Applications for Java

Why Did SpringSource Need GemStone? An Interview with Spring's Rod Johnson

Cameron McKenzie discusses with Rod Johnson VMWare's acquisition of GemStone, looking at why SpringSource bought the company, and how GemStone technology fits into VMWare's portfolio of products.

Why Did SpringSource Buy GemStone? A Discussion with Rod Johnson

This article will soon be followed up with a second interview with Rod Johnson, discussing Spring, the cloud, and how Spring's open-source philosophy can remain uncompromised as SpringSource's portfolio of proprietary technology products grow.

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Developers think Functionality But less about Scalability

Bill Mar, Director of Engineering Services from SmithMicro Software. SmithMicro provides the backbone of our digital life by connecting different digital devices together. In his role, Bill works in the Wireless Business unit working on Voice-related services, e.g.: VoiceSMS or Visual Voicemail – services that we've all become used to since we run around with smart phones such as the iPhone or Blackberry.

Bill talked about how SmithMicro had to move towards Proactive Performance Management as the company and the user base started to grow. In his presentation he made an interesting but bold statement: Developers Think Functionality – But Less About Scalability.

As I used to be a developer for many years (and still today, as dynaTrace still allows me to do a little coding on certain features) I had to think about this statement and didn't know in the beginning whether I should agree with him from the perspective of my current role within dynaTrace or whether I should be offended from the perspective of a developer who just likes to code new features. In the end I agreed with him – especially after listening to all he had to say about his day-to-day challenges as Directory of Engineering Services.

In this blog I summarize what was said on the webinar. Bill gave some great insight into what they did in order to become more proactive with performance management. He shared recommendations and their Best Practices that have worked for his team. He really told some great stories and had some great analogies. The bold statement I mentioned in the beginning is just a teaser

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How Google is Going to Own the Cloud

I had the opportunity to interview Jonathan Rochelle today. Jonathan is the group product manager for Google Docs. We talked about Google Docs, collaboration, the cloud, and of course Microsoft. Google Docs is the primary alternative to SharePoint/Office and takes a different tack to this world - and Jonathan did a superb job of laying all that out.

First Jonathan talked about consumer (free) use. He said Google's goal with this is to get people to use the web more. It's not to run ads, it's not to make money, it is merely to make people more comfortable using the web. Google views this as a key strategic goal - to enable people to do more on the web. Secondarily there is the business version that has additional functionality added to make it a strong solution for businesses.

My next question was the key one - how does Google Docs compare to SharePoint/Office 2010? Jonathan started with a spot-on observation, that the new Microsoft release is really a giant swing toward the cloud. He is very happy to see this because Microsoft's move in this direction is a big vote of confidence in putting apps up on the cloud, and that validates Docs.

He then talked about the power of applications that provide collaboration via the cloud. This was interesting for a couple of reasons. First Jonathan focused on the new paradigm of placing all of these apps on the cloud, not about Google vs. Microsoft. He's a strong believer in this (aren't most of us?) and clearly what he finds cool is that Microsoft has validated this approach big time.

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Service-Oriented User Interfaces: How Soon is Now?

A company operates their primary line of business application in a highly automated environment.  One where it is as likely that the client for for the middle tier is python or perl script as a browser based application. In the past they had made the mistake of creating a separate facade for each sort of client.  PHP for the web application, perl and python libraries each hitting the database and reproducing any required business logic.

It's not hard to imagine the problems this led to.

Service-Oriented User Interfaces: How Soon is Now?

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Sun's stars: Where are they now? And why did they leave? - Sun Microsystems, sparc, Siebel, peoplesoft, oracle, Java, IDC - CIO

Oracle, which spent $US7.4 billion to acquire once-high-flying Sun Microsystems, has been losing prominent Sun technologists since shortly after the deal was forged. The acquisition was supposed to give Oracle control not only over such technologies as Sun's flagship Java implementation and Sun's Sparc hardware, but access to engineers and developers who were nothing short of celebrities in their field. But it has not worked out that way.

It was not unexpected that Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz and Sun chairman and former CEO Scott McNealy did not make the switch to Oracle. Those high-ranking positions were already taken at the database giant. But the number of former Sun personnel residing in Oracle's top executive offices is sparse.

In fact, the only Sun alumni found on Oracle's Web listing of top executives are Executive Vice President John Fowler, who had dealt with Sun hardware; Senior Vice President Cindy Reese, who was a worldwide operations executive at Sun; and Vice President Mike Splain, who also was involved with Sun's hardware systems operations.

Key departures have included Java founder James Gosling, XML co-inventor Tim Bray, and Simon Phipps, Sun's chief open source officer. After serving as CTO of client software at Sun, Gosling worked for a couple months with the same title at Oracle before leaving in April under what appears to be acrimonious circumstances. Bray, who was director of Web technologies at Sun, also quickly left Oracle, becoming a developer advocate at Google. Phipps, never offered a job at Oracle, is open source strategy director at integrator and identity platform vendor ForgeRock.

Other departures include Sun engineers Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo, who shepherded the development of the JRuby programming language at Sun but joined Engine Yard last summer several months after the Oracle acquisition of Sun was announced. A key developer on the open source Hudson continuous build project, Kohsuke Kawaguchi left in April to form a company to continue working on Hudson.

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Total Eclipse of Sun

InfoWorld chronicles the technological brain drain at Sun Microsystems after it was gobbled up by Oracle:

Key departures have included Java founder James Gosling, XML co-inventor Tim Bray, and Simon Phipps, Sun's chief open source officer. After serving as CTO of client software at Sun, Gosling worked for a couple months with the same title at Oracle before leaving in April under what appears to be acrimonious circumstances. Bray, who was director of Web technologies at Sun, also quickly left Oracle, becoming a developer advocate at Google. Phipps, never offered a job at Oracle, is open source strategy director at integrator and identity platform vendor ForgeRock.

Other departures include Sun engineers Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo, who shepherded the development of the JRuby programming language at Sun but joined Engine Yard last summer several months after the Oracle acquisition of Sun was announced. A key developer on the open source Hudson continuous build project, Kohsuke Kawaguchi left in April to form a company to continue working on Hudson.

In his blog, Gosling even notes that he needed a lawyer to resign from Oracle:

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Open source Vaadin bridges Java to Ajax - Vaadin, rich internet applications, ria, open source, javascript, Java, ajax - Computerworld

With rich Internet applications all the rage an open source Web framework dubbed Vaadin promises rapid Ajax development while keeping Java code on the server.

Many RIA frameworks rely on JavaScript libraries and browser plug-ins like Flash and Silverlight, but Vaadin claims to reduce this client complexity by running the majority of the logic on the server.

Vaadin development began in 2000 as an internal product of Finnish Web development company IT Mill. It was officially released as an open source project in December 2007 under the name IT Mill Toolkit 5 and then became Vaadin in 2009.

Vaadin is a collection of user interface components and Ajax technology is used on the browser side.

Developers compose the application user interface from components like Button, Table and Tree and the components use events, listeners and data binding to communicate with each other and the business logic.

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Curious Creature » Complacency on “Corporate Standards”

I was in a meeting today where a discussion was happening about the benefits of using Hibernate in an enterprise Java application. I pointed out that with Hibernate the options are provided to call stored procedures, have Hibernate generate SQL for you, etc. The main point was that it provides a lot of flexibility and that we should be using the best tool for the job whether thats a stored procedure, dynamic SQL, etc.

At my current employer the past standard was “all data access is done as a stored procedure”. It is also important to note that Hibernate is not popular. The current standard also is “all data access is done as a stored procedure” but various projects have been straying from that standard. When it was stated that we should use the best tool for the job some people present in the meeting took exception to that and became angry. It was noted that SQL Injection attacks were very easy where dynamic SQL is involved (read: where Hibernate is being used).

SQL Injection certainly can be a problem but it really depends (like anything else) on the environment. In a system where form fields are being sent essentially unchanged to the database this is a large concern. In any modern enterprise system it isn't likely it will be a problem (thought it certainly should be thought of). Where is the SQL Injection going to happen? There should be validation rules for any form fields. For performance reasons PreparedStatements should be used which also has the nice side effect of dealing with SQL Injection issues (why? because you're not building a where clause…you're just plugging in a parameter). Drivers could also deal with this issue with proper escaping of special characters in string parameters.

Needless to say there are a lot of ways SQL Injection attacks can be prevented in an enterprise application. It isn't a problem that needs an inordinate amount of time to deal with and it certainly isn't a reason someone shouldn't choose Hibernate as the data access tool of choice in an enterprise application. This brings me back to the title of this posting ‘Complacency on “Corporate Standards”‘.

Just because something has been a standard way of doing something doesn't imply that the standard shouldn't be reviewed occasionally. If it has been years (and in this case it literally has been years) the policy most certainly should be reviewed to see if there are better options given how quickly things change in the IT business. I have been programming professionally for about 15 years now and in that time the *only* time when stored procedures were popular and the way to do something was 15 years ago. I think it's pretty obviously with the rise in popularity of frameworks like Hibernate (on the Java side), and Rails, etc. that time is long gone. That isn't to say that a stored procedure shouldn't be used but it shouldn't be the only option.

The old man yelling at kids to get off his lawn? That was this situation. It's time to tell the old man to move aside and let some new ideas through.

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App Devs: GetJar Gets Getties Ready Open Call for Android, iPhone, BlackBerry, Java, Symbian and WinMo Apps - WIRELESS AND MOBILE NEWS - Applications on Android - Applications on iPhone

GetJar has opened their mobile app competition The Gettie Awards 2010, to mobile application developers. The Gettie Awards 2010 will honor the successes and innovations of the best application developers across all major platforms including Android, BlackBerry, iPhone, Java, Symbian,and Windows Mobile along with a Gettie for best overall application.

A panel of five judges including prominent industry heavyweights, press and analysts will first select three (3) nominees within each category from all submissions of files/applications. Winners from each category will be determined by review of the actual physical applications. The Gettie Award winner will be determined by a combination of popular vote and judge's votes. Developers get the chance to be the best within each category and best for overall application at this prestigious event.

This year, The Gettie Awards will take place in conjunction with the first evening of VentureBeat's annual MobileBeat in San Francisco, California. The deadline for entries is June 25, 2010. Submissions after this date may not be eligible for consideration.

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Versant Releases Lightning Fast db4o v8.0 RC

primary theme of the 7.0 release was Ease of Use, highlighted by Transparent Activation and other important complimentary features such as handling of Runtime/Unchecked exceptions, the MTOC (multi-transactional object-container) client server implementation and pushed updates for active client scenarios. In this front we believe we lived up to the promise (though we're still committed to making it easier for all developers to deal with object persistence).

Looking forward, the primary theme of the 8.0 release is performance. This release introduces a fundamental change to the identity management system which significantly improves the I/O characteristics of the db4o server. These changes constitute advances in db4o's performance as shown in Poleposition benchmarking and, at the same time, paves the way for improvements in areas such as I/O clustering, defragmentation management, and object evolution.

Recognizing the strength of db4o for embedded device and desktop applications, we are extending it's reach of end to end object persistence via integration with db4o's big brother technology, the Versant Object Database (VOD). The db4o replication system (dRS) will be adapted to provide the power of pure object persistence from db4o's high performance desktop to Versant's massive scale pure object database aggregation server.

Keeping in mind that this release line will be formalized through the standard stabilization process for the newer features. Here is a summary of what the db4o team aims to produce (in the areas of performance and major capabilities) with the final release of version 8.0 anticipated in the fall of 2010:

• New Major Performance Features
  
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