at the top, so that it became the icon for the list itself. I didn't post these lists, someone else impersonated me and posted them in some stupid attempt to influence readers - like people care what I like and don't like (why are you reading this anyway?). What really pissed me off was the fact that I was impersonated. There are only four people with the last name Monson-Haefel on this planet and that is my wife, two kids, and myself. Why so unique? My wife and I took each others names when we got married. She was a Haefel (a rare name) and I was a Monson. Monson-Haefel is a married name. That listmania posting under my name was intention fraud, and in many states its considered Identity Theft - a crime.

As a side note, James Gosling was also impersonated on Listmania – funny how his list recommended the same book as mine …. Hmmmm.

Amazon.com wields a huge amount of influence in the publishing industry. By some accounts 25% of all books (at least in our field) are sold by Amazon.com. That's incredible market share. Because Amazon.com doesn't verify the identity of their members it's has unwittingly created an environment that encourages fraud and identify theft. What can we do? Well, other than complain to Amazon.com maybe not much. If anyone feels the same way that I do, and you have a good idea of how to stop Amazon.com's current business practices let me know. I'm all ears.

Personally, I think the best solution is for Amazon.com to validate the identity of its members by credit card. Why? Well, unless you have connections in the underworld it's pretty hard to create more than one Amazon.com account because each identity would be associated with a valid credit card with a unique owner. It would pretty simple to determine that two members are the same person - even if they used different credit cards (e.g Visa and MasterCard) for each account. What would be even better is if Amazon.com only allowed people who purchased the book from Amazon.com to post a review about that book. This would make it pretty expensive to post multiple reviews to the same book, good or bad.

Richard

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