Any announcements left for JavaOne?

It really seems that this year, announcements are happening before JavaOne.
Here's what I have so far (I'm sure I missed some, adding as we go):
• GlassFish v3 does OSGi
• NetBeans 6.1 released
• Spring Application Platform
• Java 6 on the Mac (late, but still faster than JBoss on Java EE 5 ;)
• OpenJDK 6 in Fedora and Ubuntu
• Embedded GlassFish
• XWikiWorkspaces

Hum, I'm wondering if they were all planned long in advance or somehow related one to another...
Anyway, plenty more to come at JavaOne I'm sure. Full speed ahead!

( mai 01 2008, 06:49:59 PM CEST ) Permalink Comments [4]

A Tours le 14 mai 2008

JavaOne c'est la semaine prochaine et le compte-rendu de ce qu'il se sera dit c'est à Tours au "Toursjug" le 14 mai 2008 à 19h (avec un peu de GlassFish au passage).

( avr. 28 2008, 09:44:13 PM CEST ) Permalink Comments [0]

Yet Another Successful JavaPolis

JavaPolis is over and it was yet another great event. I've had many people tell me they liked it more than JavaOne. It must be either the comfy theater chairs or the size of the conference (easy to talk chat with speakers and conference attendees).

It must be a habit of releasing NetBeans versions for JavaPolis (4.0 in 2004). This time NetBeans 6.0 is really here and what a distance between those releases!

My GlassFish presentation went well, very well even given I had totally crashed my aging laptop two hours before I started. Good thing I had my presentation on a USB stick and that the GF download was reasonable in size. As Jean-François wrote, the audience was good (the competition was pretty stiff) and people stayed throughout the presentation and there were some interesting questions after the talk. The startup time of the current v3 drew some nice "wow" 's and applause which I almost did expect (I'm must be spoiled after showing this too many times ;-).

Of course I met a lot of people and I'm not even going to try to name them all. I have to say that I was very pleasantly surprised to see the attendance in talks such as Java EE 6, EJB 3.1, and JPA 2.0. They were really crowed. Spring seemed less present than previous years and there was no BEA in sight (they used to be one of the main sponsors).

Finally, it was great to see Neal and Josh on stage together, but it seems the agreement didn't last long.

( déc. 18 2007, 10:53:28 AM CET ) Permalink Comments [2]

Java 6 is 365 days old

Java SE 6 was released one year ago. Have you moved to using it? In development? In production? Using and application server (GlassFish v2 is supported on JDK 6)? Are you a Mac User? :)

( déc. 10 2007, 10:38:32 PM CET ) Permalink Comments [12]

Poll - Which JPA provider

With three implementations, all open source, I'm curious as to which JPA implementation you are using, so I've started the poll on the right hand side a couple of days back. I imagine some people will chose one of the answers even if they're not using JPA, but that's fine, this poll is far from being scientific in the first place.

( déc. 09 2007, 09:12:57 PM CET ) Permalink Comments [1]

VisualVM - NetBeans Platform powered

It's been almost three years that I first mentioned the NetBeans platform. The technology has since grown to be a first-class citizen in the NetBeans and Java worlds (with tooling support and books). The main difference with Eclipse RCP remains - NetBeans Platform is 100% Java/Swing.

VisualVM is a recent (and early) development based on the NetBeans Platform. It strikes an interesting balance between monitoring (a la JConsole), profiling (a la NetBeans Profiler, including a heap walker), and troubleshooting (new in Java 6). The platform is worth about half the application size, startup time is less than 5 seconds, and the application has a very professional look. The update center inherited from the platform isn't functional just yet, but I can certainly see the value of this for future versions and plugins to extend the feature set.

If you're in a Java 6 world, everything is really easy except maybe for profiling server-side applications which requires a fairly long time for the dynamic instrumentation to happen. Just like for JDK tools, VisualVM can also work on a remote process or a core file. More on VisualVM here.

( nov. 16 2007, 10:34:54 AM CET ) Permalink Comments [2]

SDPY - JPA

Two years ago, I was commenting on the JPA evolution. 24 months mater, Hibernate is still a very vibrant community, but interestingly enough it's not the default in any Java EE 5 application server (at least until JBoss 5 releases). Clearly developers do use JPA outside the container (for batch or Swing applications), BEA/SolarMetric donated openJPA, and WebSphere "Classic" is still not reported as supporting Java EE 5...

( nov. 06 2007, 06:28:00 AM CET ) Permalink

New Sun processor + new VM optimization = Great performance increase

Now, it's not just GlassFish at Sun that's breaking performance records. My friends from Sun's Java performance team are also doing wonderful things with the JVM on the newly released Niagara 2 (UltraSPARC T2) CPU. Congratulation guys!

Maybe it's time for a new GlassFish benchmark on this newer Java 6 VM? Too bad BEA can't use Java 6 ;-)

( oct. 09 2007, 09:25:54 PM CEST ) Permalink

Java conference in Athens

This was my first trip to Greece and I must say I had a very good time thanks to wonderfully friendly JUG hosts Paris & Panos. This is one very nice Java User Group that seems to be doing very well. The audience for this event was close to 200. Maybe the rich agenda had something to do with this.

The GlassFish map didn't show Greece as one of the top countries in the World. Maybe this has to do with the JBoss AS lead developer living in Athens as well as being in the audience. So my presentation covered Java EE 5 (2 slides), GlassFish v2 (main part of the presentation given we've just released this major version), Java EE 6 (brief), GlassFish v3 (HK2 kernel + demo), and a brief description of the broader community. The presentation slides should soon be online on the event page.

I also discussed with a couple of GlassFish users. They seemed very pleased with both the current product and the early work on GlassFish v3. Questions I got were around JBoss performance (answer: ask them, not me!), licensing (answer: CDDL let's you reuse GlassFish bits as part of a commercial offering), external commiters (depends on the module, JSF has several).

It was also nice to meet other speakers (Roman, Jonas, Alef, and Heinz). Some interesting discussions before and after the event. Paris and Panos took some of us out on the night before the enjoy typical Greek food. Very nice.

Finally, it was a good opportunity to meet with the Noemax people who provide components for Microsoft WCF (the Web Services stack in .Net 3.0). In particular these people provide a FastInfoset and SOAP/TCP extensions to WCF. These are of course interoperable with GlassFish's Metro stack. We also discussed how Java and .Net developer communities differ. All in all a great conversation.

Paris has a report on the event as well as a few photos. Roman's is here.

( oct. 08 2007, 12:02:15 PM CEST ) Permalink Comments [1]

A good keynote (IMHO)

I find Ted Neward to be an impressive guy when it comes to broad, yet deep, software culture (the JavaPosse folks come close seconds only because of Tor's lack of interest for Web Services :). I was particularly impressed with the way he conducted the JavaPolis 2006 interviews. Really good questions and sooo many different topics.

I just got to listen to his Jazoon keynote from this past summer. This is a good one IMO: not a vendor pitch, relatively technical, forward looking, and funny (that of course depends on your sense of humor). The recording doesn't have good sound quality, but I encourage you to listen to Ted talk about the future of languages and why they now matter more than before. The simple answer (hope I'm not spoiling the talk) is that we have a widely used and adopted JVM. Ted even has tips as to how to sell (or not) any new language to your boss.

This talk had me thinking about AIR's ActionScript VM. Yet another VM. Parrott isn't there yet it seems, so can Mozilla, Adobe and others turn their VM into a successful platform?

( oct. 05 2007, 07:00:00 PM CEST ) Permalink

JavaZone '07 - Day 1

So this is the end of Day 1 of JavaZOne and I have to say I'm liking what i've seen and heard so far in this conference. The speaker's Diner yesterday was a good opportunity to meet some new faces as well as to reconnect with some colleagues and friends.

The welcome to JavaZone is pretty "unique" - Heavy Loud Metal 8am. Most people (3/4 I hear) are from Norway. Wifi for all. Power sockets too! Wonderful! Speakers, be careful what you do, all is broadcasted (one speaker spent the time before the talk cleaning up his family pictures... :) Serving diner @ 3:15pm??
If you didn't get your (newly designed, see right picture) GlassFish t-shirt, come to the GlassFish talk - last session, room 6 (sorry, no link, JavaZone/Tomcat/Struts site is down) or claim it at the Sun booth, I don't plan on flying back with them.

Notes from talks I attended:

•  John Davies ("Seriously Powerful Systems").
Banking: FpML is a great schema example but quite complex, Java vs. C/C++ => Java dominant in banking but "Sun and BEA Real-Time are still a long way off what we need.". Comments focused on BEA real-time which isn't a JSR 01 implementation. 5ms to run the GC is still too long, today we're struggling to get under 20ms. Need to more to multi-core and have really good multi-threaded programs. SWIFT is *the* standard. It's moving to XML (ISO 20022). SWIFT MT to MX. More than 50% of the audience uses Spring. Did some scaling benchmarks on AZUL (192 core box).

•  "jMaki" by Craig McClanahan.
The room (if you can call that a room) is at the end of a hallway, not ideal. jMaki let's you mix and match widget. Not just have them not on each others JavaScripts toes, but also common programming/event model. NetBeans demo, deployment to GlassFish. Question: lot of overhead with all those JavaScript libraries on the client? jMaki tries to me smart but can't be more granular than the underlying ajax frameworks. Result is satisfying in most cases.

•  "Scalable, Reliable and Secure RESTful service", Dan Diephouse (XFire), now with MuleSource
Standing room only. PUT is idempotent, POST is not. This helps reliability. Firewall most likely no allow PUT or DELETE operations. Google uses X-HTTP-Methop-Override=PUT. Scalability by using Etag header (HTTP 304 not modified). "Last-Modified" is old school. Transactions - use compensations instead => more scalable. Security: HTTP Auth, SSL, or XMLSig. Closes with Atom Publishing Protocol. Talk is a bit abstract talk, no code. Almost an HTTP training class (not that no one needs that). Mentions Jersey as JSR 311 Ref Implementation (also Spring MVC, CXF, Restlets, ...). Questions: what about WADL? Debate if description languages are even needed. Dan thinks WADL is cool.

•  "Enterprise Comet" by Jonas Jacobi (walked in late).
Pretty good attendance. "I think Comet will be in the Servlet 3.0 spec. Otherwise, there is no standard." Comet is good for real-time. Mentions Jean-François Arcand's work in GlassFish v2/Grizzly. Oracle has something in the works they call Active Data Channel, but the speaker doubts Oracle has even read the spec (!). Enterprise Comet: Java as the only language used, deploy to standard web containers, Project Chai: native VM with cross-compilation for java, Can fall-back to polling. Also integrates with Terracotta. Beta in October. Release plans not clear (open source or not).

•  "HK2" presentation by Ferid Sabanovic & Rikard Thulin (IBS)
not in the best room, at the end of a hallway but fairly well attended (60?). Covered the basis of this modules system used as a basis for GlassFish v3. 4 demos (start/stop of GFv3, Maven plugin for building a module, drop jar files in the file-based repository & scoping). Short presentation, good Q&A session -
- what do you use it for? Answer: for this talk/demo mainly!
- OSGi vs. HK2? Answer: different approach. SpringFish: compete with GlassFish using HK2 + Tomcat. Simpler than OSGi (only 50 classes to learn).
- Can you deploy WAR files to HK2? Answer: Not really to HK2, rather with GFv3 which has a Web Container built as an HK2 service.
- If you don't use Maven, are you responsible for editing the manifest files? Answer: Yes!
- Is HK2 promoted besides GFv3? Answer: Not that I know of.
- Why chose HK2 to illustrate component-based architectures when OSGi is mature and has a community? Because it's small and elegant. HK2 is not really a competitor to OSGi.

•  "Scripting in Java 6". Except it was in Norwegian...

•  "Measuring up performance, a practitioner view" - Kirk Peperdine
Get the right measurement is 99% of fixing performance problems. Demo with NetBeans Profiler + Jetty. JMeter as load injector.

•  JavaPosse. As always an entertaining moment. Listen to it when it's released.

Simon Ritter's and Angela Caicedo's "Java Keynote" was totally packed (in the biggest room too). I think having a two-day event is really nice. I've never been to that many session and I think knowing this event only lasts 48h is helping that... The evening was spent in one of the four pubs reserved by the JavaZone organizers. Yet another +1 for this conference.

( sept. 13 2007, 01:42:35 AM CEST ) Permalink

SDPY - From JavaCast to JavaPosse

Well, a LOT has happened since the fall of the JavaCast. If you're into podcasts (what a better way to commute!) you need to listen to the JavaPosse. Show #141 and going strong!

( sept. 11 2007, 06:00:00 PM CEST ) Permalink

I've been using Nimbus for a while...

...and the final version too.

I was reading Jasper Pott's blog which has mostly very enthusiastic reactions and people commenting about how some things will just not be usable (mainly scrollbars). Well, I've been using Solaris Express which comes with the (GTK Nimbus theme) for a little while now and I must say that I really love the scrollbars (even them being a bit buggy). I'd encourage you to try Solaris Express (or a recent update to Solaris 10) and see for yourself.

So now that you know my preferences, the Java Nimbus look-n-feel doesn't have to be the exact same copy as the Solaris GTK theme and I'm sure Jasper and friends will listen to all your tastes ;).

( juin 08 2007, 09:22:39 AM CEST ) Permalink Comments [2]

Consumer JRE

Being quite concentrated this year at JavaOne on server-side and GlassFish content, I did not attend Ethan's talk on the Consumer JRE (né Java Browser Edition and aka Java Kernel). Some time ago I had written down my thoughts on how doable and needed I thought this was (and I wasn't all that positive I must say). Now with JavaFX around the corner, this is becoming a high priority and a quick chat with Chet Haase has me more positive about the possible size improvements.

The numbers are now as follows: entire JRE (Java 6) is under 11Mb. HelloWorld requires a 2Mb download. Notepad, Swing Set, and LimeWire translate to something between 3 and 4 Mb downloads. The improvements over what I had measured as due to dynamic libraries (dll, so) optimizations (I had only looked at rt.jar which is only responsible for half the JRE size) or even removal while some others are relative and due to JDK 6 bundling more stuff than 5.0 which I did the review for (JAX-WS is the most obvious example).

Results coming to a JRE near you as soon as for 6.0 update 2.

( mai 14 2007, 11:06:41 AM CEST ) Permalink

My JavaOne schedule

•  Sunday is ride across the bridge day (if time/GlassFish Day preparation permits).
•  Monday is CommunityOne/GlassFish day. I'll try to make it to the Groovy session at the W in the evening.
•  I'll be at the GlassFish pod in the .ORG corner on Tuesday from 11:30am to 1:30 pm.
•  I'll be in most GlassFish-related sessions.
•  The JavaPosse BOF is most likely on my schedule.
•  Et j'attends toujours d'Eric la date du pot francophone. Un bon moment en perspective.

( mai 03 2007, 04:48:55 AM CEST ) Permalink