• Native integration with WebLogic Server/WebLogic Portal 9.2 and 10.2+.
• Fine grained concurrency management for session access
• Improved distributed session expiry algorithm
• Support for Coherence*Extend

It turns out we’re not the only ones giving Coherence lots of love. Check out this report by Gartner covering Data Grid solutions from The Big Three (Oracle, IBM, & Microsoft.)

Those interested in finding out more can watch Cam’s Live Webcast on July 29th.

The next three posts will cover my favorite new Coherence 3.5 features:

• Improved Partition Distribution Algorithm
• Service Guardian (Deadlock Detection)
• POF Extractor/Updater

Stay tuned for more!

As is always the case when getting new hardware, I had the daunting task of moving everything over to the new machine and setting it up to my liking. In an attempt to save myself a week of work, I decided to try out restoring my account and apps via Migration Assistant and Time Machine. I was a bit hesitant as I previously did an upgrade to Leopard from Tiger (instead of a fresh install, as I was then also trying to save time) but I figured that I didn’t have much to lose. If it didn’t work, I could just reinstall OS X on the new Mac and start over.

I’ve been running on the new machine for a few days now, and so far things seem to be working well. I did run into a few glitches that I was able to overcome:

• Reinstalls of Parallels and the Cisco VPN client were required, I suspect this was the case because these apps require kernel extensions of some sort.
• Java 6 was nowhere to be found which I thought was strange (doesn’t Java 6 ship OOTB with Leopard?) I installed the Java package from the DVD and also did a software update; this included a Java update which included Java 6.
• The biggest challenge I encountered: when bringing up the screensaver options in the System Preferences app, it would spin up to 100% CPU and require a hard kill from the Activity Monitor. I noticed some messages in the Console about some deprecated API, so my first attempt to fix this issue was to follow the instructions in this thread. This did remove the warnings from the console, but the lockups continued. After reading this thread I decided to try installing iLife Support 9.0.3; this ended up fixing the problem for good.

So far I have to say that the effort has been worth it. Fixing the glitches above took far less time than reinstalling everything, and all of my preferences and settings migrated over with no problem (saved passwords via keychain, OS and network settings, etc.)

you make the hot days hotter
and the cold days colder
this is a burden
that is too much to shoulder

some of your drivers
are certifiably insane
making NY cab drivers blush
when they see your road rage

you make me navigate through
six foot snow banks
then break down on the way
as I watch my day tank

during rush hour
you might pass by twice
while eight 77‘s
clog Mass Ave, how nice

so why do I bother
why do I try
when efforts so futile
make a grown man cry

the answer is simple
simple as can be
you’re a cheap way to get around
$1.25 is quite a low fee

so thus I am destined
to rely on mbta
to get me to work
sometime today

now I don’t mean to cuss
or complain and fuss
but can someone please tell me
where the fuck’s my fucking bus?

Edit: Maria suggested I link the last line to the video that inspired it.

Spring is expanding the portfolio to cover more areas of enterprise development, in particular the integration and batch projects.  Most of the press coverage (including blogs) covers the trendy Ajaxification of the web (and there was no shortage of this at TSE either); but the core of the enterprise is (still) integration and batch processing.  The reception of these projects by attendees was positive and enthusiastic.

The trend of enterprise development is leaning away from generic monolithic J(2)EE application servers and towards more specialized solutions.  This was addressed at both Rod Johnson’s keynote and the keynote delivered by John Rymer, Vice President at Forrester Research.  This shift was made possible in large part by Spring and the infrastructure it provides (declarative AOP, TX management, etc.)  A number of surveys were referenced which indicate high rates of Tomcat adoption in the enterprise.  Deployments that require more than just a servlet container can easily take advantage of 3rd party add ons, such as the use of Coherence (and others) for clustering.

Speaking of clustering, attendees interested in clustering and scalability had a great selection of presentations to choose from.  Hal Hildebrand of Oracle delivered a well attended talk on using Spring, OSGi and Coherence to develop the next generation application server.  Billy Newport and Nati Shalom delivered presentations on IBM ObjectGrid and GigaSpaces, respectively.  Yours truly discussed Oracle Coherence and methods for integrating the data grid with Spring and data sources.  The data grid vendors participated in an extreme scalability BOF which included Rob Harrop and Wayne Lund. (Unfortunately Billy had to leave early and was not able to participate.)

Overall it was another great show; Jay Zimmerman and NFJS delivered, as always.

This is cool… my friend Mike Mathieu set up a web page where you can enter an address and find out how walkable it is.

The URL is http://www.walkscore.com/.   Very cool site.  BTW, my Somerville neighborhood scored an 86 out of 100.

As you can see, Isaac had a great time!