18th April 2010, 05:50 am
As I type this I am 35,000 feet over Alaska (no I can’t see Putin’s backyard from here) en route to QCon Tokyo. Brian was scheduled to talk but was unable to make it so I’m stepping in to present a talk on spanning multiple data grids across disparate data centers. (You can see Brian describing this talk at QCon SF here.) In addition to this presentation, I’m looking forward to sampling the food and culture in Japan. As a big city guy I’ve always wanted to visit Tokyo so I’m quite fortunate to have the chance.
As they say, when it rains it pours. I just came back from the New York SIG where I talked about real world challenges in customer deployments and passed along lessons that we learned in solving these problems. After leaving Tokyo, I will be joining Cameron and Noah in Toronto for the inaugural SIG where I will deliver the same presentation I gave in NY. Cameron will talk about the past and future of Coherence, and Noah will give an update on the latest innovations in the Coherence Incubator project.
Has everyone received their copy of the Coherence book yet? One of my favorite parts of the book is the very beginning where Aleks describes what it takes to build scalable applications. In fact a good portion of the first chapter doesn’t even mention Coherence; it just talks about aspects of scalability that developers and architects of high scale systems should be familiar with. A copy of this book was raffled at the NY SIG, and more copies will be given away at the Bay SIG and Toronto SIG.
19th February 2010, 02:28 pm
It has been a while since I’ve posted, so I figured it would be a good time to give an update on what is happening in Coherence land.
New Coherence Bloggers
We have two new bloggers sharing their experiences with Coherence!
The first is by Oracle JDBC expert Pas Apicella who recently took on Coherence. Upon his introduction to Coherence he immediately proceeded to create a CacheStore example using PL/SQL, followed by an example of using the Oracle JDBC Data Change Notification mechanism to push updates from the database to a cache.
Additionally we have Coherence architect Andy Nguyen debuting with a detailed description of a sophisticated distributed bulk loading technique he’s employed on several customer projects.
Coherence Book in March
After many months of blood, sweat, and blisters from too much typing, Aleksandar Seovic has completed the highly anticipated Coherence book published by Packt. Having worked closely with Aleks on reviews and contributions, I believe this book will be a terrific resource for developers and architects that need to write scalable applications. Both experienced users of Coherence and new users will find relevant and useful content. Aleks was recently interviewed by Cameron Purdy about the book which can be downloaded as an MP3.
User Group Meetings
The UK SIG in London is the last Coherence user group meeting for the winter, it is coming up on February 26th. The spring events are currently being planned; stay tuned for details!
Also coming up on February 24th is the first Boston SUG meeting of the year. Although the topic won’t be Coherence this time, it will be of interest for developers and architects interested in scalable systems. We’ll be meeting up for drinks and snacks at Bertucci’s afterwards. And I’ll be there if anyone wants to chat about Coherence or any other topic!
22nd September 2009, 05:26 pm
This year I’ll be at Oracle Open World for the first time. I hear that this conference dwarfs JavaOne in size which is hard to imagine given how large JavaOne is. For those of you attending that are interested in Coherence, we have over two dozen sessions to choose from – making this the biggest Coherence event ever.
The Coherence content is available on OTN. (There’s also a PDF version that is nicer for printing out.) It includes sessions on future direction, integration with other products in the Oracle lineup, developer workshops, and customer panels describing their use of Coherence.
I’ll be talking about using Coherence to scale out external data stores (including relational databases.) This is mostly the same content that will be covered during the NY SIG.
17th September 2009, 08:35 am
The next NY Coherence SIG is on October 1st (two weeks from today) and it promises to be a great event. For those of you who follow my blog, I previously introduced these two gentlemen a few months ago when they started blogging.
The first talk will be by Aleksandar Seovic who has an extensive Coherence resume. In addition to implementing POF in .NET, he is also the author of an upcoming book on Coherence. In his spare time (insert tongue in cheek) he runs S4HC, a consulting company specializing in Spring, Coherence, and other technologies.
If you’re in Tampa, you can also check out his upcoming talk at Tampa JUG on September 29th.
We will also have Mark Falco, one of our rock star engineers who concentrates on our network protocol (TCMP), C++, and other areas. Mark is usually the first (and last) person I reach out to when I have questions about Coherence networking – so if you have any questions of your own be sure to bring them. He will talk to us about TCMP and how to optimize your machines and network for optimum performance.
Finally, yours truly will talk about configuring Coherence to work with an external data source (usually relational databases.) I’ll describe in detail how each of the external connectivity features work (including many features you’ve probably never heard of), best practices, and good old fashioned war stories. (Shout out to Rob for helping with the Omni Graffle diagrams!) This is the same talk that I will present in mid October at Oracle Open World in San Francisco. I’ll provide more detail on this later; for now you can check out the Application Grid lineup – which includes WebLogic Server, Coherence, JRockit, Tuxedo and Enterprise Manager.
16th September 2009, 07:03 pm
Coverage of the last day of No Fluff Just Stuff (albeit a few days late):
Spring DM and OSGi
Craig Walls provided an extensive overview (and defense) of OSGi. OSGi is a framework for managing library dependencies. It enables the installation, configuration, and updating of modules in a live program without JVM restarts. Multiple versions of a class and/or libraries can coexist in a container. Each module has a defined lifecycle and dependencies between modules can be defined.
Here is a list of OSGi implementations:
Open Source
Commercial
Craig provided a live demonstration of the OPS4J Pax shell running under Eclipse Equinox and Apache Felix. Unfortunately we ran out of time and we didn’t get to see much of the Spring DM server in action.
java.next
Stuart Halloway gave an overview of the latest and greatest languages available for the JVM. Like some of the other NFJS speakers he has very strong opinions, especially when it comes to the use of Java. I believe the quote was something along the lines of “every time you start a greenfield project with Java, God kills a kitten.” (Incidentally, Ted Neward believes that using Java arrays instead of collections will lead to the same fate for said kitten.)
Straight from Stuart’s slides: pros and cons for your consideration:
Clojure Pros
- Functional
- Multimethods
- Concurrency
- Lisp
- A la carte
Clojure Cons
- Youngest java.next language
Groovy Pros
- Easiest to learn
- Easiest bi-di interop
- More committed to reusing Java libs
Groovy Cons
- Worst Java baggage
- No concurrency/multicore story
JRuby Pros
- Biggest community
- Commercial support: EngineYard
- Rails
- multiple platforms
JRuby Cons
- No concurrency/multicore story
Scala Pros
- Functional
- High performance
- Pattern matching
- Actor model
- Hybrid object/functional (could also be a con)
Scala Cons
The general theme on these new generation languages is:
- Dynamic typing (Scala is not as dynamic as the others, but offers more flexibility than Java)
- No checked exceptions
- Reasonable defaults
- Convention over configuration
- YAGNI
