Adam Bien's Weblog

JavaOne will take place in San Francisco from September 19-23, 2010 - so I was semi right :-). Most of the questions are answered here. kenai.com will be killed. What is a pity - it is/was a great platform with mercurial support. Glassfish, however, will be also commercially supported by Sun/Oracle.

Posted at 12:34PM Jan 28, 2010 by Adam Bien in General  |  Kommentare[5]

[my tweets]  Rss My book: Real World Java EE - Rethinking Best Practices

Some details. Hopefully the strategic plans / roadmap regarding Glassfish, NetBeans, OpenSolaris and hardware will be revealed soon. ...and what about JavaOne? :-)

Posted at 04:20PM Jan 21, 2010 by Adam Bien in General  |  Kommentare[0]

[my tweets]  Rss My book: Real World Java EE - Rethinking Best Practices

It was a great, interesting year - but my personal "business" predictions went totally wrong. I actually expected a bigger impact of the economy downturn to the amount of work (contracts) and actually planned a "vacation-year". The plan was to learn as much as possible new stuff, speak at few conferences, write some books and articles in parallel. What happened was the exact opposite of a "vacation": I got more contract requests, than I could actually handle. I underestimated the Java EE 5 interests of my customers. Java EE Training / workshops were very well attended, but I was also involved in 2009 in more Java EE 5 projects than ever before. There was also a well attended EJB 3 / Java EE 5 day at the w-jax conference in munich - the Java EE talks at the JAX conference in Frankfurt were overcrowded. I'm also stunned by the sales numbers of the "Real World Java EE Patterns - Rethinking Best Practices" book - also a nice surprise. The visitor numbers of this blog almost doubled - comparing it to 2008 (> 7k visitors a day).

The only explanation for the increased Java EE popularity I have, are increased interests on multi-vendor standards. It seems like companies / enterprises in hard times are not willing to be dependent on a single vendor / technology provider any more. This year we "migrated" (this activity was mainly comprised of testing) some Java EE 5 applications from one application server to another - just because of better licensing and support conditions. I was also involved in some J2EE -> Java EE 5 migrations. They were also smoother, than expected: I was surprised how well it worked.

It was also a year of the REST / EJB 3 / JPA synergy. I used the combination a lot in my projects - and the developers liked it. It was funny to watch the reactions of people, who never saw Java EE 5 code before but knew J2EE :-). 

During the Community One conference in New York City, a merge between Sun and IBM was announced. Lot of analysts were speculating about the Sun-IBM product overlap. A few weeks later Oracle merged with Sun - the transaction, however, is not committed yet. Hopefully there will be no TransactionTimeOutException :-). Oracle is actually an interesting company - they already experimented with Java in their database over 11 years ago with the Aurora JVM. Oracle just completed the dream of having a database appliance with a minimal OS-kernel. The project Raw Iron was announced over 12 years ago - this year it was implemented with FlashFire or the Sun Oracle Database Machine.

I was a bit concerned about the future of Java FX - but I was surprised with an interesting statement during the Java One keynote. Larry Ellisson seems to have strategic interests on Java FX as well.  

The end of 2009 was also exciting. Java EE 6 with Glassfish v3, NetBeans 6.8 were released, Java FX got a visual composer and a really good IDE support, and IntelliJ was opensourced.

It was an exciting year - already looking forward to 2010. ...and Java is still #1.  A prediction: the impact of JDK 1.7 modularization will be bigger, than the introduction of closures. Btw. I don't rely too heavily on vacations this year either - I got already some requests for Java EE 6 gigs :-).

Posted at 10:58AM Jan 05, 2010 by Adam Bien in General  |  Kommentare[2]

[my tweets]  Rss My book: Real World Java EE - Rethinking Best Practices

I used Java EE 6 before its release (at December, 10th) in various projects and needed a server for development, test and deployment :-). Glassfish v3 is the official RI, easy to install server with very good NetBeans and Eclipse integration - so it became the natural choice. I filed some bugs / features requests during the migration and development of my projects.

What really surprised me was the responsiveness of the whole engineering team. It was like chatting - I got a response in few minutes. Sometimes the solution to my problem made into the next nightly build. It is exactly the opposite experience, to what I encountered in projects with closed source application servers and "platinum contracts". 

The next surprise was a nice email I got after the release. Most of the bugs were fixed!:

"We've just released GlassFish v3 final, a full Java EE 6 open source app server, and we'd like to thank you for your contribution with the following bug report(s) which were fixed in this release :

--The GlassFish Team" 

Special thanks to the whole engineering team for be as responsive and honest under pressure - shortly before the actual release and Judy Tang the coordinator of the FishCat program. Her responses had milliseconds latency :-). 

Posted at 03:27PM Dec 29, 2009 by Adam Bien in General  |  Kommentare[4]

[my tweets]  Rss My book: Real World Java EE - Rethinking Best Practices

It seems like the first 75% of time in the majority of projects is wasted for things without any additional value. At the beginning of a project there is not a lot of pressure, so a lot of time is spent for esoteric discussions, unrealistic evaluations and production of "write only" documents.

It seems like developers are not allowed to start with development until the "ivory tower guys" found the ultimate solution. Such a solution rarely exists in the practice, so after the majority time is wasted, developers have to hack the application in the fraction of the initially planned time. 

Its a pity, because instead of discussions and documents, the time could be spent for the creation of spikes, PoCs or prototypes. It is a lot easier to evaluate working code, than nice looking presentations, or bubbles.

I'm sure the agile people have already a (japanese sounding) term for the "Two Minutes To Midnight Strategy":-).

Posted at 10:45AM Nov 29, 2009 by Adam Bien in General  |  Kommentare[5]

[my tweets]  Rss My book: Real World Java EE - Rethinking Best Practices

The release date of JDK 1.7 will be extended to September 2010 - with some interesting features.

Posted at 09:00AM Nov 23, 2009 by Adam Bien in General  |  Kommentare[3]

[my tweets]  Rss My book: Real World Java EE - Rethinking Best Practices

Glassfish v3 enables convenient monitoring of JMS destinations, directly from the web-based admin console. There are about 40 statistics available for each physical queue.

Some of them are: Number of Producers, Number of Consumers, Peak Number of Consumers, Number of Messages, Number of Messages Held in Transaction, Number of Messages Received, Number of Messages Sent, Peak Message Size etc.

To access the statistics open (in the admin console) the node: Java Message Service -> Physical Destinations the choose a destination and click on "View".

This new feature is very useful for debugging and performance monitoring of JMS applications (like tunguska :-)). Another reason to upgrade from Glassfish v2. 

Posted at 09:59AM Nov 04, 2009 by Adam Bien in General  |  Kommentare[2]

[my tweets]  Rss My book: Real World Java EE - Rethinking Best Practices

Some intentions are documented here.

Posted at 09:00AM Oct 30, 2009 by Adam Bien in General  |  Kommentare[5]

[my tweets]  Rss My book: Real World Java EE - Rethinking Best Practices

The IntelliJ is opensource (jetbrains.org)  - you can download it without any registration and use it for free. Not all features, however, are available in the community edition. These are very good news - especially for the adoption in the enterprise sector. 

Posted at 09:00AM Oct 16, 2009 by Adam Bien in General  |  Kommentare[8]

[my tweets]  Rss My book: Real World Java EE - Rethinking Best Practices

Although the clock rates of CPUs aren't getting any faster - moore's law is still valid. The transistor count still doubles every two years. In few years we should expect CPUs with hundreds, if not thousands of processors and cores - for the same or even lower costs as comparable, today available hardware.

Even now you can run on "commodity" hardware like T2 64 operating system instances in parallel. The Vega 3 from azulsystems comes with 864 CPU already.

According to moore's law we should expect a tremendous computing power density in a small form factor (a 1U pizza box?). Having such power in place is it still viable to "oursource" your computing into 3rd party provider? In near future the management software of todays clouds could run on a single machine - your very private cloud.

One of the problems of such approach is the power consumption. The on-premise cloud installation is only interesting in case you are able to highly utilize your machine and provide (and pay) the necessary power.... 

Posted at 09:00AM Sep 30, 2009 by Adam Bien in General  |  Kommentare[7]

[my tweets]  Rss My book: Real World Java EE - Rethinking Best Practices