Executable Maven 3 project is included and checked-in. Feedback is, as always, highly appreciated!

I’m very excited to say that as of today I’m a Mozillian! I’ll be working with the fine folks on the WebAPI team. This is an entirely new set of technologies for me so I’ll be learning a tonne. I’m looking forward to meeting and working with all the excellent people in the Mozilla and broader web communities. I’ll be working out of the beautiful Toronto office.

As for Eclipse and Fedora stuff, I’m really looking forward to the release of Linux Tools 1.0 and the rest of Juno in June, 2012. Before then, Fedora 17 will come out and is going to be an outstanding release, especially from the Eclipse point of view. As I’ll be consuming Eclipse tools for my new work, I’ll be sure to file and fix bugs and spread the good word about the power of Eclipse for C++ developers. When I have some good HOWTO content for developing Mozilla stuff with Eclipse, I’ll post it here and be sure to tag it so Planet Eclipse picks it up.

With apologies to Neil Young: keep on rockin’ in the Free and Open Source world!

Please give us your feedback in bug 378285.

In Java EE 7 you could replace a @Stateless with the ubiquitous @Transactional annotation. However, you will have to type 4 more characters for this purpose :-)

See also other screencasts at http://www.youtube.com/user/bienadam

Red Hat has provided me with many things: innumerable learning opportunities, career growth, exposure to open source communities, public speaking opportunities at conferences, and more. Most importantly, though, I’ve been given the chance to work with a lot of really amazing people both inside Red Hat and in a variety of vibrant Free Software and Open Source communities.

The Eclipse community has been my home for a few years now. It’s full of some of the most talented and passionate software developers I’ve ever met. I plan to remain involved in the Eclipse world and am looking forward to getting Linux Tools 1.0 released as a part of Juno and what comes after that!

I’ve excited for my new job but have a few weeks of down time in between where I hope to largely be AFK. I’ll write a blog entry here when I start my new job. I’ll still be around the open source world and if you’d like to contact me I’m reachable here on my blog or via various social networks. I wish everyone continued success both personally and professionally. Thanks for everything and I’ll see you around.

JAVA_HOME can be set by putting the following line into the ~/.profile file:
export JAVA_HOME="/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/1.7.0.jdk/Contents/Home"

NetBeans 7.1.2 was simultaneously released as well. Also Java FX 2.1 is available for Mac and Windows to download.

"A servlet container may send concurrent requests through the service method of the servlet. To handle the requests, the Servlet Developer must make adequate provisions for concurrent processing with multiple threads in the service method.

Although it is not recommended, an alternative for the Developer is to implement the SingleThreadModel interface which requires the container to guarantee that there is only one request thread at a time in the service method. A servlet container may satisfy this requirement by serializing requests on a servlet, or by maintaining a pool of servlet instances. If the servlet is part of a Web application that has been marked as distributable, the container may maintain a pool of servlet instances in each JVM that the application is distributed across.

For servlets not implementing the SingleThreadModel interface, if the service method (or methods such as doGet or doPost which are dispatched to the service method of the HttpServlet abstract class) has been defined with the synchronized keyword, the servlet container cannot use the instance pool approach, but must serialize requests through it. It is strongly recommended that Developers not synchronize the service method (or methods dispatched to it) in these circumstances because of detrimental effects on performance".

Servlets are not thread safe and you have to synchronize your code manually what usually leads to esoteric implementations.

• Moderne Architektur mit Spring und JavaScript (pdf)
• Pimp Your IDE Productivity (pdf)

The IPA is a new way to do patent assignment that keeps control in the hands of engineers. It is a commitment from a company to the engineers that patents can only be used for defensive purposes–that is, only in response to a litigation threat against the company or a recent history of offensive patent use. The company will not use the patents in offensive litigation without the permission of the inventors. With the IPA, employees can be assured that their patents will be used only as a shield rather than as a weapon.

We are still in early stages, and have just started to reach out to other companies to discuss IPA and whether it might make sense for them too. We have posted the IPA on Github, with the hope that folks improve the IPA in an open source fashion and share it with their respective companies.

Twitter will implement the IPA later this year, and it will apply to all patents issued to our engineers. If you have comments, feel free to look at the Github repository or join the conversation on Twitter with hashtag #IPA

• Ever since the invention of Java EE roles like the Application Assember were defined. I never saw a project that followed this workflow. Nowadays there is just an automated process that results in an EAR or even a complete setup including an application server. It is time to face this reality and get rid of these role descriptions. The deployment process is not done that way. Java needs to step away from it.
• Nowadays application server are seldom used to host more than one application. So maybe that offers some possibilities to improve the deployment processes and also the features. If there is just one application on a server anyway the strict isolation between applications Java EE offers does not make that much sense any more.
• It would be good to focus more on deployment during the development process. Applications are much more often deployed into testing or development environments than into production. I am wondering how many CPU and I/O cycles are wasted compressing WARs and JARs and then EARs during a build process - and immediately decompressing them on the web or application server so testing can start. Can't the Java EE standard do something about this? Obviously there are exploded WARs and EARs - but they are not used as often as they should be. Obviously there are tools like JRebel and Play - but what if the complete tool chain including IDEs, build tools, servers etc would support a standard here? What if all of those parties could collaborate to make this work flawlessly? I think we would see quite a boost in developer productivity.
• Often I see applications modularized in several WARs. These modules need to talk to each other. However, there is no easy way to do this. Usually they end up using Web Services or another HTTP based protocol. Compared to a local method call this adds the overhead of HTTP, sockets and marshalling / demarshalling. A possible solution would be OSGi - but that technology is quite complex. The reason to me seems to be the problems around shared class loading. Classes that might represent parameters or return values can be shared between modules. JBoss includes a solution based on JMX that did not support shared classes - so modules need to have the correct classes available. This is the same as for Web Services or the other HTTP protocols. But there is no standard apart from JMX - which is very low level. Can't we have some communication between WARs that in the standard? Maybe based on JMX? Or at least best practices around it?
• Concurrency in languages like Erlang is very different from what we are used to in Java. There are actors that work on a serial list of messages. Concurrency is achieved by multiple actors working in parallel - while the actors themselves are just working serially. This approach is also used by the Scala library Akka on the JVM. In Erlang this approach leads to lots of actors - far more than the number of threads that can be supported on the JVM. If the JVM wants to stay relevant for this model we need proper support for it.
• Actors in Erlang and in Google Dart - they are called Isolates have separated heaps. Those heaps can be independently GC'd - so while one actors spends time doing GC the other can continue to work on messages. By design you end up with less stop-the-world-GC. Maybe we could have a similar concept in Java? This is an extension of the previous suggestion but there might be other options as well. For example each WAR file could have a separate heap.

For those who don’t know what Travis CI is, it’s a hosted continuous integration service for the open source community, still in alpha stages but surprisingly stable from my point of view. It also integrates nicely with your GitHub account so you can easily decide what projects you want to build by logging in using your GitHub credentials. On top of that, the Travis CI code itself is hosted on GitHub for people to contribute to.

Traditionally, open source projects benefited from having continuous integration service if they were hosted part of an open source foundation, however, Travis CI allows any project to take advantage of the service if they support the language:

• Clojure
• Erlang
• Groovy
• Haskell
• Java
• JavaScript (with Node.js)
• Perl
• PHP
• Python
• Ruby
• Scala

For example, I recently decided to add Travis CI support to hogan.js, which is one of Twitter’s open source projects, essentially a compiler for the Mustache templating language. You essentially get a nice build status icon that integrates nicely into your GitHub’s projects README:

Adding Travis CI support for the hogan.js Javascript library was fairly trivial, you can take a peak at the commit to figure out how it was done or read the Travis CI documentation. The only tricky part was ensuring that git submodules were properly initialized and phantomJS was launched so QUnit can successfully run. It’s even easier for other languages that Travis CI supports!

In the end, I love what Travis CI is doing for the open source community and how it integrates with GitHub. Continuous integration is something every software project should have and Travis CI makes it really easy to get started. In a future post, I’ll considering comparing Travis CI to some of the other CI options out there (e.g., Hudson/Jenkins), but for now, consider trying out or even sponsoring the service.

EclipseCon has come and gone again in the blink of an eye! As usual, it was an outstanding week. After the annual Architecture Council meeting on Sunday, I spent Monday morning getting six 8 GB USB sticks prepared for the CDT tutorial that afternoon. Doug Schaefer kindly stepped up when Bernhard Merkle couldn’t make it and I think things went pretty well. The room was a lot more full than I thought it would be: 18 had pre-registered and after starting with 39 people we probably ended the 3 hours with 25 or so. Feedback received was very positive which is always nice to hear. To the person who said you’d have liked to see more complex import examples: we’ll try to do add some if we do this again in the future.

Tuesday was the CDT Summit which featured some great discussions. I am always impressed by the engagement and growing diversity in the CDT community. The renewed focus on user experience is heartening and discussions on remote project unification were great. I know my colleague Jeff Johnston was very happy to hear about the interest of others in the remote area and especially in the suggestions by the PTP project (Greg Watson in particular) of trying to unify the remote project support in the CDT area. Thanks!

I spent Wednesday in the CBI and LTS meetings so didn’t get to attend any talks. We’re going to continue investigating the feasibility of using CBI for eclipse-build-type Eclipse SDK builds and keep talking internally at Red Hat about joining the LTS initiative.

I got to attend talks on Thursday which was nice. After a great keynote by Mylyn/Tasktop’s Mik Kersten, I took in Denis and Wayne’s roundup of Eclipse build infrastructure. I already knew the details but it was good to hear it all together. Next up for me was the JGit and EGit update by Matthias Sohn from SAP and Kevin Sawicki from GitHub. I’ve been very impressed with the velocity of the JGit and EGit projects and this talk re-inforced their continued improvements and enhancements. To round off the morning I attended Elena Laskavaia’s talk on static analysis. Elena’s Codan framework is a great addition to the CDT and I’ll forgive her for not awarding me the Blackberry Playbook (she asked the audience how many bugs on average are found per week by static analysis tools. Sergey Prirogin from Google guessed 1 and I guessed 3. The answer was 2 so I guess with Price is Right rules it was fair that Sergey won ). After lunch I checked out the Platform UI team’s Eclipse 4.2 tips talk which showed some of the great work that’s gone on in Eclipse 4.x. After that I heard Greg Watson discuss the PTP project’s git-based remote project synchronization. It’s an excellent idea and I’ll have to look into it more. Finally, I attended Sergey’s “C++ refactoring: this time for real” talk and he showed off the superb work he’s done to get the CDT’s C++ refactoring tools up to snuff. After inadvertently showing off a bug in this at FOSDEM, it’s nice to know it’ll be in so much better shape for Juno.

Today (Friday), John Arthorne, Alex Kurtakov and I went into D.C. with and Dave and Justin from eBay. It certainly is an impressive capital city! Eight hours of walking let us take in the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, the various war memorials, the White House (from afar), the “International Spy Museum”, and the (free and awesome!) Air & Space Museum. I’ll be sure to come back to D.C. some day to take more in.

It was great seeing everyone this week!

As a student, you get a stipend of of $5000 USD and the respective mentoring organization gets $500. Students have from March 26th through April 6th to apply to the mentoring organizations that they are interested in. Afterwards, the mentoring organizations rank and review the proposals. Finally, the accepted proposals are announced on April 23rd.

If you qualify (you’re a student and older than 18) and have some coding skills, I highly recommend you consider doing GSOC as it’s a great way to learn something, get some experience and even get a job potentially. I recommend looking over the list of mentoring organizations. I’m excited this year because Twitter is a mentoring organization and we will have some students work on some of our open source projects. Of course, the Eclipse Foundation is participating and has a great list of project ideas.

In the end, if you’re a student, just do it if you don’t have anything else crazy lined up. You get to work with quality mentoring organizations that have been vetted as great places to get started on working on open source.

• We did an internal Code Retreat
• We are sponsoring the Legacy Code Retreat in Berlin.
• Also adesso Mobile Solutions does internal Katas.

Nowadays almost all programmers do extensive Unit Tests. And therefore we see problems arising. Instead of thinking about a problem and building a reliable solution developers now just write a test and code away. At one point they get a green bar and consider the job done. But can you build proper software that way? Dijkstra stated in 1972: "If you want more effective programmers, you will discover that they should not waste their time debugging, they should not introduce the bugs to start with." - see Wikiquote. I think the same holds true for testing. So instead of the ever famous code-test-refactor cycle we could use more of the Feynman Way of Solving Problems. If you really think about the solution first you will find you won't need a test. Instead you will actually write correct code from the beginning. You won't need to rely on tests. They cannot show the absence of bugs anyway - as Dijkstra mentioned. In the end you will end up with cleaner code and less code - as there are no tests to be written.

This principle can be applied to other areas as well. I think one reason why there are so many car accidents are the very effective brakes cars have now. If we had less effective brakes people would think about possible problems beforehand, drive more carefully - and we would have less accidents.

I look forward to attending the Eclipse Foundation board meeting and also giving the Git tutorial with colleagues. Over half the projects on eclipse.org have already moved to Git, if you haven’t yet or have hesitations, I highly recommend you attend the tutorial. Also, If you just want to grab a frosty beverage and chat open source let me know. I would love to talk to eclipse.org committers who have some ideas on how to make committer life better at the Eclipse Foundation.

See you there!

Chris Tyler speaking about the Raspberry Pi at Red Hat's Toronto office

Chris Tyler of Seneca College, Fedora, and much other fame graciously took some time out of his busy schedule to give a talk about the Raspberry Pi at Red Hat’s Toronto office last week. It was fun to see the pre-production model in action running Fedora 14 (the plan is to have Fedora 17 running on it very soon). Chris showed off the some of the hardware’s capabilities with an OpenGL demo and a very smooth playback of ‘Big Buck Bunny’. We discussed some of the recent work getting OpenJDK (specifically HotSpot) and Eclipse running on ARM and if that would apply to the Raspberry Pi. Short answer: it definitely should, but has yet to be verified on actual Raspberry Pi hardware.

Delicious raspberry pies (my personal favourite!) were procured from Wanda’s Pie In The Sky. Interestingly enough, the person I spoke with at Wanda’s told me that raspberry pies were popular in the 1980s but are not very popular these days. Have Ontario’s pie tastes changed? Regardless, Wanda’s is supposedly doing something with raspberries for Pi Day on Wednesday so check it out if you’re in the Kensington Market area.

Thanks for the great talk, Chris!

I’m running this year for one of the committer representative spots and plan to continue to do my best to represent committers if given the opportunity again. I’ve had the honor to be on the board for the last few years and have helped push through changes that I thought were important for the committer community. For example, I would like to see our migration to Git through, we are getting close and I would like to see this happen by the end of 2012…

In terms of the future, there are three main things that are important to me:

There are many businesses that adopt Eclipse tools and runtimes, it’s important that we find a way to support these existing adopters while moving the eclipse.org mission forward. There are companies with mature products built on Eclipse with long support cycles that need to be accommodated. For example, Airbus has a crazy ~30 year support cycle on the planes that they build using Eclipse software. One way to do this is supporting the Long Term Support industry working group and ensuring we have the infrastructure (e.g., common build) in place to support these scenarios.

It’s great that the eclipse.org community prides itself on clean Intellectual Property, I’m proud of what we do and it’s crucial for certain types of commercial adopters. However, the downside to the Eclipse IP process is that it can be a barrier to contribution due to the process and record keeping. Given that the software world has changed in recent years with the advent of Git (distributed version control), GitHub and notion of social coding, we should take a serious look at improving our IP process to work in this new world. Can we find a ways to simplify the contribution process using Git or Gerrit? Can we find a way to host an eclipse.org project outside the eclipse.org infrastructure, say on GitHub? I know, heresy, right ?

Finally, I would like to continue pushing on eclipse.org’s foray into web tooling via projects like Orion. It’s great to see Mozilla Firefox already adopting Orion in its developer tools, but we can do more in this space.

In the end, I encourage everyone to vote and make your voice heard.

Of course, it goes without saying that these are both running on OpenJDK with Andrew Haley & co.’s work on porting HotSpot to ARM. Things are quite usable on these low power devices even if Eclipse is a bit slow to start up. Great work all around!

The precise release version is 1.3.0.201202151440-r

It can be downloaded from the Eclipse Marketplace or the p2 repository.

There’s a lot of new improvements, the largest being git-submodule support:

I’m also a huge fan of the branch status decorations:

If you’re interested in the details of what’s new, check out the JGit New and Noteworthy and the EGit New and Noteworthy.

Note that this is the last release in the 1.X stream for EGit and JGit, there will be a 2.0 release in June targeting the Eclipse Juno simultaneous release. When we move to 2.0, there will be some breaking API changes and API cleanup that happens. If there was something you didn’t like about the API, now is your chance to speak up and contribute.

If you’re interested in using Gerrit for your eclipse.org project, please speak up on this bug.

It’s satisifying to see this finally be rolled out as a few of us committers have been pushing on this for the past couple of years as a way to modernize the Eclipse infrastructure. We have been piloting Gerrit for quite awhile in the EGit and JGit projects and have been very pleased with it. It’s great that Eclipse committers now have a convenient way of doing code reviews using Git if they wish to add that workflow for their project.

On a side note, I’m working on improving the way git contributions are handled by the Eclipse Foundation when contributors use Gerrit. I’m hoping to simplify the amount of work that needs to be done by committers and the IP team, if you’re interested in this effort, please follow and comment on this bug.

Booth photo, shamelessly stolen from Gunnar

My lightning talk (slides here) was right after Gunnar’s and IMO both did what they set out to do: to provide an introduction to some parts of Eclipse and hopefully pique people’s interest to learn more. More than one person came up to me afterwards asking for more details or telling me they were going to try things out and report any bugs they find. I look forward to hearing from those people.

Gary Benson and Xerxes Rånby looking at Eclipse running on OpenJDK on ARM	Beer event at Delirium Cafe
It’s Scientastic!	View from Eclipse booth. There was a giant stuffed camel looking the other way.
Omair Majid and Jon VanAlten debuting Thermostat	Mike’s future O’Reilly book
Andrew Dinn, Chris Phillips, Jon ValAlten, and Gunnar Wagenknect	Krzysztof Daniel, Stano Ochotnicky, and Deepak Bhole

It was a really awesome experience, living up to Dalibor‘s description as “Oktobefest for Free Software hackers”. Many hands were shook and much delicious beer was consumed. The organizers and volunteers who keep the conference running smoothly are absolutely amazing; thanks for providing this great service! I hope I can attend in the future!

@Stateless
@TransactionManagement(BEAN)
public class MySessionBean implements MySession {

  @Resource
  javax.transaction.UserTransaction ut;
  @Resource
  javax.sql.DataSource database1;
  @Resource
  javax.sql.DataSource database2;

  public void someMethod(...) {
      java.sql.Connection con1;
      java.sql.Connection con2;
      java.sql.Statement stmt1;
      java.sql.Statement stmt2;
      // obtain con1 object and set it up for transactions
      con1 = database1.getConnection();
      stmt1 = con1.createStatement();
      // obtain con2 object and set it up for transactions
      con2 = database2.getConnection();
      stmt2 = con2.createStatement();
      //
      // Now do a transaction that involves con1 and con2.
      //
      // start the transaction
      ut.begin();
      // Do some updates to both con1 and con2. The container
      // automatically enlists con1 and con2 with the transaction. stmt1.executeQuery(...);
      stmt1.executeUpdate(...);
      stmt2.executeQuery(...);
      stmt2.executeUpdate(...);
      stmt1.executeUpdate(...);
      stmt2.executeUpdate(...);
      // commit the transaction
      ut.commit();
      // release connections
      stmt1.close();
      stmt2.close();
      con1.close();
      con2.close();
}
... }

public void someMethod() throws SQLException, NotSupportedException,
  SystemException, SecurityException, IllegalStateException,
  RollbackException, HeuristicMixedException,
  HeuristicRollbackException {

@Stateless
@TransactionManagement(TransactionManagementType.BEAN)
public class MySessionBean {
  @Resource
  javax.transaction.UserTransaction ut;
  @Resource
  javax.sql.DataSource database1;
  @Resource
  javax.sql.DataSource database2;

  public void someMethod() throws SQLException, NotSupportedException,
      SystemException, SecurityException, IllegalStateException,
      RollbackException, HeuristicMixedException,
      HeuristicRollbackException {
    java.sql.Connection con1 = null;
    java.sql.Connection con2 = null;
    java.sql.Statement stmt1 = null;
    java.sql.Statement stmt2 = null;
    try {

      con1 = database1.getConnection();
      stmt1 = con1.createStatement();

      con2 = database2.getConnection();
      stmt2 = con2.createStatement();

      ut.begin();

      stmt1.executeUpdate("");
      stmt2.executeQuery("");
      stmt2.executeUpdate("");
      stmt1.executeUpdate("");
      stmt2.executeUpdate("");

      ut.commit();
    } finally {
      if (stmt2 != null)
        try {
          stmt2.close();
        } catch (SQLException ex) {
        }
      if (con2 != null)
        try {
          con2.close();
        } catch (SQLException ex) {
        }
      if (stmt1 != null)
        try {
          stmt1.close();
        } catch (SQLException ex) {
        }

      if (con1 != null)
        try {
          con1.close();
        } catch (SQLException ex) {
        }

    }
  }
}

@Stateless
@TransactionManagement(TransactionManagementType.BEAN)
public class MySessionBean {
  @Resource
  javax.transaction.UserTransaction ut;
  @Resource
  javax.sql.DataSource database1;
  @Resource
  javax.sql.DataSource database2;

  public void someMethod() throws Exception {
    java.sql.Connection con1 = null;
    java.sql.Connection con2 = null;
    java.sql.Statement stmt1 = null;
    java.sql.Statement stmt2 = null;
    try {

      con1 = database1.getConnection();
      stmt1 = con1.createStatement();

      con2 = database2.getConnection();
      stmt2 = con2.createStatement();

      ut.begin();

      stmt1.executeUpdate("");
      stmt2.executeQuery("");
      stmt2.executeUpdate("");
      stmt1.executeUpdate("");
      stmt2.executeUpdate("");

    } catch (Exception ex) {
      ut.setRollbackOnly();
      throw ex;
    } finally {
      ut.commit();
      if (stmt2 != null)
        try {
          stmt2.close();
        } catch (SQLException ex) {
        }
      if (con2 != null)
        try {
          con2.close();
        } catch (SQLException ex) {
        }
      if (stmt1 != null)
        try {
          stmt1.close();
        } catch (SQLException ex) {
        }

      if (con1 != null)
        try {
          con1.close();
        } catch (SQLException ex) {
        }

    }
  }
}

• The whole point of transactions is to provide safety if something goes wrong. If you do not commit nor roll back the transaction it will be left in an undefined state and all kinds of things might happen. This is compromising the safety of transactions. So the transactions become more or less useless. You might as well just not use them at all.
• Not closing connections and statements will eventually lead to resource leaks e.g. connection pools running out of connections. This will at one point make the system fail.
• These problems are hard to detect - they will only surface if exceptions are thrown. So finding and eliminating the problem is complex. You should rather get it right from the start.

We quickly setup an Eclipse stand over there and Mike, Andrew and myself are showing demos and talking to people. BTW, thanks to the FOSDEM organizer to have it well prepared so that we just needed to setup our banner and our notebooks for the demos.

So far we have a great mixture of questions from developers using Eclipse for their day-to-day work, programming questions of Eclipse plug-in developers and people interested in Orion. There are also people stepping by that have no questions – they introduce themselves as happy Eclipse users and appreciate what the committers of the various projects have built over time. Thanks for those kind words folks!

• an Eclipse stand (K building, first level)
• a talk by Mike Milinkovich entitled “How Eclipse Works” (12:00-12:30 Sunday in the Free Java Devroom, K.4.401)
• a lightning talk by Gunnar Wagenknect entitled “An introduction to EclipseRT” (10:40-10:55 Sunday in the Ferrer room)
• a lightning talk by yours truly entitled “Powerful tools for Linux C/C++ developers based on Eclipse” (11:00-11:15 Sunday in the Ferrer room)
• a lightning talk by Gregoire de Hemptinne entitled “Wazaabi – Model your UI … live” (based on EMF) (18:40-18:55 Saturday in the Ferrer room)

“FOSDEM is the biggest free and non-commercial event organized by and for the community.” There’s no registration required, so if you’re in the area, swing by! There are a lot of people that I’m looking forward to seeing and having a beer with this weekend but I’m especially looking forward to seeing the ever-awesome Alex Kurtakov again and to meeting my new teammate Krzysztof Daniel in person for the first time.

Safe travels and see you in Brussels!

Update: Gregoire de Hemptinne pointed out his talk on an EMF-based declaritive UI system, Wazaabi.

Personally, I think it’s a great choice and a nod to Johannes Kepler.

I also use them to drive PDE Build. Instead of specifying stuff to fetch for a build again I simply point PDE Build to the same .target file I use in the IDE. Works like a charm as long as you only use “Software Sites” (p2 repositories) which are accessible via URL by any developers Eclipse instance as well as the build machine.

Previously, this was implemented by transforming the .target file XML using XSL into an Ant script. The Ant script did a bunch of p2 mirror calls to download the bytes. I recently upgrade to a newer version of the builder containing a Juno version of the org.eclipse.pde.core bundle. Starting with 3.8 this bundle defines a nice Ant task that does not require the XSLT magic.

  
  <pde.provisionTargetDefinition
      targetFile="/path/to/my.target"
      destinationDirectory="${repoBaseLocation}/target"
      clearDestination="false"/>

FOSDEM (Feb. 4 – 5, Brussels, Belgium)

I’ve never been in Brussels before. I’ve also never been at FOSDEM before. Andrew told me about his plan to generate some nice Eclipse buzz there. Well, it looks like that will turn out great. Mike will be there too. We’ll have an Eclipse stand for people to show some projects and talks about Eclipse and we’ll also give a few talks about Eclipse. Mine will be about EclipseRT.

EclipseCon (March 26 – 29, Reston, Virginia, USA)

Ok, this one is a classic (for me). I’ve been there before. You gotta have to be there! However, this year my flight to EclipseCon will be shorter. The event moved from the west coast to the east coast. Frankly, I always wondered about switching location away from Santa Clara. But I’ll also miss San Francisco. It’s a beautiful city always worth a visit. Yet it took me three EclipseCons until I finally visited it in 2009 for the first time. I may need to find a new event in that area.  Anyway, I’ll give one of the many tutorials there (Dynamic Server Applications with EclipseRT).

JAX (April 16-20, Mainz, Germany)

Also bit of a classic, I like that event. It’s packed with lots of sessions and people. I’ll talk about developing cloud applications with Eclipse Gyrex. Our first major version (1.0) is only weeks away and that talk will be a great opportunity to learn more about Gyrex and see how we use it to solve some interesting problems.

Hope to see you soon at any of the events!

• The daily software engineering life - How to be prepared (pdf)

A little history

Introducing Xcode 4

Not so quick…

Circumventing the problem…

SYMROOT = build
OBJROOT = build

…or solving it

$ grep -r SYMROOT ~/Library/Developer 2>/dev/null
$ grep -r SYMROOT ~/Library/Application\ Support/Developer 2>/dev/null
$ grep -r SYMROOT ~/Library/Preferences 2>/dev/null

Binary file ./com.apple.dt.Xcode.plist matches

IDEApplicationwideBuildSettings

    ...
    SYMROOT
    /Users/ds/Documents/cc/SharedBuildOutput
    ...

Success!

• Department Seminars: The daily software engineering life - How to be prepared

There are some interesting options this year, it’s even hard for me to vote:

• Kari: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kari_(moon)
• Kratos: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kratos_(mythology)
• Kepler: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Kepler
• Ketu: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketu_(mythology)
• Koronis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koronis_family
• Kuiper: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuiper_belt

So, please go vote by January 15th, let’s get a name in time for EclipseCon 2012.

It features a short comparison of the current state of frameworks and tools with the Java world, and then focusses on the sudzc open source library that takes a very interesting approach in generating web service client artifacts by transforming the service's WSDL into Objective-C classes using XSL transformations.

The post is available in German as well.

The post is available in both English and German at http://blog.codecentric.de/en/2011/10/why-good-metrics-values-do-not-equal-good-quality.

The precise release version is 1.2.0.201112221803-r

It can be downloaded from the Eclipse Marketplace or the p2 repository.

There’s a lot of new improvements, including better performance and stability. If you’re interested in the details of what’s new, check out the JGit New and Noteworthy and the EGit New and Noteworthy.

We hope you find the release useful and please enjoy the holidays!

http://wagiaalla.com/2011/11/29/analysing-eclipse-build/

I encourage you to read it if you’re interested in the build of the Eclipse SDK.

Thanks to all the presenters, especially those who came from far away, some as far as Ottawa!

• Andrew Robinson from Red Hat on Fedora Packager for Eclipse
• Marcelo Paternostro from Oracle on the Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse and Sapphire
• Brian de Alwis from Manumitting Technologies on e4 and CSS
• Igor Feodorenko from Sonatype on m2e
• Peter Krogh from Oracle (and Ottawa) on EclipseLink
• Wayne Beaton from the Eclipse Foundation (and Ottawa) on Orion

This event featured a trivia contest with questions written by the illustrious Kim Moir and a prize of an Eclipse shirt. Marcelo won but it was a tight race between him, Elliott Baron, and Severin Gehwolf. We also had a delicious 10th birthday cake made by one of Sami Wagiaalla‘s friends who’s starting a cake-making business:

Thanks to all who attended, representing individuals, a variety of companies, and a number of academic institutions. As a few of us said at the end of the evening: see you in six months!

Here’s Frank and Chris speaking about SystemTap

But enough blathering. At FSOSS I presented about using Eclipse for C and C++ development. This wasn’t anything showing groundbreakingly new but a number of attendees told me that they learned something so that’s good. I was unfortunately only able to attend one half day of FSOSS due to work and travel so I only got to see the SystemTap for the cloud talk. SystemTap has tonnes of potential so it’s good to see it being demonstrated to many audiences. It was also great to catch up with John Selmys and hear about his cool work making a Fedora-based live image for Android development. I hope I helped him get onto the right track with using the headless p2 director

The week after FSOSS I was at EclipseCon Europe in Ludwigsburg, Germany. It was my first EclipseCon outside of North America and was an excellent conference as expected. The quality of the talks was great as usual. I gave a few talks:

• a 3.5 hour C/C++ with Eclipse tutorial with Bernhard Merkle
• an update on the Linux Tools project and our short-term plans
• an overview of the IcedTea and IcedTea-Web projects on behalf of my co-worker Deepak Bhole who couldn’t make it

There were some good questions in all three so I hope people gained some knowledge out of attending. As for other sessions, it’s hard to pick highlights but a few I enjoyed were:

• David Cuartielles’ Arduino keynote
• Igor Fedorenko’s Tycho talk
• Volker Simonis’ “How to Contribute to OpenJDK” talk
• Eric Moffatt and Tom Schindl’s Eclipse 4.x talk
• Kim Moir and John Kellerman’s 10 year Eclipse retrospective
• Brian Selic’s Model-Based Software keynote
• Steffen Pingel and Benjamin Muskalla’s Git/Gerrit/Hudson/Mylyn showcase
• Andrew Ross’ Eclipse Long-term Support Initiative discussion
• Simon Kaegi’s Orion and JavaScript at Eclipse talks

The EclipseCon mobile application was very handy so thanks to itemis Mobile and Peter Friese for that. One thing about EclipseCon Europe that’s better than EclipseCon North America is the food. Especially for vegetarians, I found the options to be much better so thanks!

As could have been expected, the biggest impressions I’m left with after attending EclipseCon Europe are a) Eclipse is huge in Europe and b) Europeans love software modelling! By the end of the conference I felt like I was an idiot for not using the powerful modelling tools we have at Eclipse I’ll try to get myself beyond my sticks and stones tools over the next year and if I am lucky enough to attend EclipseCon Europe 2012 maybe I’ll be a member of the cool crowd.

Dart is a good fit for Google App Engine (GAE). Isolates have just one thread - that is also what Google App Engine enforces. That has the advantage that GAE can restart isolates. Isolates can be snapshotted and migrated to other VMs - which is great if you want to react to different load by offloading work from a machine. Isolates can only communicate via ports - that allows you to minimize dependencies to the outside. Again that is great if you want to restart or migrate Isolates. It might also be a way around the limitation that GAE won't allow you to open sockets. Java without Multithreading and without the possibility to open sockets is hard and no fun - and that is why I believe Java on GAE ist not that great. This changes dramatically if you use Dart. So we will see where this is headed. Remember the first days of Java: It was seemingly all about Applets. Now it is all about the server. Technologies might succeed in other areas than originally planned. If you are new to Dart - here is a presentation about Dart:

Google Dart

View more presentations from Eberhard Wolff

' ]]> http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/jandiandme2/~3/1uBdOrpHrnw/random-thought-about-google-dart.html noreply@blogger.com (Eberhard Wolff) Tue, 08 Nov 2011 09:31:55 +0100 Today is the first day of EclipseCon Europe and I’m really looking forward to a short but packed week full of great talks, a birthday party, receptions, hacking sessions and chats with the Eclipse family.

In case you are interested, I’ll give to talks this week. The first one is today in the afternoon and the second one tomorrow.

• Managing large and distributed Eclipse Server Applications
  Wednesday, 17:00, Willhelm-Krämer-Zimmer

• Developing Runtime Applications with Eclipse Gyrex
  Thursday, 15:30, Seminarräume 5

Oh and if you have any questions or just want to chat, feel free to talk to me at EclipseCon!

' ]]> http://wagenknecht.org/blog/archives/2011/11/welcome-to-eclipsecon-europe-2011.html Gunnar Wagenknecht Wed, 02 Nov 2011 08:51:51 +0100 Scala and Spring

View more presentations from Eberhard Wolff

https://github.com/ewolff/scala-spring

' ]]> http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/jandiandme2/~3/XuW0HiA_fF4/spring-and-scala.html noreply@blogger.com (Eberhard Wolff) Tue, 01 Nov 2011 11:15:35 +0100 Show Notes

This episode is a live recording from the Groovy and Grails BOF at SpringOne2GX 2011 in Chicago. Hear from the project leads on the Grails, Groovy and Griffon roadmaps as well as lots of interesting discussion the the Groovy ecosystem and community.

Thanks to all the guys who came out late at night to participate!

Enjoy!

' ]]> http://feeds.grailspodcast.com/~r/grailspodcast/~3/nzIUWQfzePE/250 Glen Smith,Sven Haiges Mon, 31 Oct 2011 07:04:00 +0100


You can find instructions on our Contribute page. Thanks in advance!

Read the full article' ]]> http://www.rssowl.org/node/294 bpasero Sat, 01 Oct 2011 10:25:23 +0200

Show Notes

• Great StackOverflow thread on Best Practices

• Grails Package Naming (Oldy but a Goody)

• SpringOne 2GX (Oct 25-28)

• GR8Conf in Canberra (Nov 15) and OSDC (Nov 16-18)

• Groovy & Grails Exchange 2011 (Dec 8-9)

• Grails Plugin Platform

com.apple.dock.extra.xpc needs to take control of another process for debugging to continue. Type the name and password of a user in the "Developer Tools" group to allow this.

• Interactive Ubiquitous Computing Systems (Albrecht Schmidt, University of Stuttgart)
• Software Analysis as a Service (Harald Gall, University of Zurich)
• Enterprise Architecture (Jörg Koletzki, E.ON IT GmbH)
• Software Performance Engineering in Dynamic Environments (Raffela Mirandola, Politecnico di Milano)
• Balancing Long-Term Research with Industrial Applicability (Magnus Larsson, ABB Corporate Research)

Apple has - as was to be expected - slightly modified the appearance of many Mac OS X controls in 10.7 "Lion". Some of those changes have caused protest and debate around the net, but I believe this is just the same as it is with face-lifted car designs, which means in a few weeks everyone will have gotten used to the new style and consider the previous version old-fashioned.

However, there is one particular little issue that I could tell I would not come to like immediately: The icons - and more importantly the font-size - in the Finder's left hand sidebar is way bigger than it was in Snow Leopard. This makes the source list look much more cluttered in my opinion.

At first, I headed for the Finder's View Options context menu, but there's nothing there to change the sidebars appearance. A little more digging then brought me to the General preference panel in System Preferences (previously called Appearance). There you can make the desired change:

The following pictures show the three choices (Small, Medium, Large) with Medium being the default. Set to Small the Finder looks much friendlier again.

Oh, and while you're at it, you might also want to change Show Scroll Bars setting to When scrolling, instead of Always or Automatically based on input device if you like me sometimes use an older mouse.

Previously on Lost Daniel’s machine

To understand the situation fully, this is what my drive and partition layout used to be:

• 320GB internal hard drive called “Snow Leopard internal”
• 2TB external USB drive
  
  • 500GB partition called “TM500” for Time Machine
  • 1.5TB partition called “TMRest” for media, disk images etc.
• 2x1TB in a Firewire 800 Western Digital MyBook II enclosure, configured as a 1TB RAID1, used for media and VMware instances

The partitioning on the USB drive came about by migrating (cloning) a Time Machine backup from an earlier 500GB ATA drive in an external Firewire enclosure. The enclosure had failed, and as I did not feel like buying a new one for an elderly PATA hard drive, I replaced it with a new USB model, including a 2TB drive. However, I did not want to “waste” the whole new thing for Time Machine. Even with the 500GB drive I had had well over 6 months of backup to go back through, which was more than enough for me. So after transferring the Time Machine data from the old drive to the new bigger one, I set up the remaining 1.5TB as a media partition.

Early signs of trouble

A few weeks ago my iMac’s internal hard disk started failing. It manifested itself a spurious beachballing during random operations, even ones that would not obviously encompass intense disk activity like surfing the web or writing emails. At first I suspected a recent Flash or Adobe Reader updater to be the culprit, because I had had headaches over these before. Only after a few days did I realize that the system was logging disk read errors into the kernel log:

kernel[0]: disk0s2: I/O error.

Googling for that message quickly confirmed my suspicion and revealed that the disk was failing, making it impossible for the OS to function reliably. Fortunately the drive was kind enough to fail slowly, instead of a big bang, with this early warning I could make sure Time Machine had a very recent backup of my data, before shutting down the computer and taking it in for repair.

The old 320GB disk that came with the computer had been working since 2008, and while I would not have minded it living a little longer, this turned out to be a fine opportunity to get some more room to breathe on the internal disk, without having to resort to putting the Movies folder and the iTunes library to an external Firewire drive. So I had the shop install a replacement 2TB disk in place of the faulty stock one.

Room to breathe

Upon return I booted from the Snow Leopard DVD and let the Time Machine restore run. A few hours later I was happy to boot up the Mac as if nothing had changed. Well, almost nothing. For one, applications that had been downloaded from the Internet caused the “This is potentially harmful, because it’s from the Intarweb” confirmation dialog to appear, even though I had run these apps for ages before the restore, but more importantly, the available disk space was about 1.800GB more than before. So far so good.

Happy about the newly won capacity I started moving back the iTunes library from the external drive to the internal one. After that, I began moving several hundred gigs of iMove projects, too.

Remember the backups

When finished copying lots of data - which had taken several hours - it occurred to me that now the 500GB Time Machine partition on the USB drive would be way too small now, even though the system drive was only about half full. I thought about my options for a moment and came up with the idea to reset the Firewire enclosure to work in RAID0 mode, effectively giving me 2TB capacity instead of 1TB with the former RAID1 configuration, and let Time Machine use that volume for backups. Sure, RAID0 increases the chance of fatal failure, but as I also back up my data to Carbonite, I figured this would be an acceptable risk.

I would then reformat the 2TB USB attached drive as a single large partition for miscellaneous use.

Lots of copying and moving

Because of the upcoming repartitioning and reformatting I had to do a lot of shuffling around the remaining 1.000GB of data that was still lying partially on any of the three external drive partitions. This is when I realized that hard drives may have grown in size, but they have not grown in speed nearly as much. Even without the bottlenecks of Firewire 800 and USB2.0 copying around a TB of data will take an uncomfortable amount of time, even with directly attached SATA drives and sequential access. For example, assuming a (very optimistic) average speed of 60MB/s which I could get from the FW800 drive to the internal volume, moving 1TB (which is approximately 1.000.000MB will still take at least 4.5 hours. With USB 2.0 you can feel lucky if you get half the speed on average, easily doubling that time.

So over the course of three days I moved several TBs of data between the drives, partitioning and formatting in between. At last I ended up with this setup:

• 2TB internal hard drive called “Snow Leopard internal”
• 2TB external USB drive, called “USB2MEDIA”
• 2x1TB in FW 800 MyBook II enclosure, configured as 2TB RAID0, called “TM2TBR0”

It would have been easier, had I not wanted to keep my 6 months of Time Machine backup history intact. Even though I have rarely needed it, I tend to rather err on the side of caution. Without that and the accompanying limitations with regards to what could be moved where and repartitioned how and when, I could probably have saved one or two large copy jobs.

Caught my mistake?

As I said earlier, after a few days and nights of shifting large amounts of data over way to narrow bandwidth channels, I was now sitting in front of my target configuration. Extra points to anyone who has caught my little oversight that made all this was somewhat in vain. The rest of you would probably have been just a confused as I have when I entered Time Machine for the first time after that, just to see that my backup history had shrunk down to only 2 weeks after all.

Turns out, I was a little too happy about all the space I had won on the internal drive - so I did not remember to turn off Time Machine after the first boot into the new system. Instead, I started importing all sorts of large media files from the external disks to the internal one. While I was doing so, Time Machine dutifully kicked in, noticed a lot of new material and started backing that up to the still 500GB volume. And because of all the new data and the much too small target drive, it did the only thing it could, remove old backups to make room for the new stuff.

In essence, I had lost my 6 months worth of history even before I came up with my elaborate (?) data moving and migration scheme…

So what?

Well, in the end I did not really lose anything very important - all my current files and some history are still there. Should I find out a day from now that I need to get back a version of a file from 6 months ago, I may be out of luck, but that’s about it. However, I am fairly sure this will not happen to me again, shouldwhen the next hard drive failure strikes. And now that you have made it through this text desert, maybe it won’t happen to you, at all :)

Eclipse Demo Camp Jena
June 22nd, 5pm
JenTower, floor 27, room Hamburg

Yes, on the day of Indigo GA!

Interested? Register today and we’ll see us next Wednesday. I think there is still room for one or two interesting demos. Thus, if you are developing some cool Eclipse technology or product that you’d like to showcase just add it to the list on the registration page.

See you there!

It is very well possible that in the future there might be more posts there than here, but I will make sure there are links posted to this blog. Please note, that the JMeter article is available in both English and German.

Once again we are organizing an Eclipse Demo Camp in Jena.

Jena, June 22nd, 2011

If you’d like to attend or present please don’t hesitate to contact me or add yourself to the wiki page!

However, one thing has been bothering me for some time now, and I did not know if it was me getting older, or if really something had changed with the OS.

Long Audio Files

One of the main purposes the iPod has for me is listening to podcasts and audio books. With these I tend to almost enjoy my commutes. But also when doing chores around the house or at the gym my (now 4th gen) iPod Touch is a trusty companion.

Nevertheless, in recent times I got annoyed regularly when trying to pause playback and resume later from the lock screen. I am not sure if this was possible with the first versions of iOS - when it was still called iPhone OS - but it feels that this feature has been there forever: Double click the Home button when the lock screen is up, and you get playback controls in the upper third of the screen. This always worked perfectly for me, but in the past couple of months I have regularly hit the skip back or forward buttons by accident. When you are in the middle of a 3 hour podcast or a 12 hour audio book, jumping back to the beginning and having no idea how far exactly you had already got into it, this can be rather unnerving.

Getting old and clumsy?

I did not know what caused this. At first, I thought I was just a little more clumsy than usual, but this happened time and again. So finally I asked my book writing partner in crime Udo to please take a screenshot of the playback controls on his 2G model which still had iOS 3.1.3 on it. This is his screenshot:

Looks normal, doesn’t it? But somehow different than 4.2.1:

As is clearly visible in the direct comparison, the skip buttons have been moved much closer to the center button for play and pause, apparently to make room for additional controls, as can be seen here:

Small change - big impact

This seemingly minor change has proven to be a real pain in the neck for me. I have heard from other people complaining about their accidental hitting the skip buttons, too. In my opinion this is a classic case of feature creep: Over time more and more options get added to what was initially a well designed and carefully layed out design, effectively making it more feature rich, but also less usable. I am sure the people at Apple who designed this were aware of the implications, but probably they thought it was still just usable enough to do it this way instead of adding another row for the additional buttons.

So now I know it is not me somehow losing precision with my tapping on the screen, but an actual software change that works against me in this case.

Feature creep

There are other instances where adding new features to an already polished system adversely affects its ease of use and works against the proverbial magic like simplicity in handling Apple devices. One example would be the multi-tasking on recent iOS versions. Its quick task switcher is brought up by double-clicking the home button. This is a completely counterintuitive gesture in my opinion, not even mentioning the fine differences between switching and closing apps by “deleting” them from the switcher bar.

Another case of increasingly bad UI is the much criticized notification system. Originally it was just used for very few types of alerts and informational popups. Nowadays every app is free to push modal popups right in your face. When it was initially designed I am sure one of the key assumptions was that there would be a very limited number of these very disruptive alert boxes. Over time it became (ab)used for a lot more, which turned its simplicity from a strength to a weakness.

What’s next?

In my opinion Apple has to rethink a lot of aspects in iOS. When it first came out Steve Jobs said it was “at least 5 years ahead of the competition”. It is 2011 now, almost 4 years into iOS’ life, and Android, Windows Phone 7 and most recently webOS are coming on strong, running circles around iOS in some areas. While I am still not yet sold on my company Android phone I have to admit the platform has its strong points, and iOS could definitely use some of its features. However, I would rather not have them if Apple’s adding them to one of the next versions of their mobile OS meant they would be bolted on to the existing UI concepts without some serious rethinking.

• The GR8Conference home page 

Our three hours tutorial will introduce you to the key concepts for developing web applications with the OSGi HttpService, the Equinox ServletBridge and Virgo. Virgo is new this year and we are happy to have Glynn and Christopher joining us and talking a bit about Virgo.

We’ll also have a great set of exercises. Thus, please bring your laptops with you and make sure its battery is loaded. All you need is a vanilla Eclipse SDK 3.7 M6 and a JDK on your system. But don’t worry we’ll also have a way to distribute the necessary pieces on site.

Monday, March 21st, 9am
EclipseCon 2011, Ballroom A

See you there!

If you are a committer you are able to vote! If you haven’t received a mail with your voting password yet please have a look at this mail which was sent to the committer mailing list. It explains how to register as a full member with a few steps. Basically you need to sign the membership agreement and fax it to the Foundation’s office. There is still time! Voting ends on March 11, 2011 at 3pm Eastern time.

I think the most interesting challenges for the upcoming term are Git and Gerrit. There is still a significant amount of code in CVS and quite a few projects are planning to switch after the Indigo release. Now Gerrit is interesting. There’s a really good description and a screencast written/created by Alex available. Very good read and watch. It really has some benefits and potential for an important role in managing source contributions to Eclipse projects. I think it’s clear that with Git the current way of handling patches through Eclipse Bugzilla doesn’t scale. So we have to find a good story for integrating Gerrit into the Eclipse IP process. But frankly, I don’t see IPzilla go away anytime soon. There is still the whole management of 3rd party dependencies which is well implemented there. Of course, there is always room for improvement (even outside of IPzilla).

On the other hand, Gerrit is a new tool that needs to be dealt with by the Eclipse webmasters. Once it is an essential part of the Eclipse development infrastructure it needs to be governed with SLAs (which basically translates to manpower). Thus, this effort must be supported by the Board which I hope to drive forward when I’m elected as one of your representatives.

This is part five of an ongoing series about my experiences while writing the MySQL Admin Cookbook for Packt Publishing. All previous parts can be found under the mysql-admin-cookbook label.

After the initial discussions about the book’s outline which I described in part 2 of this series were underway, talks about the actual writing contract started. Naturally, neither Udo nor I had any experience with publishing companies and the contracts between them and their authors. Add to that the fact that we are both from Germany and had had little to no experience with English legal stuff of any kind - apart from the usual 5000 pages EULAs you just “agree to” by clicking the “go away” button as quickly as possible - and you will probably understand that we were a little nervous about what we should expect.

Contract outline

On Feb, 27th 2009 we were sent the first draft of our contracts as PDFs via email. It was twelve pages long and was structured as follows.

First, there was a definition of terms to be used throughout the document, clarifying what terms like “Editors”, “Electronic Form”, “Program”, “Rights” and so on were supposed to be understood as in context of the contract.

After that followed a series of paragraphs covering different aspects of the relationship between author and the publishing company. Contained therein were regulations about the writing schedule, copyright, what would happen in case the schedule was not met, about the process of editing, corrections and proofreading, the distribution of the finished book, warranties and payment terms. Moreover there were items about revised later editions of the book, marketing and support, regulations concerning what rights the author would have regarding using materials from the book and in which contexts and how many copies the author would receive for free after publication.

These descriptions were about 7 pages long. All this text seemed to be very much a standard template used for every book of that publisher.

After that followed a more individual part, detailing the exact names and addresses of the contract partners, amount and schedule of advance payments and later royalties depending on book sales and the terms of payment. Moreover the schedule for all the chapters was laid down with due dates for each of them. Since we were writing as co-authors, my contract mentioned only the chapters Udo and I had agreed on to be written by me, his contract naturally covered the other half.

Finally the format we would send our chapters in would be defined as either Microsoft Word Format or Open Office ODT. Graphics were expected in either TIFF or EPS as line drawing, screenshots as PNG or JPG.

Contract Details

Udo and I went through our respective PDFs on our own at first. Once we were through we sat together and compared notes and questions. There were quite a few points we were immediately sure and in agreement about - even though it was our first publishing contract - that could not be accepted from our side. Not yet knowing how much of a problem changing those would be for the publisher we agreed unanimously that should they not be possible to change we would not go ahead and abandon the whole project.

I will not go into extensive detail here, but let me just mention some parts we were not willing to sign as they were:

• a phrase about liability in case the author(s) were to miss the schedule
• a phrase which would make the author(s) responsible for anything in the book being “unlawful”, or “infringing on the copyrights of any third party”
• a phrase coming down to a guarantee that nothing written in the book would cause any data loss or other damage to users’ data as a result of following instructions in the book.
• a phrase that would require the author(s) to fully indemnify the Publisher fully against all losses, damages and costs, including any sums paid to settle claims, arising out of the breach of one of those warranties.

These terms would have - in the worst case - meant an incalculable legal risk to us. We suggested adding “to the best of the authors’ knowledge” as a limiting clause to all of the above items.

The only other “major” issue for us was an early termination clause from the authors’ side. The original contract proposal only had a provision for the publishing company to terminate the contract for certain reasons before the book would be finished. No such regulations was contained in the contract, for example in case of a severe illness or other personal events that would prohibit us from finishing up the writing.

All other terms were mostly fine with us, even though we, of course, had several detail questions about individual pieces. Those were all answered comprehensively and mostly met what we already had expected.

We offered to waive any advance payments in return for the addition of an early termination option from our side, assuming that this might be a problem for the publisher otherwise. Moreover we were looking at the whole project mostly from a curiosity and “new experience” type of view. None of us had any expectations or hopes to earn a lot of money, so we were quite ready to be paid on after actual copies of the finished book had been sold.

Publisher’s reaction

We had feared that we would be getting into some sort of lenghty discussion with the publisher about the changes we wanted to make to the contract, assuming that the initial version they had sent us was something that had been carefully designed and worked out by their legal team and was not subject to change very much.

Much to our surprise, however, all the changes we requested were applied without any further ado. We received a new version of the contract some time after we had sent out our feedback. In that new revision the first issue mentioned in the list above (liabilities in case of schedule missed) was deleted completely - we had merely asked for a clarification about what would be considered a “miss”.

The “to the best of the author’s knowledge” clause was added without further discussion to all the paragraphs we had asked for. Only in one case had there been a little misunderstanding as to how we wanted a particular sentence to be phrased, but that was fixed very quickly, too.

Once we had the proposed final contract in our hands, we let Udo’s sister, who is a lawyer, have another look at it and make sure we had not missed anything important. Once she gave her ok, we could sign the paper copies and send them back to the UK, starting the actual writing.

After the fact

Apparently the first contract draft was not as binding from the publisher’s side, as we had initially expected. We were somewhat nervous about the amount of discussion we would get ourselved into when proposing changes to it, that is why we were willing to give up the advance payments. Turns out that would not have been necessary at all. Some time after we had finished the book I heard - by pure coincidence - several people in podcasts and on the net claiming that one should never ever accept the first draft of any author contract. Judging from the very first and only one I read and having statements like this from experienced authors, I tend to agree :)

So if you are currently - or in the future - in contact with a publisher, I suggest you take a close look at their proposed contract and contact them about anything that is unclear. Ask questions and do not hesitate to demand changes whereever you do not like something about it or consider it too one-sided. I do not mean you should be needlessly aggressive, but in the end this is about what you will be investing a considerable amount of time and work into for the next several months, if not more, so I recommend being frank and not shy when it comes to the legal document covering that.

Ok, there are some things I installed to make the base system a little more comfortable, e. g. by installing Better Touch Tool or iStat Menus which allow for better leveraging of available hardware features. But other than that - I haven’t made up my mind about TextExpander yet - there is little left to be desired.

Except: File and window management… Say what you will about Windows, but one are where it still runs circles around stock Snow Leopard is window and file management. Aero Peek - docking Windows to the screen edges and having them become exactly half the screen size - is a welcome addition to BTT, and Exposé is also usable. But still, the Windows explorer IMHO is still a better file manager than the Finder.

I cannot even tell you the exact details of what I am missing, but the fact alone that there is no default system shortcut like Win+E which brings up a new Explorer/Finder window is a major downside of the Mac OS.

Quite recently, however, I came across TotalFinder in some podcast (sorry, cannot really remember, might have been Bits und so) and gave it a try. It’s author Antonin Hildebrand took the open source code that is used in Google’s Chrome browser to implement the tabs and put together a nice little piece of software that pimps your Goold-Ole-Finder.

There are lots of features, the primary one being the addition of said tabs to regular Finder windows, which itself already helps to tame the window clutter you normally end up with when using the Finder. Basically, when TotalFinder is installed, instead of opening a new window for each directory you want to use, a new tab is added to the last Finder window that was opened. Of course, you can still have multiple windows, and you can even tear off existing tabs and spawn them into new windows that way, just as you can do with websites in Chrome.

But my favorite feature of all is what Antonin calls the Visor: A configurable hot key slides up a (optionally multi-tabbed) Finder window from the bottom of your screen - similar to the way the iPhone brings up the keyboard. It works just like any other (Total)Finder window and automatically disappears once it loses focus or you hit the escape key (also configurable). IMHO this is insanely useful, because you never have to worry about filling up your desktop with countless Finder instances - they are all nicely kept in tabs, out of sight by default but just a single keystroke away and all at your disposal at the same time. This alone would be a great tool already.

But there’s still more… If you are like me, you like the classic two-column file manager paradigm of Directory Opus or Norton Commander fame, depending on which platform you grew up on. TotalFinder has that, too. Although it does not always work perfectly, probably because it has to be a rather hacky way to integrate this into the OS, I still find the “Dual Mode” a cool feature. It just splits a Finder window, including the Visor, in half vertically and mirrors the source list on both sides. That way you can easily choose two directories to be visible at the same time and move or copy files between them without switching windows or tabs. This, too, is just a shortcut away.

All in all, after two weeks of trying it for 8 to 10 hours a day on my MacBook Pro without a single crash, I can wholeheartedly recommend total finder. And prices between $10 and $15 should not really cause you much trouble, either. Depending on what you like, this is less than one or two iPad games - but TotalFinder is just so much more useful :)

There is also a way to launch them. However, what always bothered me was that this was just a fake application launch. You had to use the product editor all the time to keep the launch configs in sync. But over time I noticed some issues. Sometimes, when updating target platforms, something gets out of sync, features will be missing, whatever. Your launch is broken and the guys start to line up next to my desk.

Hmm, wouldn’t it be nice to just launch products all the time and have them 100% like they should be all the time including automatic validation of missing features (even included once) and plug-ins?

Oh yes! If you need this, just install my Patches for PDE (via Help -> Install New Software…). I published a new version in my repository (http://eclipseguru.org/). The relevant patch is attached to bug 326059.

Julius Wagenknecht
2010-09-04 03:40 UTC
49cm, 3090g

At 5:40am local time my wife gave birth two our second child. It’s one of those few things that are way better than Open Source. They are both healthy. We spent most of the day together and began enjoying our new life as “party of four”.

Picture below.

• Until 1987, I primarily used a VMS system.
• In 1987, I switched to a Unix machine at MIT. I was able to import my old VMS mail into whatever the mailbox format of the day was (mbox, probably) by a script I found somewhere.
• In 1992, I switched to using POP through the client program Eudora. Eudora stored the mail locally, in a folder format that was something like 'mbox', but not exactly. (For example, attachments were not stored inlined, but instead in external files.) I managed to import my old Unix mbox files into folders.
• In 2004, I switched from POP to IMAP. I went through an extensive process to convert my existing mail base into real mbox files that my IMAP server could read. I spent several days writing scripts to convert the Eudora pseudo-mbox files to something imapd could handle.
• In 2006, I left Quiotix, and switched my primary mail over to Tuffmail. I took my mail archive (in mbox file format) and put it up on my server machine, and serve that up with imapd. So I now have my mail split between two servers, but Thunderbird can deal with multiple servers just fine. I tried to move the archived mail to Tuffmail as well with several different tools (imapsync, offlineimap, Thunderbird bulk-copy) but I could never get a clean copy -- I suspect that the combination of crappy old multiply-converted mbox files and the old UW-IMAPD server is to blame.

Right now its still fragmented across a number of formats and servers. Yuck.

This is a nice little book about the history of mathematics and the 350-year quest for the proof to Fermat's Last Theorem.  It was written by the fellow who wrote the BBC / Nova TV special on Andrew Wiles, but includes a lot more information than a one-hour show could.  It does a nice job at hitting many of the high points of mathematical development from Pythagoras to modern day, including the "discovery" of zero, then negative numbers, then imaginary numbers, techniques for grappling with infinity, Turing-computability, and Godel's incompleteness theorem.  It doesn't attack any of these in great depth, but it does provide a nice historical perspective while remaining about as accurate as a lay book can do.  It also does a nice job of illustrating the near-hubris required for Wiles to lock himself in a closet for eight years in order to solve a problem that had eluded mathematicians for centuries.  Mathematicians will enjoy the panorama; non-mathematicians will likely find the introduction to some of these obscure concepts accessible and enjoyable.   Also by this author: The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography .

(Recommended to me by: Stuart Marks.)

Unfortunately, the state requires all newly install water heaters to have a thermostatic mixing valve that limits the water temperature to 120 degrees.  (For tank systems, it is recommended to keep the tank water at 140, to prevent the bacteria that causes Legionnaire's disease, but 140 is hot enough to scald.  But continuous systems have a control system for the output temperature, so can be safely kept at whatever temperature you program in.)  And its probably not even working right, since the output temperature is even less than 120.  The valve adds cost to the system and to the installation (probably a dozen additional welds in addition to the valve), and while we now have an infinite supply of hot water, generated more efficiently, its not as hot as we like it. 

Reputable plumbers are not able to remove or bypass the valve, which means we need to either find a disreputable plumber or I need to do it myself (read: find an incompetent plumber.) 

Note to lawmakers: in my many years of successful shower use, I've learned a secret trick to avoid getting scalded: put your hand under the water first -- if its too hot, turn down the water temperature before getting in!

Thanks, elected officials, for making my house systems both more expensive and less useful. 

You can download the Ruby gem here: http://github.com/briangoetz/ztunes/downloads.  (It is not currently in any sort of gem repository.)  It defines its gem dependencies, but you'll also need the Unix tools ffmpeg, flac, and lame.  It will run on Linux and Mac but currently has some trouble on Windows since it is dependent on symbolic links for some of its functionality, which Windows doesn't support.

My motivation for writing this was that iTunes is really inadequate for managing a media library unless (a) you only want to play on iPod (or other Apple) devices and (b) you are willing to let iTunes be in control of ripping and encoding.  This didn't work for us for two reasons: we have Squeezeboxes on all the stereos, and I want to rip my CDs to a non-proprietary, lossless format (that means flac, which iTunew doesn't support.)  We also have music that has been aquired in various other forms (MP3s from Amazon, AAC from iTunes, WMA from Rhapsody) and want to be able to play all the music on all the devices, without transcoding it all down to a least-common-denominator.  (In other words, if Squeezebox supports WMA but iPod doesn't, let Squeezebox play off the original WMA but let iPod play the transcoded version.)  And this should be transparent to the rest of the family.

There are several basic tasks in managing the media library that zTunes automates:

• Content ingestion.  I've got a "drop" folder, into which I want to drop the originals of my media, in whatever form, and have them be analyzed, metadata extracted, and filed into a unified library based on its metadata.  My metaphor here is the gas tank of an M1 tank: you can pour anything combustible (gasoline, jet fuel, diesel, used cooking oil) into the tank and it figures out how to burn it.  Currently it maps a media file to a filename by using the author/album/title tags for audio or the title tag for video; audio files are named like "The Who/Who Are You/Squeezebox.flac". 
• Transcoding.  Not all devices play all device types.  So ingested content also needs to be transcoded into alternate formats, which are maintained as parallel directory trees.  The transcoded trees are transient; they are merely shadows of the "authoritative" tree.  Some files may need be transcoded to multiple formats; for example, video files ripped from DVD or transferred from TiVo might be transcoded to 480 x 320 video for iPhone but 320 x 240 for the older video iPods. 
• Syncing.  I use the Windows program "Tag&Rename" to edit the metadata tags on my media files, to normalize genres, naming details like "The Cars" vs "Cars, The", "Vol 1" vs "Disk Two", etc.  When I edit the metadata on an "original" file, I'd like the file to be renamed accordingly, and metadata changes to be reflected in the transcoded copies.  When I delete an original, I want the transcoded copy to go away.  Etc.
• Device management.  I would like to have a single directory for each device type, that I can point device-specific library management software (iTunes, Squeezecenter, Creative Explorer) at, and it will see the right view of the media library for that device (will only see files it can play; will see them in the "best" format available for that device.) 

One thing it does not do yet is manage the integration of your external media library into iTunes (iTunes is particularly bad at dealing with files you didn't acquire through iTunes.) 

See more in the README file here: http://github.com/briangoetz/ztunes/blob/master/README

I'm currently using this to manage a library of ~8,000 media files in half a dozen formats.  I'd love to get some more users -- drop me a note if you're interested! 

The motivation to rewrite my digital-media scripts came from having too many conversations like the one below with Stuart Marks:

SM: Hey, you wrote a bunch of scripts to manage audio and video files, are you willing to share them?
BG: Well, in theory, yes.  But I'm kind of embarassed to show them to anyone...
SM: Let me guess.  Perl?
BG: Yep.
SM: I have a Perl story...
BG: Don't bother -- all Perl stories end the same way.

I'll post the full details soon -- including links to the software on github -- but for now I'll just outline the problem I was trying to solve:

• Ingest digital media files in any format (MP3, AAC, WMA, WAV, FLAC, M4A, M4V, WMV, MP4, etc)
• File them into a library based on their metadata
• Additionally transcode them down to one or more "compressed" formats (MP3 for audio, iPhone-sized Mp4 for video) for memory-constrained devices, without letting go of the original
• Organize them so that each device (iPod, Squeezebox, non-iPod MP3 player) can play all the media, in the best format that the device can recognize natively (Squeezebox supports MP3, WMA, and FLAC; iPod supports MP3 and AAC; Zen supports MP3 and WMA) or a transcoded form if it can't.  For example, for a given track whose source form is WMA, Squeezebox and Zen should see the WMA but iPod should see the MP3; for a track in FLAC, Squeezebox should see the FLAC but iPod/Zen should see the transcoded MP3. 

• Get an IDE-USB adapter, put the old disk on that, put the new disk in the machine, boot from a Linux CD, and use dd to copy the data;


• Get a pair of 40 pin to 44 pin IDE adapters, put them in a desktop system, and copy using PartitionMagic (Windows) or dd (Linux);


• Find a dual-drive 44 pin IDE cable, plug both drives in, and hope that the OS / BIOS recognizes both disks;


• Just reinstall Windows and whatever apps I have on the new drive (including chasing down all the device drivers, such as the touch pad, speakers, etc)

• 1443 Declarative UI sucks? Create your own!
  
• 1480 Extensible EMF Switches
  
• 1483 Annoyed by all those similar looking interfaces: IMemento, IConfigurationElement, IPreferenceStore, IDialogSettings, ILaunchConfiguration...
  
• 1484 JFace/SWT Tables turned upside down
  

Michael Scharfs Eclipse and Java Blog http://MichaelScharf.blogspot.com/

Download/update

Functionality

• When you go to Window->Customize Perspective->Tool Bar Visibility, you will not find the Fullscreen tool bar unless you have enabled it in Window->Customize Perspective->Command Groups Availability
  
  
• The Toolbar details are empty, although the toolbar contains a command:
  

Michael Scharfs Eclipse and Java Blog http://MichaelScharf.blogspot.com/

• There is a big danger that a great technology gets a "bad reputation", just because "normal users" want to apply it and they find it the technology incredibly hard to learn and to apply.
  
• As expert user, you can cause a lot of damage it you tell some unexperienced users to use a technology without guiding them. And in some cases it might be better to tell them not to use the technology if they are not "ready". For you it might be the right choice, for them it would cause disasters at all levels.
  
• Learning "complicated" technologies might not be worth the effort if you want to apply it once.
  
• Ask yourself if it is more efficient to hire an expert than to learn the technology. Especially if you want to apply the technology only once in a relatively simple way. In this case the expert can be 10-100 times more efficient than you.
  
• If you are a normal user and you still want to learn the technology, be prepared that is takes time and it is a painful process. In order to make educated decisions you have to become at least "Competent" (see the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition) or needs "Conscious competence" (see Four stages of competence).
  
• Maybe expert user and normal user should team up to write documentation and create example. For experts it is often very difficult to understand the problems of normal users and for normal users it is impossible to come up with good examples and documentation.
  

Michael Scharfs Eclipse and Java Blog http://MichaelScharf.blogspot.com/

• In the mid 80ies when I started with object oriented programming. For procedural programmers (modula2/pascal/C/Fortran) it sounded like a lot of buzzwords and seemed to add no real value...
  
• End of 80ies and in the beginning of the 90ies (before the GOF book was out), patterns seemed to be quite fuzzy and it was hard to explain what the value of describing "patterns" is.
  
• Around the same time I discovered scripting languages (starting with (g)awk->TCL->perl and ending with python, which I used for a decade). It was hard to motivate why those "slow" languages are in any way useful.
  
• Aspect oriented programming is still in the "hard to explain/motivate" phase.
  

Michael Scharfs Eclipse and Java Blog http://MichaelScharf.blogspot.com/

• Create an eclipse freeloader award
  
• Have an "eclipse supporter" logo
  
• Have a list of of freeloaders prominently on the eclipse page
  
• Create an eclipse pillroy

Michael Scharfs Eclipse and Java Blog http://MichaelScharf.blogspot.com/

1. I start eclipse with:

   -configuration C:\eclipse\extensions\foo\eclipse\configuration

   
   
2. I install foo using the update manager.
   
   
3. Now I can use the extension by creating a foo.link file inside the links directory of an eclipse installation (you might have to create the links directory) containing:

   path=C:/eclipse/extensions/foobar

   
   

C:\eclipse\extensions\bar\eclipse\links\foo.link

Michael Scharfs Eclipse and Java Blog http://MichaelScharf.blogspot.com/

• http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pecha_Kucha
• http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/magazine/15-09/st_pechakucha
  

We're sorry bur we are unable to process your request at this time
 A general application failure has been detected.

   wir sind, die aber traurig sind, wir sind nicht imstande, Ihren Antrag diesmal zu verarbeiten.
 Ein allgemeiner Anwendung Ausfall ist ermittelt worden.

Update your links (if so inclined) to the new site and we'll see you over there!

Bundles in S3 based bundle repository:

OSGi profile editor:

There are two short screencasts that show how RAP (Reach Ajax Platform), plain old JSP example, and Spring based remote service (Spring + Spring DM for OSGi) can be deployed to EC2.

The products are ready, the demo-versions online and the business-plan written. We are already talking to media partners and customers here in Germany (although world-domination has been written into the business plan).

Our ideal partner will have an online-mobile-media-publishing background and understand both online and traditional print and broadcasting markets.

Sounds like something you may be interested in hearing more about - then tell me why we should be sending you the details and letting you take a look at what we've been cooking!

Apart from selling the domain - I'd also be open to discussing any ideas you may have around what a lifefeed application should look like today. I guess the original idea is now somewhat passé as things like FriendFeed gain traction.

• Build that Life Feed - Now that FriendFeed is all the rage and you're building the next killer feed application - how about owning the "feed of your life" or lifefeed.com
• Open Source fans out there may be interested in sourcecrossing.com or sourcexing.com or opensourcecast.com
• Cooking geeks may be interested in geekskitchen.com

Actually, what is the best way to sell a domain nowadays? Any recommendations?

OSGi on EC2 video presentation

For those who do not know what EC2 is: it is a very cool service coming from Amazon. It allows users to start virtual servers within it's "Elastic Compute Cloud". Compared to traditional server hosting, Compute Cloud allows you to scale your capacity according to your demands. By running servers in the cloud, you can avoid initial expenses of buying new hardware and such. Another attractive feature - you do not have to sign up for any long term contracts (which is usually almost always the case in Germany).

Amazon will charge you on "pay for what you use" basis. Their current prices start from 10 cents per instance hour plus some additional traffic fees.

In my opinion, this is a very good option to host Java based services. What makes it even better option is that hosting services with high quality Java support are usually expensive hard to find.

One evening we were relaxing in the sun when we saw someone pushing a very large John Deere tractor-lawnmower (like one of these) along the main road between the two villages on the island. I jokingly asked if he had run out of petrol - and that is how we came to meet Holger.

Holger was born on the island of Baltrum and works half-days delivering crates of drinks to the various holiday homes and flats on Baltrum. Because there are no motorized vehicles, Holger rides round on his bike towing a trailer with the crates perched on the trailer. A common form of heavy-goods transport on the island.

Holger spends the other half of the day (during the Summer) mowing lawns and the larger grassy areas with his petrol powered John Deere lawnmower. Once on the lawn, Holger is in his element - he fires up the tractor-lawnmower and off he goes.

However, whenever Holger "meets" a road or other public path, he has to turn off the lawnmower and push it over the road to the next piece of grass. He is not allowed to drive over or along any public path without first getting a permit. Getting a permit means ringing up the police and requesting explicit permission to drive over (or up) the path he wants to take. So, due to this hassle, Holger resorts to pushing his John Deere over the island or hitching a tow from one of the many horse carriages.

Holger also introduced us to the concept of "extreme shopping" whereby a group of people from the island will catch the ferry over to the mainland, make a rush for the nearest town, split up to access different shops in parallel and then make a speedy dash back for the next ferry back to the island. Because the ferry only runs 2-3 times a day, there isn't much room for timing mistakes.

During the hour we chatted, Holger gave us some really good insight into the life on an island. Strangely attractive actually.

Recently, I arranged for Alfresco to do a presentation and it went really well. Robin Yellow attended and gives his impressions. John Powell CEO of Alfresco did the talk and gives some feedback (and a plug for yours truly).

I recently attended a meeting with a major oil company and they had engaged the services of Indiginox, an OS consulting company, who focus on advising large enterprise on the viability and pros and cons of different OS projects.

We actually do quite a bit more than that (e.g. authoring and establishing policies and guidance, researching and authoring specific enterprise relevant topics around Open Source, establishing and management of internal Open Source communities and much more). If you're interested in just what we do - then take a look at the Indiginox Enterprise Open Source offer.

It is a Eclipse plugin (can also work as a standalone application), that makes work with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) a bit more comfortable. This is a first beta, but we will keep on working to extend and improve the software.

It is free for any kind of use. You can downloaded it from the Cloud Services site, or install it with Eclipse update manager from http://www.service-cloud.com/studio/update/

Here is a screenshot (click to see more):

Tags: OpenESB

Tags: glassfish_de

Jacquie Langham qualified as a teacher of Art and Craft at Bretton Hall. Alongside her teaching career here and in Germany, she developed as a mural and portrait artist. She and her late husband held exhibitions and opened a Gallery in Germany, showing their paintings, ceramics and jewellery. They lived and worked there for 17 years and their paintings can be seen in private collections, worldwide.

Since returning to this country, Jacquie has continued to paint portraits on commission, until quite recently, when she started to work with acrylics for the first time and became excited by the medium, producing unusual and vivid images of chillis, peppers and other vegetables. She is, at present, exploring dramatic and colourful aspects of other familiar images.

Makes me really proud to be able to point to her work and I hope you'll check out the the site for more - and larger pictures!

My focus hasn't been on implementing a software project but on authoring an internal Open Source strategy whitepaper and establishing things like an Open Source policy and Open Source guidance or setting up an Open Source internal community within said BigCo.

Seeing the growing interest for Open Source within the corporation gives me some real satisfaction and in a way it shows that jumping into the - then - icy cold Open Source business "water" back in 2000 was one of the best decisions I ever made.

Another blog post - I'm sure this is just a fad.

GlassFish v2 - also known officially as Sun Java System Application Server 9.1 - is finally released today!

You can get from here or here

If you are new to GlassFish here are some of the feature highlights:

• Full Java EE 5 Support


• Profile support: Developer, Cluster and Enterprise Profiles


• Clustering and failover support


• New in memory replication for failover more


• Java Business Integration support


• Easy to use intuitive admin console


• Performance!


• and much more - See Eduardo's writeup

You can read more about this exciting release as usually on the
aquarium

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1. Zielgruppe: Wem möchte ich etwas sagen?
   
2. Inhalt: Was möchte ich den Leuten sagen?
3. Methode: Wie möchte ich den Leuten das sagen?

1. Zielgruppe: Wem möchte ich etwas sagen?
   
2. Inhalt: Was möchte ich den Leuten sagen?
3. Methode: Wie möchte ich den Leuten das sagen?

• Minimize ammout of code that has to deal with concurrency
• use immutable objects wherever you can
• sometimes it's cheaper to share

• Minimize ammout of code that has to deal with concurrency
• use immutable objects wherever you can
• sometimes it's cheaper to share

• Download GlassFish V2 beta2 (eg build 41c) from here
  
• Execute java -jar glassfish-installer-v2-.jar
• As we will have to use the cluster profile edit setup-cluster.xml as needed. If the default ports and passwords are ok for you there is no need to change anything. (I assume default settings for the next steps)
  
• Execute ant -f setup-cluster.xml and a GlassFish domain with its domain administration server is created for you.
• Start your domain admin server by executing asadmin start-domain --user admin and verify that its up and running by accessing the admin gui at http::4848
• Next you have to create a node-agent. Node agents are responsible for communication between you domain admin server and server instances or clusters. You create a node agent be executing asadmin create-node-agent . If you don't specify a node agent name the hostname if your system will be used. If you create your node agent on a different server you also have to specify host/port information for your domain admin server by giving --host --port to asadmin
• Fire up your node agent by asadmin start-node-agent
• Next look at your admin console. Your node agent should show up as running.

Step 2: Setup a GlassFish V2 cluster

Setting up a cluster means that we are going to define a cluster configuration that is shared among multiple instances. To create a cluster proceed this way in the admin gui:

• Select Clusters in the navigation tree
• Click on new to create a cluster, give your cluster a name, select default config and add cluster nodes (at least 2 for now). For each cluster node select your node agents representing the machines where your cluster instances shall run. The following picture shows my test setup.
  
  

• Click on OK and your cluster and its instances will be created (will take some time depending on your machine).
• On the next page that will show up in the admin gui you can select the checkbox left to the clustername and click on the Start Cluster button to start up your cluster.
• Now your cluster should be up and running and ready for application deployment!

If you prefer cluster creation using command line tools you can do it with asadmin this way:

• /bin/asadmin create-cluster --user admin
• /bin/asadmin create-instance --user admin --nodeagent --cluster
• /bin/asadmin create-instance --user admin --nodeagent --cluster
• /bin/asadmin start-cluster
  

Step 3: Deploy an application to your cluster

Now we can finally deploy an application to our new cluster environment. In order for a web application to make use of session failover in a cluster some preconditions must be met:

• The group membership service in your cluster must be running as it provides some hearbeat information about the health of your instances. Normally this service is enabled by default. You can doublecheck by selecting your cluster and look at the general tab - the checkbox Heartbeat should show enabled.
• The deployment descriptor of your web app - web-inf/web.xml must contain the element:
  

      
    myclusterable webapp
    

• And also your application must provide a web-inf/sun-web.xml that contains properties for the session manager:
  

  
  Servlet 2.5//EN" "http://www.sun.com/software/appserver/dtds/sun-web-app_2_5-0.dtd">
  
  
  
    
      
        
          
        
        
          
        
      
      
      
    

• In aboves extract of a sun-web.xml the session manager has to specify persistence-type="replicated" to use the in memory replication of your cluster. The persistenceFrequency property with value web-method means that after each request the session gets replicated. A different setting would be time-based replication. The persistenceScope property with a value of session means that on each request the whole HTTPSession gets replicated. Other potential settings are modified-session and modified-attribute.
• If you have changed your apps web.xml and sun-web.xml you are ready to deploy to your cluster. In the admin gui you can simply select your cluster as target. Usually only "server" is shown as selected Target which means that its deployed to the domain admin server. Just select your cluster and add it to the targets list.
• Before you click on the OK button for deployment make sure to select the Availability Enabled checkbox for your application!
  

• If things went fine the server.log of your instances should have an entry like this:

  [#|2007-04-17T10:31:11.255+0200|INFO|sun-appserver9.1|javax.enterprise.system.container.web|
  _ThreadID=24;_ThreadName=RMI TCP connection(19)-/clusterjsp;replicated; 
  web-method;session;|WEB0130: Enabling ha-based persistence for web module [/clusterjsp]'s  
  sessions: persistence-type = [replicated] / persistenceFrequency = [web-method] / 
  persistenceScope = [session]|#]

Now you can access your application on both of your cluster instances by directly pointing your browser to each server instances. (eg : and :). If your application changes attributes in the HTTPSession you should see those changes getting replicated to the other server in your cluster.

Thats all for now about clustering with session failover for GlassFish V2. Of course you also want to use load balancing in front of your cluster. Do do this you can use either the Sun Web Server with GlassFish or use Apache+mod_jk with GlassFish V2.

Update: Shreedhar (check his excellent blog about Shoal) pointed out that 2 things should be considered when using in memory replication:

• The cluster instances should be located on the same subnet
• Clock times on all machines in the cluster should be time syncd to be as close as possible

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