Fred's Random Thoughts Frederic Jean's Weblog

TextDrive Using Solaris 10?

TextDrive is a hosting provider that is specializing in shared servers. They are very popular with the Ruby on Rails crowd due to their openness and willingness to provide a very solid environment for hosting Rails based applications. So far, they have used FreeBSD as a foundation to provide their services.

TextDrive does share a Flikr photostream where they share pictures of their recent move or of ongoing work that occurs in their colocation data center. In this stream, there are a few of pictures showing Solaris 10 CDs, including one showing CD 1 in the tray of one of their database server.

It's just speculation on my part, but I do think that Zones would be a great tool for the type of services they provide to their customers. It would be very interesting to see where this goes.

-- Fred

Technorati Tags: TextDrive, Solaris

JavaOne 2004 and 2005 Presentations available

I didn't have the chance to attend JavaOne in San Francisco this year. Beside the travel and attendance costs, Sun is trying to keep the seats for our customers.

It doesn't mean that I have to miss out on all of the content. Most of the technical sessions are now available at http://developer.sun.com/learning/javaoneonline/ . There are the PDF slides, which are a good start for an overview of the subject.

Even better are the multimedia presentations, where the slides are synchronized with a recording of the presenter. It's still not close to attending since you can't ask questions, but it does provide the whole content rather than just the slide deck. You do need an Sun Developer Network subscription in order to access the content.

-- Fred

Technorati Tags: Java, Sun

AOP @ BoulderJUG

I attended the BoulderJUG meeting last night. Ramnivas Laddad presented on both sessions. Ramnivas is the author of the AspectJ in Action book. He is an authority on AOP, and his enthusiasm for the technology is certainly contagious.

He first covered different techniques available to monitor Java Enterprise applications. He covered monitoring through:

• External Monitoring: scripts, load generators, Mercury Tools.
• Process Monitoring: System Monitor, DTrace.
• VM Monitoring: JVMTI
• Component Monitoring: JMX, Servlet Filters

He did try to compress what takes about an hour and a half into an hour. As a result, the presentation itself suffered. Still, it was a good way to generate ideas on how to monitor an application.

He then proceeded to talk about what's new in AspectJ. Here are some of the changes he mentioned:

• AspectJ/AspectWerkz merger. Adds load time weaving to AspectJ and the @AspectJ syntax.
• @AspectJ syntax, where aspects are declared using Java 5 annotations.
• AJDT enhancements. AJDT is an Eclipse plugin for AspectJ development. The AspectJ Visualization perspective is an interesting way to visualize how much code is impacted by a project's aspects. Small details like the crossreference view also made me wish I could use Eclipse for development.

Ramnivas provided step by step demos using Eclipse and writing aspects on the fly. He adapted his demos to the questions and requests from the audience. He is certainly someone that you want to spend time with if you are grappling with AOP.

As usual, Scott Davis was actively plugging the No Fluff, Just Stuff conference. They will be in Broomfield, CO, on the weekend of November 11-13. I would recommend attending the conference if you have a chance. He also took the time to peddle his latest book: JBoss at Work.

It was certainly yet another pleasant evening spending time with other Java heads.

-- Fred

Technorati Tags: AOP, AspectJ, Java, JUG

It must be October...

Mollie loves to decorate for the different seasons and holidays. She really loves to decorate around Halloween and Christmas. If I let her, we would have pumpkins all over the house in mid-september :) Thankfully, we arrived to a compromise, and she usually waits until october 1st before decorating the house.

She doesn't limit herself to the inside though. The outside of the house also has to reflect the current holiday. So say “Hi!” to Frankie:

-- Fred

Technorati Tags: Halloween, Holiday