Mani's blog: Mani Chandrasekaran's Weblog

Has been a long time, since I posted on this blog. There has been a few product announcements, which are exciting:

1. Sun release new Sun Role Manager 5.0 and Directory Server Enterprise Edition 7.0. Click this link for more details
2. Sun Releases New Update for Solaris 10 Operating System : Builds on Solaris 10 Innovation With New Streamlined Administration Capabilities, Solaris ZFS Updates and Expanded Support for New Processors
3. Sun Announces New GlassFish Communications Server and Key Customer Wins Cedar Point Communications and Malden Labs Choose Sun for Next-Generation Network Platforms
4. Sun Announces Java Communications Suite 7 - Sun introduces Release 7 of Java Communications Suite that includes a robust and highly scalable indexing and search service, a new CalDAV compliant calendar server, and enhancements to Convergence, the state-of-the-art AJAX Web 2.0 client. Java Communications Suite is the #1 messaging and collaboration platform for service providers. Eight of the top nine operators and hundreds of enterprises worldwide have already deployed more than 170 million seats of the Java Communications Suite.

Lots of new releases, exciting new features ...

Credit: Image linked from http://www.oracle.com/features/suncustomers.html

Alfresco is a very popular open source Content management system (CMS) and Document management system (DMS). It competes well with commercial offerings. There has been a few instances of requests from technical folks, about the integration points between Alfresco and Sun software, primarily Glassfish application server, Sun Webspace portal server and OpenSSO.

Alfresco and Glassfish
Running Alfresco on Glassfish application server is pretty easy. This is well documented in Amanda's blog and also the Alfresco web site.

Alfresco and OpenSSO
Alfresco is well integrated with OpenSSO and Sun Directory server.

Alfresco and Sun Webspace Portal server
The content and documents managed in Alfresco can be displayed or administered in Sun webspace portal via Portlets. The Alfresco web services API or the CMIS api can be used to accomplish this . There is also a white paper written by our ISV engineering team, let me know if you need it.

On a final note, the Sun webspace server has a built in content management and document management system. If your requirements can be met with what Webspace can offer, then there is no need to use a separate CMS and DMS system

I had a query recently from a partner, who was planning to integrate Microsoft .Net applications with MySQL. I am not an expert on .Net, but I looked around and found the following resources and pointers that will help:

1. There is an excellent webinar on Microsoft Entity framework and using MySQL at the Mysql website.
2. MySQL .Net connectors are available for download at the MySQL website
3. Another persistence framework, nHibernate can also be used for data persistence. I just googled, and found this useful link and this link about the integration.

Hope this helps ..

Just got the news, that I have cleared the requirements to become "The Open group - TOGAF (The Open group Architecture Framework) Certified Architect".

While, I am also a Sun Certified Enterprise Architect SCEA for Java EE 5, there were some significant differences between SCEA and TOGAF, in my view. SCEA is more focussed around technology and is Java and Java EE focussed, is certainly more intensive and multi step (you need to do a online quiz, assignment and an essay). TOGAF is more centred around Enterprise architecture, not just technology architecture and is also technology agnostic. I would say, there is a significant amount of learning and unlearning, to become a TOGAF practiioner. But, I am very happy today to be a part of the large family of TOGAF certified people. We can all talk in the same vocabulary and lingo

A recent email invite to an "enterprise architecture summit" in Bangalore, kind of triggered a stream of thoughts on EA frameworks, and my experience with a few of them. I have used or am aware of a few EA frameworks, and having been at Sun, we also follow(ed) a framework. Well, I have listed the EA frameworks that I know about and my comments are (these are my personal comments, not Sun's. obviously, these are "tainted/biased" by the kind of work I do):

1. Zachman's framework - This is very popular, keep seeing plenty of training's and workshops being organized in India. I have looked at this, and it definitely is useful. But, I have a couple of points on this. First, its proprietary and second, it seems very laborious and very painful to document every single of the boxes in the Zachman's chart. Beyond, documenting "current state" of an EA, I am not too sure, it will help in the complete IT lifecycle. Of course, plenty of people are using it, and obviously see value in it.
2. TOGAF - The open group architecture framework - I am very impressed by TOGAF, and I love the way we can use TOGAF for its step by step approach, being an open standard, being mature and for its usefulness in the complete IT life-cycle. BTW, Sun is a platinum member of the TOGAF foundation.
3. DODAF and Federal Enterprise framework - Both very US government specific framework for US federal projects.

Ultimately, in my view, the effectiveness of any EA framework, lies in practicing it and incorporating it in the corporate DNA of any company. There should be a buyin from the top management, they should be convinced about the effectiveness of using EA frameworks. All right then, Happy weekend.

I upgraded my old gen iPhone OS to ver 3.0. I love the new version, lots of neat features like searching emails (finally), copy and paste, landscape keyboard etc etc. Of course, not all the new features are available on my old phone, but the new features are still great.

I did my upgrade via the iTunes update center, the update went through like a breeze. The only problem was, my GPRS edge settings disappeared. I googled around, found that iPhone creates a edge setting to be something else than what you need. The solution, is to create a new profile using the iPhone configuration tool , set the apn host name to be www for Vodafone India, export it to a file, email the config file as an email attachment and send it to yourself. Then you need wifi to connect to your email server, extract the attachments and the edge settings worked again. Other than this, the upgrade was a smooth process ...

I and my team, were fortunate enough to get sponsored to attend a 5 day MySQL for DBA's training in Bangalore recently. Even though, I am not a DBA, nor do I intend to become one, but there is upswell of interest for MySQL in India, every customer and partner seems to want to know more about it and there is ever growing linkage between other Sun Middleware products and MySQL.

Lets take the following products and how MySQL fits in:

• Glassfish and MySQL - Apart from being the perfect fit in terms of price/performance etc etc, MySQL makes for a perfect choice, when you are building Web applications, intranet/internet apps, Web 2.0 apps. All you need is the MySQL JDBC driver, Create a connection pool for MySQL and there you go !! If you are using any of the popular frameworks like Struts, Spring, Hibernate or iBatis, its all very easy.
• Sun GlassFish Web Space Portal Server and MySQL: By default, Web Space Server is bundled with an HSQL database that is intended for evaluation purposes only. In most production environments, you will want to use a more robust database, such as MySQL.
• Sun Identity Manager: MySQL Enterprise server is a supported repository for Sun IDM. This makes great sense, when you are in a really price sensitive situations. I had blogged about this sometime back.
• Sun OpenSSO Enterprise: MySQL can be used as one of the supported authentication JDBC based user repositories .
• Java CAPS and Glassfish ESB: Of course, MySQL can be used with both Java CAPS (using eWay adapters) and Glassfish ESB, if you are building SOA based applications.

There you have it, there is a fitment with MySQL with almost all of our middle ware products !!

The following are some key things (in my personal opinion) which makes MySQL stand out, from other commercial or open source databases:

1. Everything and any server configuration settings can be changed/viewed using the my.ini (on Windows) or my.cnf (on Solaris and Linux) files. It is extremely simple. Just add it, under the appropriate headers and it will be picked up by MySQL when in starts. Plus, there are some sample, configuration files, which show sample settings for large or medium kind of databases.
2. The concept of Storage engines, and switching storage engines, having different storage engines in a single database, blows you away !!! Moving databases, renaming databases is a snap, as simple as renaming files (for Innodb) or changing directory names (for ISAM). Knowledge of different Storage engines can be a little intimidating at first, but for now, there are a few parameters like - what kind of applications will be using it? do you need transactions/ACID compliance? etc etc. Google "compare MYSQL storage engines"
3. Setting up a MySQL replication with a Master/Slave, is a breeze, and can be done in less than 10 mins for a simple setup. You will find good information in the MySQL documentation.
4. Every configuration variable setting, can be found using "MySQL>show variables like '%keyword%';" command.
5. Doing a backup and restore of MySQL data is so simple using mysqldump.
6. Tuning of MySQL databases seemed to be straightforward, will write up more stuff, as I experiment more. But generally, there are plenty of aids, which explain where time is being spent on queries, and how we can improve them
7. Creating Triggers, Stored procedures are simple, and like other databases.

This is it for, more later ...

It's my birthday today, got a of calls/emails/twitters/sms's (the variety of technologies seem to be increasing every year) today. Many thanks to all of you, who wished me. Its been fruitful year, both professionally and personally !! I am looking forward to this year, lots of momentous changes (hint: the Sun-Oracle thing) seem to be in store this year.

I could not resist commenting on one thing. I go to a restaurant, which is part of a chain of restaurants. On my birthday, I get no less than 10-12 emails from the same group, and the same email from them.

The email format is like this:

From: feedback@abcgroup.in
reply-to:babitaxxx@abcgroup.in
to	manixxxxx@gmail.com
date	Thu, Jun 25, 2009 at 3:17 PM
subject	Happy Birthday!

Dear Mani,

We at the ABC Group would like to wish you in advance a very Happy Birthday!

To make this day more special for you, we invite you to celebrate your Birthday at 
any of the ABC outlets listed below...

Do call to make your booking with our customer relations executive on 4111xxxx/4111xxxx. 
(Office hours - 10am to 5pm), who will arrange your table at any of the ABC outlets.

Thanks,

xxxx
Vice President (Operations)

My email id is the same, the names are a little different. Its sometimes, mani, manikandan, mani chandra etc etc. This is precisely, one of things, where a product like Project Mural , can be a good fit, with its Master data management and ETL capabilities. I hope to send an unsolicited solution document to them shortly

Glassfish ESB v2.1 has been released !! The key features of this release are:

1. Support for GlassFish clustering in all components
2. Intelligent Event Processor (IEP) Service Engine – Available in v 2.1 with Platinum level support. Enables complex event processing (CEP) and event stream processing (ESP) using the Continuous Query Language (CQL)
3. New Systems Support: NetBeans IDE 6.5, GlassFish Enterprise Server 2.1, OpenSolaris 2008.11, Red Hat Linux AS 5 (32 and 64 bit) and IBM AIX 5L 5.3 (OS: 64 bit; JVM: 32 bit) (runtime support only) and lots more

You can download the software at the OpenESB website or the Sun download website. Congratulations to the Glassfish ESB team on this release.

Sun Open Suite for SWIFT Solution - Alliance Integrator Upgrade Program

About Alliance Integrator : Integrator is a SWIFT-specific integration layer designed to help firms integrate business applications with SWIFT. Licensed as an add-on to Alliance Access, this application integration framework is designed and built for SWIFT users by SWIFT, and is sold, supported, and maintained by SWIFT as well. Integrator has been built using Sun’s Java™ CAPS Financial EAI software, which includes : GlassFish™ Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) re information about Alliance Integrator, please contact SWIFT.

The Sun Open Suite for SWIFT Solution The Sun Open Suite for SWIFT solution demonstrates Sun’s experience in the SWIFT area, and comprises the following products, all of which have been optimised to work together with the SWIFT network and the Alliance product line.

1. GlassFish™ Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)
2. Sun Identity management Suite
3. Sun Solaris
4. Sun Cluster
5. Sun SPARC and Intel systems

The Open Suite for SWIFT solution provides companies with a complete SWIFTNet access infrastructure and just one contact for support, lowering project risk and cost.

Sun’s Alliance Integrator Upgrade Program
Sun’s Alliance Integrator Upgrade Program offers a smooth, risk-free way for Integrator customers and partners to complement Integrator’s rich functionalities with the openness of Sun’s GlassFish ESB software.

Contact me or Sun, if you need more information or a demo on how this works. Please download the white paper, which has more details about the Sun Alliance Integrator upgrade program.

Are you in the Retail, Financial, Telecom industries? Do you have a system which involves payment via credit cards? PCI Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) is a a standard which is - "The PCI DSS is a multifaceted security standard that includes requirements for security management, policies, procedures, network architecture, software design and other critical protective measures. This comprehensive standard is intended to help organizations proactively protect customer account data." . There is a deadline to be PCI-DSS compliant, and its approaching fast ..

Sun Identity suite of products - Sun Identity Manager, Sun Role Manager, Sun Compliance Manager and Sun OpenSSO can help in meeting several of the requirements, to achieve compliance. A webinar is being organized, which will touch upon these aspects, and offer details on how Sun Identity suite helps. Please register at http://www.sun.com/software/webinars to attend this webinar, on Wednesday, June 17, 2009 at 10:00 am PDT / 1:00 pm EDT / 17:00 GMT/UTC and 10.30 PM Indian Standard time .

A report by Ohloh on application server adoption in open source (commissioned by Sun is out) and has exciting news for Glassfish !! There is also a good summary at the Aquarium and John Clingan's blog

Credit: Image linked from http://blogs.sun.com/jclingan/resource/ohloh1.png

The Exec summary from the report:

Application Server Trends among Open Source Developers
Prepared for: Sun Microsystems
Prepared by: Jason Allen, Scott Collison and Robin Luckey

Abstract: Ohloh performed custom analyses against Ohloh's directory of open source projects, specifically drilling into each project's source code history to yield Java and Application Server metrics. While our open source coverage is comprehensive across the entire open source space, for this report we focused specifically on Java-based projects.

We have made a best-faith effort to have near 100% coverage of all Java-related open source projects. Ohloh is unique in its ability to measure development activity directly from the primary source. Other reports in this vein rely upon data from voluntary survey responses, or upon secondary metrics such as product sales figures.

These and similar strategies are only broad indicators of the true underlying activity. In contrast, Ohloh tracks the individual changes to source code as they are made by developers, and thus observes the act of software development itself. Ohloh data is accurate to the minute, the developer and the individual line of code. There is no closer way to objectively measure how developers are spending their time. Ohloh tracks development metrics for 38,359 open source projects. Of those, 14,450 contain some Java code. We track over 250,000 open source developers, 32,866 have authored Java code and over 16,000 have provided geographic information. These metrics are collected from over 3,500 forges.

Ohloh performed a custom data analysis to determine the adoption of application servers among open source developers. Key findings in this report are:

• Of Java projects that target Java EE, GlassFish is the leading application server with just over 50% of projects targeting GlassFish (note that projects can target multiple application servers). Project adoption is a indicator of past and present health of an application server among open source developers.
• Of Java new project starts that target Java EE, GlassFish is the leading application server for new project starts with 73% of all Java EE projects. Project starts is a leading indicator that is a reliable predictor of future market success.

GlassFish has gone from being a market lagging application server among open source developers in 2004 to becoming the market leading application server among open source developers today. GlassFish is well-positioned for future dominance in the market place with a very commanding position among new projects coming on line today. With that said the overall growth of Java development among open source developers is flat.

DELIVERABLES: This summary highlights the findings and includes backing information about what the data means and how it was gathered. Included with this document is a spreadsheet of the raw metrics.

Passed the Sun Certified Integrator for Identity Manager exam this morning. Whew, what a relief. Did some amount of preparation for the last three days, thanks to a lot of prodding and guidance from my friend at Sun Learning, Rajesh. Thanks Rajesh

As explained in the exam objectives, there is stuff from SPML, General IDM architecture, Where IDM fits in, XPRESS language questions using snippets of code, Reconciliation etc etc. Most of the stuff is covered in the IDM-345 class, but I had not done this course. I had done a very old course called IDM-2535 or something like that, five years back

Finally, why did I do it? Well, I have been working in different areas of Sun Identity Manager since 2005, but had never gotten a chance to validate, what I knew, and if I had covered all the areas of Sun IDM. An exam, I believe, is the best way to validate your breadth of knowledge. Of course, the certifications are no substitute for real world experience, but atleast you can trust that a "certified" person knows the basics

I was recently at a massive deployment of Sun Glassfish Enterprise server's (2.1) in a deployment, where the topology was the Glassfish DAS, Node agents, Sun web servers distributed across Solaris Containers across multiple servers - that is horizontal and vertical scaling.

After installing the DAS and Nodeagents, we created Glassfish server instances for all Nodegents, in an app server cluster. When we tried starting the app server instances, we started getting lots of "java.net.ConnectException: Connection refused exceptions" in the server logs and the servers would refuse to start. One of the clue's, of what the problem could be was in Shalini's blog. This led us to think, this was related to some kind of hostname issue. The problem, it seems that when you have a cluster of app server instances, there should be a hostname mapped to an IP address entry in /etc/hosts, for every app server instance participating in a cluster

So, in /etc/hosts, you should have something similar to the following:

127.... localhost
xx.xx.xx.xx servername loghost
xx.xx.xx.xx GlassfishDAS
xx.xx.xx.xx Glassfish1
xx.xx.xx.xx Glassfish2
xx.xx.xx.xx Glassfish3

This problem, may probably not arise, if you there is a DNS server. In our case, we were operating from a Data center, with newly installed servers.

I was in Ahmedabad yesterday (May 5th, 2009) for an Architecture review meeting at a partner yesterday. Surprisingly, the meeting ended a bit earlier, and we had a couple of hours to spend, before our flights. We decided to visit, Mahatma Gandhiji's Ashram. It is a serene place, on the banks of the river Sabarmati. It took some time to digest the fact, that Gandhiji lived and worked here, strategised his non-violent freedom movement against the colonial powers !! Its a very simple and spartan place. I took a few snaps and have uploaded it to flickr !!

P.S. There seems to be an effort to create a promenade, along the banks of Sabarmati. But sadly, like most rivers, the Sabarmati seems to be heavily polluted