Arun Gupta, Miles to go ...

Mid West Java Tech Days 2007 - Minneapolis Trip Report

Mid West Java Tech Days concluded in Minneapolis earlier today.

First, here are some facts I learned about Minneapolis:

• Minneapolis is a Twin City with St Paul
• Has 20 lakes and wetlands
• Mall of America - Biggest retail and entertainment complex in the USA
• Target headquarters is in the downtown
• Has the First Basilica in USA
• 7 miles of skyways linking 8 blocks downtown. Really useful for those rainy and snowy times.
• Has one of the biggest Tibetan populations in the World (read more here)
• Abundance of public parks - Accessible within 0.5 mile of every home

Second, the Internet connection at the hotel is ridiculously slow (at least for me) as shown here:

I talked to other colleagues staying at the same hotel and it seemed to work fine for them. Anyway, it took 6 calls to the Tech Support to resolve the issue partly. Or may be it's 1:15am in the morning here, the usage is down and that's why I'm seeing a better response time ;-) But when I explained the issue to the hotel, they happily removed the ISP charges for my first day stay @ the hotel.

Now back to the event.

The event kick started with Tim Bray's keynote.

Tim Bray gave the keynote to an audience of approx 125 people and talked about "Business and Cultural aspect of Web 2.0" and "Programming Language and Infrastructure". Everybody in the room raised a hand when asked if they were a developer which was kind of cool because typically we see a mix of IT managers, Engineering Managers, Sys Admins and of course Developers.

One of the key messages in the talk was to start thinking about outside-in (how the community is going to interact/provide feedback about the product) and inside-out (how open the discussions can be) for a product and see how the community can be involved.

Tim presented Tree View of the Programming Languages. It shows how different programming languages are getting adopted year-by-year. The data is created by collecting book purchasing data from different publishers and then taggin each book with language. They point to notice is that only JavaScript and Ruby are growing. Here are some of the points that he mentioned about PHP & Rails:

PHP

• Low barrier entry
• Some of the apps are great (MediaWiki, WordPress, Drupal)
• Horrible security issues
• Horrible maintainability story (~ 5000 functions at the top level)
• May not be good for enterprise apps.

Rails

• Don't Repeat Yourself (DRY)
• Convention over Configuration (CoC)
• MVC to the core
• Unit testing is hard to avoid
• Incredibly compact code (good maintainability)
• Developers love it but slow.
• Good choice for the Enterprise and for Web 2.0 developers

Java is a 3-legged stool comprising of APIs, JVM and Java language. All the scripting languages (Ruby, PHP, JavaScript, etc) are supported in the JVM using JSR 223 APIs.

Tim also compared PHP, Rails and Java in terms of scaling, dev speed, dev tools & maintainability. The talk concluded by stating that Single Architecture IT shop is never going away. PHP, Java, Ruby, .NET - all will continue to exist and live together. REST allows a cleaner integration of these technologies. In my talk on Metro, I discussed an alternate strategy for a heterogeneous systems where Java and .NET can co-exist with each using WS-*-based interoperability achieved in GlassFish.

I delivered two talks - "Metro: Web services interoperability with Microsoft .NET" and  "jMaki: Framework for Ajax-enabled Web 2.0 apps".

The first talk (Metro) was scheduled to start at 11:15 am and there were only 3 people in the room at that time. I started the talk few minutes late giving time for people to show up but even by 11:25 (after I've done the initial introductions) there were only approx 12 people in the room. And then somebody from the audience mentioned that the previous session just finished and I did see a splurge of audience right around that time. On audience's request, I did a recap and then continued with rest of the presentation. I was glad that the room was full in few more minutes :)

The slides are available here. Here is the list of questions asked with their answers:

• Can Metro apps be deployed on Web Sphere ?
  This is not a tested/supported configuration but Metro apps can be deployed on Web Sphere provided all the libraries are bundled in the WEB-INF/lib directory of the web application itself.
• Can Metro apps be deployed on JBoss ?
  JBoss WS 2.1.0 will support Metro. Read more details here.
• How can contract-first endpoint be developed and still utilize interoperability with .NET feature ?
  Use the "New Web Service From WSDL" feature in NetBeans IDE and the enable Security/Reliability/Transactions feature as shown here.
• Link to demos shown in the talk
  • Excel 2007 (source code, screencast)
  • NetBeans 6 screencast demo (screencast)

The jMaki talk was SRO and we had to borrow multiple chairs from another room to accommodate the audience. The slides are available here. Here is the list of questions asked with their answers:

• Can jMaki apps be deployed on other containers, such as Tomcat ?
  jMaki web applications are deployed as WAR files and can be easily deployed on any other container.
• What does it take to create your own widget and make it available in the palette ?
  This page provides low-level details on how to create your own jMaki widgets.
• What is the total size of jMaki wrapper ?
  18KB
• Can jMaki apps be developed using JDeveloper ?
  Currently jMaki apps can be developed using NetBeans IDE, Eclipse and Ant-based tasks only. However please send us an email if you are interested in contributing the jMaki plug-in for JDeveloper.
• Link to demos shown in the talk
  • jMaki Maps mashup
  • jMaki on Rails
  • Sun Tech Days

And, of course, there were some Hudson enthusiasts.

The evening concluded with a great dinner at Solera along with Charlie, Thomas, Tim and Greg and some interesting discussions about scripting languages.

Here is the picture album so far:

Next step Chicago on Oct 18, there is still time to register!

Technorati: conf webservices glassfish metro jmaki netbeans hudson

Posted by Arun Gupta in webservices  |  Comments[79]

TOTD #14: How to generate JRuby-on-Rails Controller on Windows (#9893)

The current Rails Gem (version 1.2.5) gives an error when creating a Controller in a JRuby-on-Rails application on Windows. It gives the following error during controller creation as shown below:

C:/testbed/ruby/jruby-1.0.1/lib/ruby/1.8/pathname.rb:420:in `realpath_rec': No such file or directory -C:/testbed/ruby/jruby-1.0.1/samples/rails/hello/C: (Errno::ENOENT)
    from C:/testbed/ruby/jruby-1.0.1/lib/ruby/1.8/pathname.rb:453:in `realpath'
    from C:/testbed/ruby/jruby-1.0.1/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/rails-1.2.4/lib/initializer.rb:543:in `set_root_path!'
    from C:/testbed/ruby/jruby-1.0.1/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/rails-1.2.4/lib/initializer.rb:509:in `initialize'
    from ./script/../config/boot.rb:35:in `new'
    from ./script/../config/boot.rb:35:in `run'
    from ./script/../config/boot.rb:35
    from :1:in `require'
    from :1

and Rails 1.2.4 gives exactly the same error. This is Ticket #9893. This actually happens because of JRUBY-1401.

The workaround is to use Rails 1.2.3. If you have already installed the latest Rails plugin, then you can uninstall it using the command:

C:\testbed\ruby\jruby-1.0.1\bin>gem uninstall rails
Successfully uninstalled rails version 1.2.5
Remove executables and scripts for
'rails' in addition to the gem? [Yn] y
Removing rails

And then install Rails 1.2.3 as:

gem install rails --include-dependencies --version 1.2.3 --no-ri --no-rdoc
Successfully installed rails-1.2.3
Successfully installed activesupport-1.4.2
Successfully installed activerecord-1.15.3
Successfully installed actionpack-1.13.3
Successfully installed actionmailer-1.3.3
Successfully installed actionwebservice-1.2.3

Now create a new application as shown below:

jruby -S rails hello

And then create a controller as:

jruby script\generate controller say hello
exists app/controllers/
exists app/helpers/
create app/views/say
exists test/functional/
create app/controllers/say_controller.rb
create test/functional/say_controller_test.rb
create app/helpers/say_helper.rb
create app/views/say/hello.rhtml

Hope you find it useful and this bug is fixed in the next version of Rails.

Please leave suggestions on other TOTD that you'd like to see. A complete archive is available here.

Technorati: totd rubyonrails jruby windows

Posted by Arun Gupta in web2.0  |  Comments[2]

Web 2 Summit - Cool Applications on Industry-grade Operating System

Sun Microsystems is a gold sponsor of Web 2 Summit (nee Web 2.0 Conference). Registration to this conference by invitation only. If you are an attendee, here is one session that you don't want to miss: Betting on OpenSolaris for Success

In this session, Sun Chief OS Platform Strategist Ian Murdock, Joyent CTO Jason Hoffman and Director of Systems Ben Rockwood will show that the latest innovations in operating system technology are happening in OpenSolaris and will explore how even though the OS is invisible to developers much of the time, it very much still matters for writing cool "Web 2.0" applications.

Technorati: conf opensolaris web2summit web2.0

Posted by Arun Gupta in web2.0  |  Comments[1]