Daniel Brookshier's Blog

JavaOne Archives

Swing Set 3 - The Rotary Bazooka T-Shirt launcher

Tossing a t-shirt is not as easy as it looks. Especially if you are a software developer. That is at least what the Swing Set 3 team tells me. Looking at the flesh wounds of one of the members, it is a bit dicy (or rather the launcher bytes).

The Swing Set 3 team only garnered second place this year. I was quite surprised. The winning entry was closer to the Bluetooth of Danish Viking and King, Harald Blåtand, not the Bluetooth related to Java ME device (BTW Java ME is the new branding for J2ME). Swing Set 3 on the other hand was a marvel of electronics, old bycycle parts, and sharp pointy bits that together flung t-shirts to the back of the auditorium.

Ok, here is the team:

o Matt Quail (http://madbean.com) - The software guy and master of the GUI interface

o Brendan Humphreys (http://opencurly.com) - Aluminum expert, T-Shirt Artisan
o Conor MacNeill (http://codefeed.com) - Electrical engineer and cranker (Stopped the barrel with only a small loss of blood)
o Pete Moore - Fearless leader, tool guy (in charge of the sharp pointy bits)

Just a bunch of software guys trying to hardware, the same way they do software. That means bugs and crashes, right? But let's look at the technology now because it is quite impressive.

Features

o Long Blue Canisters - Low-range/high-volume release mechanism.

o Secondary low-volume/high-range t-shirt release boom - This one sent a t-shirt to the back of the room.
o Bike rims - Main axis of the barrel (hand cranked). Spins at a max of 250 RPM with the right pizza fed volunteer
o Separate 12 and 24 volt power busses on the main barrel - used for sensors and relays
o Infrared RPM sensor - Measures the speed

o Mac 15 inch 1.5gHz PowerBook - Command and control center

I love their visual interface. But as you can see by their photos, they really should stand a bit farther back from the imager.

Based on the speed, the software calculates the best time to release. That's the theory anyway and the hardest part.

Time for physics. A 200 gram t-shirt, spinning at 200 RPM, at a radius of 80 centimeters has an effective weight of 10 kilos. So forty kilos of t-shirt! That is a lot of shirt. The latches have to hold the 10 kilos and still be able to open in milliseconds or the trajectory will be wrong.

Now for the real problem. Inadequate code coverage unit testing in a real environment. The highly precise infrared sensor set to 850 nanometers are key to making the device wok. In fact testing in the auditorium was done to be double sure. Unfortunately these super accurate sensors were susceptible to broad spectrum source (like a reporter's camera flash). The end result was that the system did not have an accurate idea of where all the spinning bits were and let fly whenever a reporter's camera went off.

Another manifestation of Murphy's law and perhaps one to remember. If you have a very accurate measurement tool, the world will throw noise at you that looks like clean and accurate data.

Beyond the 28 hours a day that each member contributed to the effort to chuck a shirt, they also work for Cenqua. Cenqua has two tools; Clover and FishEye. Clover is a code coverage tool for Java (a great product but lousy for t-shirt launch testing). it tells you what parts of you code are not being tested by your unit tests. FishEye is a tool that provides a web based interface into your source code repository, allowing sophisticated searching, RSS feeds and much more. http://www.cenqua.com/

The build pictures are here http://flickr.com/photos/pte/tags/tshc

Open Source and the Puppet Master - Thinking Like John Gage

Imagine John Gage and a puppet at JavaOne. How could that be related to community and open source? It is an interesting thought. All you need to do is think like John Gage.

I was at the second JavaOne. I would have been at the first, but I was on an airplane flying the other direction (reading Java in a Nutshell). I had had already ported a game called Xiang Qi (A.K.A. Elephant Chess or Chinese Chess) and a shortest path algorithm (for MCI). I was impressed by Java's speed and the wonder of Goslings stack safety, garbage collections, clear errors, and the exceptions. All the things missing from C++ at the time.

But missing the first JavaOne is not that bad. Missing an opportunity to listen to John Gage, I now see as the real loss.

John Gage, is the voice of JavaOne. Scott's key note and Gosling's demo fest are the high points, but John is the thread, the motivation, and the call to arms at JavaOne. John Gage capitalizes on the value of being with other smart people. Better yet, he reminds to make the best with those around us. Without John, we are just drones going to sessions. With John Gage, we are explorers, deal makers, and dare I say it, Brazilians! **

But back to the puppets!

Bruno Souza, The community manager for the JUG community at Java.net, created a mascot for the JUG community. It is a Java Finch. Bruno, with the help of many others has created a character in 2D and 3D and even a puppet. We call it(him?) Juggy.

Juggy 1.0

You may have seen Juggy around JavaOne. He is everywhere. I am almost certain that Juggy's picture has been taken with our fellow Java developers as Duke.

Tuesday night, Juggy met John Gage. John was following the Brazilians track at JavaOne. The Brazilians are quite a story with so many developers and grand success in Healthcare using Java. To quote an audience member at Fabiane Nardon's (Duke award Winner) Birds of a Feather on Brazil's new healthcare system: "Didn't anyone tell you this is impossible to do in only four month's?" You have to follow around these people just to figure out what they are doing right.

But to the puppet. Juggy's incarnation as a puppet is impossible to ignore. John had several conversations with Juggy, as many of us have had this week. Between one of these many deep and hilarious conversations John had with Juggy, he talked about the power of puppets. Simply, puppets are our alter egos.

Throughout the history of man, the puppets do and say the things we would live to do. The puppet is the alter ego, the id set free to be honest, gregarious, suave, overtly honest, and irreverent. The puppet is who we would be if we were unbound and free. In a word, 'open'. Yes, as is community and as in open source.

John's prime example is political puppetry in France. He also included the gambit of puppets, including the shadow puppets we might find on the island of Java in Indonesia. The French puppets, known also as guignol, get a away with saying a lot of hilarious things as they parody day-to-day politics. Looking like French and world leaders they say things we might wish they would 'really' say just so that we could laugh. Sort of comic satire from an obsessed and warped doppelganger. Political humor, no matter your own politics, is funny.

John Gage is the one person in the world that I just love to hear talk. I have met him many times over the past years. Every time he seems to find the profound wisdom from a casual remark, an idea, or a situation. He sees connections and then gives us the connection for us to examine. He does this with ideas and often times with people. If you are looking for a matchmaker of ideas and people, John is the one you want.

John also has a curiosity that is unbounded. He looks beyond the surface of almost everything. As an example, on the way to the W hotel, we happened upon a city worker pulling up a manhole cover. John was right there, bending over and peering into the dark hole, looking for enlightenment from the darkness below the street's of San Francisco. He was even asking the worker for the details to the mysteries. Tonight though the worker only laughed and said, "Jimmy Hoffa."

Remember, we were talking puppets. Or was it the puppet talking? The key connection is to the power of the puppet as a device to free the personnality of the puppeteer. When the puppet asks questions, you get that same openness and willingness too. How many people would cuddle up and kiss your hand and have a polite conversation with wiggling fingers? Put a puppet on your hand and it is all possible. Like open source, we can see people open up and look at their hidden code. We can ask for their ideas, the truth, and find what we would say if we could do it right, in our own terms. The puppet is a metaphor for open source. John Gage meets serendipity once again, or at least a puppet created under a creative commons license by and for Java developers and the open source community. A puppet that is open sourced and causes people to have fun and open their hearts and minds.

Juggy, as a mascot, is our ambassador. As a puppet, he is our comic relief. Juggy is also now a blogger. He will blog here at Java.net and make us laugh. As our own guignol, Juggy will use raw wit, satire and wacky humor to make us laugh, even when we are laughing at ourselves.

Ready for proof? Here is John Gage, Juggy, and Bruno Souza.

** If you have not been to JavaOne, Brazilians are the most vocal during keynotes. And as far as I know, the fastest growing community of Java developers in the world.

Sun's Jonathan Schwartz speaks FOSS and opens Sun's Application Server

Free and Open Source Software (FOSS)
A fine quote from Johnathan's Keynote today: "There is a social utility to free software"

Johnathan's core message is that FOSS is good for business by bringing new people into relationships and creating a greater need and thus opportunity to provide infrastructure. It made sense to me. Instead of build it and they will come, this is provide them free software and they will buy your hardware and services to support it.

"There is no downside to FOSS", he also said. Hard to say. There is one to your competitor or the guy that competes against an open source project. No downside for Sun in the products like Glass Fish, JXTA, Open Office, NetBeans and others. If we saw Microsoft FOSS Office, would that be good or bad for OpenOffice?

Opening the Application Server

Open sourcing of the Sun application server was a big deal. The code is hosted at Java.net at: GlassFish) Some argue that Sun is not great at software. It is however great at supporting community creation of software. This now means a huge shift in the landscape. JBOSS was becoming a clear leader because we developers choose products we know.

How are our software product preferebes made? We know tools that we can afford to use. That's why JBOSS was popular. Download, install, and run but even better, whatever you can do with JBOSS you know you can afford to deploy it with JBOSS. So, free and I know my investment of time won't be erased by the cost of buying a $50,000 dollar app server license. Sun's application server can now play this same game.

Sun does have a second advantage. Sun has a lot of support and of course the prepackaged solution. That means when you are ready to pay for professional support, it is there.

Seems like Jonathan is pretty smart from my point of view.

I Sun a threat to JBOSS? Is JBOSS in trouble? Yes and no\, there is a lot of col and wonderful stuff in JBOSS. It was built by a group of guys with staggering intelligence. The question is that if Sun's application server is open source, how long before it has incorporated JBOSS innovations. Stay tuned.

But this is also a big win for education. Believe it or not, universities don't run on 100% open source. Like any business, a university needs reliability and support. But universities also need to build and innovate applications. Now there is no issue to a student of university employee or professor to get Sun's server and do cool things that may get ported to the university's professionally supported infrastructure. This reduces startup and supports student projects and adds future security when the application becomes mission critical.

I have trouble seeing a downside here. The only real issue is if Sun has open and closed source. If you have watched NetBeans and Forte, Forte lagged in its release cycle quite a bit. The result is when faced with free software that is up to date, they are going to select the free software. If Sun can support the open source source and shrink wrapped, they won't have an issue.

What do you think about releasing GlassFish? Is it the right thing to do? Is it Genius. I want to know what you are thinking?

Sun Ultra for 29.95 a month

Wow, get a Sun opteron for 29.95 a month with all the software tools installed and access to support. Just like cell phone with nights and weekends free.

There may be a catch. Looking at the Sun web, there is a small clarification: "When you sign up for three years of Sun support services at $29.95 per month." Not too bad considering that it still boils down to $1078.20 a month. Still not bad even though it lists for $895. Given all the support it becomes cheaper than my Apple G5 and the Apple Care package.

Hard to get the specs and it takes a phone call to buy one. So we don't know if this is for the base system. Is it worth the price? Let me know.

IENJINIA At JavaOne (with Spanish Translation)

Project IENJINIA will be at JavaOne at the Community Corner at JavaOne 's Vendor Pavilion in the Java.Net Community Corner Booth. The project leaders (who will translate this blog below into Spanish) will be talking about their project and how educators in Mexico are using it. But what is IENJINIA?

What is the first thing you think about when you imagine teaching software development? Games, right? Project IENJINIA emulates an 80's video games console. This is done for two reasons. First, most teenagers are interested in video games. The second is that the emulator is a very simple platform for exploring programming.

Writing software is an abstract and complex activity which makes it a hard to acquire skill. Students shouldn't be forced to deal on top of that with all the complexity of a modern computer system (operating system, compilers, linkers, complex "feature filled" IDEs, etc.). The IENJINIA DevKit is designed to provide a simplified computer on which the student can directly interact with the underlying (simulated) hardware using IPL (IENJINIA Programming Language).

IPL is a very simple interpreted language with dynamic typing, static scoping, automatic garbage collection and "standard" syntax (similar to C, C++ and Java).

----- Spanish Translation ----

El proyecto IENJINIA estará en el Community Corner Booth de Java.Net en JavaOne. Los líderes del projecto hablarán acerca de su proyecto y como ciertos profesores del ITAM en México lo están usando. Pero que es IENJINIA?.

Qué es la primera cosa que piensa cuando se imagina la enseñanza del desarrollo de software. Juegos correcto? El proyecto IENJINIA emula una consola de video juegos de los 80's. Esto fue hecho por dos razones. Primero, porque los juegos es algo que le interesean a los adolescentes. La segunda es que el emulador es una plataforma muy sencilla para explorar la programación.

Escribir software es una actividad abstracta y compleja que la hace una habilidad díficil de aquirir. Los estudiantes no deberían tener que lidiar con la complejidad de un sistema de cómputo moderno (sistema operativo, compiladores, linqueadores, IDE's complejos, etc). El IENJINIA DevKit está diseñado para ofrecer una computadora simplificada en la cual el estudiante puede directamente interactuar con el hardware (simulado) usando el IPL (IENJINIA Programming Language).

IPL es una lenguaje interpretado muy sencillo con manejo dinámico de tipos, "static scoping", recolección automática de basura y una sintáxis estándar (similar a la de C, C++ y Java).

JavaOne - Day four - 4 - IV - t-shirts via P2P and bling for java.net users

The awards were given out at the end of the main session today. The winners were "The Cyclists". I got to speak to the developer of the software. Silly me forgot to write down his name, but he can be reached at mrjava @ sprint.com and the web site is www.observeit.com (site is not up yet).

As Gosling said, the winner was built with a lot of weirdness and imagination. Here is the list of technology involved:
o J2EE web server for audience participation and media server to relay server link establishment.
o Java Applet for real-time sighting video display
o J2Se Swing app(media server) for graphics and sound rendering.
o J2Se bike relay server - off - bike communications
o Dallas TINI Java Controller = sensors and actuation or the drills A.K.A poor man's servos and light controls.
o JavaCard iButton computer thrown with t-shirts for Java enabled camera phone giveaway.

But there was more to the details! There were two computers in the system on stage that communicated via 802.11 back to the man server to find the IP address of each other. This is the poor man's Peer-to-Peer system. What happens is that the each PC calls the J2EE server (at the developer's house) to get the other peer's IP address. Just before they rolled out, the 802.11 was overloaded by all the attendees and in the last few minutes before they rolled out, they had to rewrite the code to use a hard wired connection that was hastily wired to the computes on the bike. With five minutes to spare the code was patched and tested. Not knowing your IP address is a bit worse than having the chain break (actually it was the master link on the chain that was popped off by two desperate competitors in front of a live audience ). I could not help with the chain, but I did sugest he use JXTA instead of the home grown solution. We will also host the code at Java.net in the Java Education and Learning Community.

I was running around with Bruno (the fellow from Brazil with the Brazilian flag cape and who runs the Java user group community on java.net) and met some guys that will donate free installation software to the Java.net community. No names yet, but look for an announcement soon.

Finally I talked to a fellow from a mining company. They use 802.11 to communicate between their heavy equipment. They have problems communicating and managing their various devices. We talked about JXTA as a solution. Looks like a lot of their problems and allow a multi-ton earth mover to call the office for an oil change via JXTA P2P. Look for JXTA in applications like this real soon.

JavaOne - Day Three - More friends, JXTA, epackaging of an app server and open source

Greetings!

We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them - Albert Einstein

I got to attend Brad Neuberg's tech session on P2P Sockets and Paper Airplane. Paper Airplane is a Mozilla plugin written with JXTA. It is a great example of extending a known metaphore into the P2P world. Brad talked about a shared Wiki and other services like SOAP via the JXTA network. Check out http://p2psockets.jxta.org/ and http://paperairplane.dev.java.net/ for more info. I really think this is a great way of doing things. There is a freedom from servers and a freedom to communicate. There are a few things to work out, but Brad has a lot of great ideas in this area that need to be explored.

Email==Face

Got to meet more people today. From the JXTA community, to my book readers, to business customers. Most I have never seen or talked to except via email. Some of these people have been emailing me for years and this is the first time I have seen them in person. JavaOne is getting to be a watering hole where everyone meets. Forget the sessions, it's about meeting the smart people of the world in person.

UML

I also got to teach a short class on UML today for NoMagic and ExitCertified (Sun's education partner). I had room full of people willing to learn UML and we had some fun too. Speaking of UML, I overheard someone say that the white-board is the best place to do UML. All I have to say is that is misleading. Using a white-board to think about a design is nice, but you need to capture the design for the long run. A white-board can't be emailed to your customer. A white-board can't be filed away to be referenced years later by a maintenance developer. You can't edit the same white-board to change the design over the course of ten years of maintenance. Use tools, free or otherwise and be a professional.

Creating an Artificial Einstein with JXTA

One of the more visionary people I met today (well... yesterday because it is now 2:00am) was Jeff Zhuk of ITS Inc. Jeff is using Open CYC and JXTA to create a distributed knowledge system and expert system. How cool is that? I have done similar things, but Jeff is going for a massive solution that integrates thousands of people to build an expert system via peer to peer computing. In addition, Jeff teaches Java, JXTA, and JINI. He has all the pieces and is looking for help.

Einstein and Java Enterprise Server

Spent the morning at Sun looking at Java Enterprise System (JES). JES is a new way to deploy and license the infrastructure of an internet business. Sounds innovative, but I would say it just shows that there are finally some smart people at Sun thinking about doing things right. JES is built on the idea that most portals are really built of a dozen or so applications like the portal application framework, web server, application server, calendar, email, instant messaging, LDAP, single sign on and many others. All of these pieces are usually put together one at a time and with a lot of work dedicated to getting them to actually work as a single unit. My past is littered with the with the wasted and long hours or complete failures because of applications not mixing well. What Sun has done is create a clean integration of all of these tools that runs smoothly and is tested as a unit to discover integration problems. The end result is a lot of the core business software is up and ready to use in a few hours. Think about the Integration of all the software components that make up the infrastructure. They are like building an airplane from little pieces and a blueprint. Instead, JES is a fully assembled and tested Lear Jet.

Like I said, not really innovative, but it takes a lot of work and politics to integrate all your standalone products into a single install, with a single interface for management, and one application to license, and get maintenance agreements on. My hat is off to the guy that proposed such a departure in the Sun way of doing business.

But now to the second part of the innovation of JES that might give JBoss a run for their money. The JES set of componenets in the common install management tools is available with a cool procing model. Think about having it all with a portal application framework, web server, application server, calendar, email, instant messaging, LDAP, single sign on and many others for just $100 a year per full time employee. This is just the business model for pricing and not some magic number that is part of the CPU count, the number of gigabytes of storage, email accounts, your first born child, and a chariot that turns into a pumpkin at midnight. The key is that this is just a way to price the system, it is not the price for the number of actual users. This just buys support for the tool and your software updates.

This is more cool and obvious if we look at a company that has 100 employees for a cost of 1000*$100 (it is free up to 99 employees but there is no maintenance). Now even though the company bought the 1000 employee license, they can have a million customers and their 1000 employees use the system without any additional costs(except for the pesky hardware). A good example is Google with 5,000 employees and 7 million customers would only need to pay for the 5,000 employee license. The economies of scale look like open source with maintenance.

The tools are all based on open standards, not open source. Seeing and modifying code is not an option. But when you have a good maintenance agreement, the risk and cost of maintaining open source verses a maintenance contract is about the same or better since most of the components are usually used as is and not customized. Because they are tested as a suite, there is even less need for the IT department to be fiddling with code that should be considered infrastructure rather than custom applications. Of course this is still a modular system and you can swap out almost any piece with an open source or commercial alternative (like the application server).

Is Sun really a winner with JES? Hard to say at this point. They have happy customers so far with the first release and a model that is hard to ignore. The application server and all those component parts are newly rewritten and running fast and seem scalable. They could be a market leader in their own J2EE market. Really! Stranger things have happened. Stay tuned.

One more day

One day to go here at JavaOne. Time to pull out all the stops and meet as many people as you can and collect ideas and business cards. Make friends, learn from them, and help them as much as you can. We are all in this together and we are a community. Get out there and make the Java world a better place!

JavaOne - Day Two - The Rise of Buzz

Today we got to see the sunny side of Scott McNealy at the keynote today. I have to admit that I like to hear that man talk. The key thing that he said that got my attention was that there were 14,000 developers at JavaOne. That is almost like before the crash! Almost everything but the requisite T-Shirt lofting at the end of the talk was just icing on the cake of the Java economy(the T-Shirt lofter self-destructed after 3 shots - but it did look real cool). Even making nice with Microsoft is less a happening than knowing that the developer community is thriving. If you can afford to go to JavaOne, there must be some money in the economy.

Tonight we also had our meeting of the minds for java.net. There were a lot of people there and the conversations were loud and hard to stop - even when we announced a few cool prizes. I heard lots of talk about opportunity knocking. There are a lot of new projects out there and a lot entrepreneurial work too. With a down economy the smart people are replacing the defunct companies. I heard of a lot of people making their way in small businesses with cool ideas. I was able to show off a few of mine too like 312 Inc's LeanOnMe P2P backup software, Quantum Chess (a P2P chess variant), and Venezia-Gondola (P2P ebay killer) all written in JXTA.

I also heard a lot of talk that Java technology is getting bigger and better. As an example, JXTA is now faster and easier. Tools and techniques are also improving. I also saw that Java is still bigger than you can absorb. There are a lot of API out there for all sorts of applications. Thank goodness we have Google or we would never find these great tools and products.

Today was also another day of meeting people. I must have met 30 people that know me, but only online. It is always a surprise to find that nobody looks like their smiley faces :o) I am amazed at how conversations always turned to business or succeeding with Java.

Education and Java started to become apparent today. I met several people form different universities. There were students and professors, all seeming to be working on very cool projects.

More to come. Tomorrow there is a JXTA session and a BOF. I'll be at the session and might make the BOF. I need to share my time with the NoMagic folks( makers of MagicDraw UML, a 100% Java UML modeler). If you are interested, I'll be teaching a short course in UML Wednesday night and will be signing copies of my JXTA book. Come by the NoMagic Booth and sign up, we have only limited seating.

Stay tuned! Two more days to go!

JavaOne Day One

I am at JavaOne, again! It is great to be a JavaOne Alumni, but it is interesting because of the changes we see from prior years. The Java 1.5 release is one of the bigger things to happen. Most of the conferences I have been to have had new version of Java, but this is a much bigger jump. Java has always suffered from a lack of templates and other syntactic sugar, but it is finally here.

JavaOne started this year with the big pizza and beer bash plus parties around the city. One thing that I have noticed is that I know a lot of people. It seems that every 10 steps I took, I met someone that knew who I was. From people at Java.net, jxta.org, to Sun, fellow authors, to former and current coworkers. There are thousands of people here, but how amazing is it that I know dozens of Java developers. Now that I think about it, I might know thousands. I meet new people every day here at JavaOne so I will know many more of you.

But if you are reading this blog and are at JavaOne, I want to meet you too. I'll be at the "Java Communities in Action" party/social/presentation at the Argent Hotel in room Metro3 (located at 50 Third street). The event starts at 6:00pm and there will be FREE FOOD & DRINKS(Beer, wine, etc). We will also give out some great prizes too. We will be meeting, greeting, and talking about the java.net communities. We will all be there from the java.net communities like games, jugs, and education, to the federated communities like jxta.org, jini.org, and netbeans.org.

New news on the java.net front. I just found out that we now have a Java/Mac community!!! I love my Macs and it is great that we now have a place to go to help Java developers integrate with all the cool Mac services like built-in spell check and many other features not found on windows boxes. There are also a couple of user interface issues that Java developers need to watch out for on the Mac and this community should help that out quite a bit.

I learned a lot of things today. I am ready to learn more tomorrow - well... today because it is already 1:15am! See you at the "Java Communities in Action" at the Argent Hotel and around JavaOne.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.