Always reading bits...


Its the shadows and reflections cast from the future that interest me.

Who : Charles Ditzel
Email: charles.ditzel@sun.com
Email: cld9731@yahoo.com



Download NetBeans!




Java Pointers
««May 2008»»
SMTWTFS
     123
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18192021222324
25262728293031

Search Blog

 


Go to Swing Pointers site

Mailing List

Library Thing

Restaurant Reviews

Flickr - Latest Photos

cld
       cld.blog-city.com

Latest Entries

A Java Green Moment : Consolidation, CoolThreads Servers and Energy

Friday, 16 May 2008 6:23 P GMT-08
 

A Java Green Moment.  So the question is - when you run Java apps on your server or within virtualized containers  - what are the implications on power and cooling (two expensive items in your datacenter - whether you have a couple of systems or a fleet)? Specifically, today I'll focus on watts (power). Sun has spent a lot of time on this issue.   One of the reasons I like the Coolthreads servers is they basically give you a big win in performance in usually in half the space (less to cool) and roughly about 2.5 times better performance/watt over competitors. That's also a big win - energy- wise.   Basically the latest T5140 and T524  provide 2 sockets per system, each socket provides 8 cores and each core
 provides 8 hardware threads giving you 64 threads per socket. The result is 128 hardware threads per system.  All of this is contained in a 1U or 2U form factor.  If you start making comparisons between various systems the T-Series, it can give you much more performance/watt in much less space.  You can see that T- Series vastily outperforms popular competing systems you can look at results for SPECjbb2005 and get more details (and disclosures) or the SPECjAppServer2004 results and you get a pretty clear picture of why I like the CoolThreads servers. You can even go to the single socket Coolthreads servers like the T5120 and T5220 and see very similar results.  For example, the T5120 single socket also outperforms a number of the popular competing systems in the SPECjbb2005 results and also look at the T5220 results for SPECjbb2005 and SPECweb2005 results. It is not simply the outright sheer performance wins that are interesting - it's also the huge performance per watt and SWaP numbers that constitute a really nice win for energy conservation. I mean, if you can save money and do the same thing faster - why waste the energy ?   Incidentally, Sun has power calculators such as this T5220 calculator here.  The big push in the industry around virtualization is a reaction to over-crowded datacenters and underutilized systems and increasing power and cooling costs. The coupling of T-Series with virtualization technologies like Solaris Containers and LDOMs  minimize datacenter power needs.  Two papers of interest are Virtualization and Logical Domains and Sun Coolthreads Servers and the more general (slightly out-of-date) Sun Blueprint : Solaris Containers Technology Architecture Guide (a generic tutorial on Solaris Containers).  Consolidation using Solaris Containers and more recently LDOMs  are routine - containers and LDOMs are built into the operating system (you don't have to go buy them - they are free - and open source).

Sun has a Try-and-Buy program site (basically a 60 day trial - you can see how it works) and the site actually has a lot of material on how T-Series works and  tuning recommendations and details on Cooltools and CoolStack.  There is also a new whitepaper, Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120, T5220, T5140 and T5240 Servers Architecture, which covers the architecture.  To get a good picture of the performance of the T2 Plus check out David Dagastine's blog on the SPECjbb2005 Multi-JVM benchmark.  Note he mentions that the CoolThread systems have taken the triple crown -

     SPECjbb2005 
     SPECweb2005
     SPECjAppServer2004

Clearly, Java performance is excellent on these systems but what makes this especially interesting to me,  is that all of this has as its background,  much lighter power consumption needs than rivals.  Check out some very nice blogs on the T-Series topics here.  I've mentioned what cooltools and coolstack are previously - Cooltools provides a set of tools with useful optimization, compiler, profiling and test tools and CoolStack packages a nice highly optimized open source web stack. 

JavaOne 2008 : General Session, Java Minute, Interviews & Duke Award (All Videos)

Wednesday, 14 May 2008 5:41 P GMT-08
> So, you missed JavaOne 2008, but you still wish you could have been there.  There is a way. There are a large number of videos covering a lot of territory.  The General Sessions are all on video now and much more.  You can check out a lot of JavaOne 2008 video links  :

  General Sessions
 - General Sessions  (All the general session videos including Rich Green, etc)
  A Java Minute
 - A Java Minute with Nerd Herder Pete Moore of Atlassian
 - A Java Minute with Arshan Poursohi of Sun Labs
 - A Java Minute with LiveScribe, Duke Choice Award Winner
 - A Java Minute with Tim Bray, Distinguished Engineer
 - A Java Minute with Mike Dalrymple about BlueRay & Java
 - The Java Minute: JavaOne '08 Keynote Highlights
  Inside JavaOne
 - Inside JavaOne - Episode 1 - Sun Spots
 - Inside JavaOne - Episode 2 - dotFX
 - Inside JavaOne - Episode 3 - High School Java Developer
 - Inside JavaOne - Episode 4 - Hydrazine
 - Inside JavaOne - Episode 5 - Perrone Robotics 
 - Inside JavaOne - Episode 6 - jMonkey Engine related jMoneyEngine Reel
 - Inside JavaOne - Episode 7 - Sony Ericsson
  Java Perspectives
 - Java Perspectives - JavaOne 2008 - Bob Brewin CTO of Sun Software
 - Java Perspectives - JavaOne 2008 - Ian Murdock  on Open Source Communities
 - Java Perspectives - JavaOne 2008 - Brent Cromley  Zappos.com
 - Java Perspectives - JavaOne 2008 - Bill Sheppard - Part 1  and Part 2 Sun's Chief Digital Media Officer
 - Java Perspectives - JavaOne 2008 - Simon Phipps, on Open Source
 - Java Perspectives - JavaOne 2008 - Jacob Lehrbaum on JavaFX
 - Java Perspectives - JavaOne 2008 - Tim Bray,  Sun Director of Web Technologies
  JavaOne 2008 Duke's Choice Awards
 - JavaOne 2008 Duke's Choice Awards - Stefan Wagenpfeil from Step2e
 - JavaOne 2008 Duke's Choice Awards - Charles Cocchiaro on Perfect Image
 - JavaOne 2008 Duke's Choice Awards - Michael Powers on mpowerplayer
 - JavaOne 2008 Duke's Choice Awards - Erwin Tenhumberg on OpenOffice
 - JavaOne 2008 Duke's Choice Awards - Joe Polastre, PhD on Sentilla
 - Java Minute : LiveScribe, Duke Choice Award
 

JavaOne 2008 : Killer Java App and How To Build One

Monday, 12 May 2008 10:41 P GMT-08
>
>

Think Java Killer App.  NetBeans.tv has a very cool video of a wonderful photo application - it's an open source digital workflow app called blueMarine. Think beyond Adobe Lightroom and Apple's Aperture.  To make things more interesting it is modular with its own update center.  It is a very clever photo application allowing for planning and executing a photoshoot with detailed maps. Check out the web site here.  You can see vividly what the author's have done on NetBeans.tv.  The video provides a nice walkthrough the application.  Note that blueMarine leverages the NetBeans platform and NASA World Wind.  The author,  Fabrizio Giudici , is a member of the NetBeans Dream Team.  At JavaOne he presented, blueMarine or Why you Should Really Ship Swing Applications, which you 
can find here. This presentation provides a nice look at what he has been doing to create blueMarine.  He explains how he leveraged the NetBeans Rich Client Platform and discussed some of the APIs he used.  He also tours some of the APIs he uses -  the Visual Library, SwingLabs' JXMapViewer and NASA World Wind.  It's a nice look inside the application.
 

JavaOne 2008 : Hands-On-Labs Now Available, General Sessions

Monday, 12 May 2008 7:15 P GMT-08
> Hands-on-Labs.  Available.  If you missed JavaOne 2008 - you should be aware that one of the most successful aspects is the Hands-On-Labs (HOLs).  Now, all the labs are available to you. You can download the labs and use the step-by-step tutorial to try out new technologies.
The list of the JavaOne 2008 Hands-on Labs :
LAB-1440 Performance Troubleshooting
LAB-1430LT Java HotSpot VM Trouble Shooting Tools in a Nutshell
LAB-3400 Adding Convergence of media to your Java EE Application using NetBeans
LAB-3410 Metro Try Out Simple and Interoperable Web Services
LAB-3420 Adding performance to your SIP based applications
LAB-4500 Develop AJAX Based Portlets With OpenPortal and GWT
LAB-4520LT Plug Into GlassFish V3 With JavaServer Faces and jMaki
LAB-4530 Building Rich Web Applications, Using jMaki
LAB-4540LT How to Build Ajax-Enabled Web Applications Using Project Woodstock
LAB-5500 Dynamic Service Composition with OpenESB: Compose a JavaOne[SM]
LAB-5510 Orchestration of Web Services, Using WS-BPEL
LAB-5530 Building Secure, Reliable, Transactional SOA Applications Using Open ESB
LAB-5540LT Query Continuous Data streams Using OpenESB's Intelligent Event Processor
LAB-6400LT Create Your Own Mobile Game
LAB-6410LT Build Flickr Client On Mobile Phones
LAB-7320LT Building Interactive TV Applications for the OCAP Platform
LAB-7350LT Rich Client Applications: Getting started with the JavaFX SDK
LAB-7400LT Project Darkstar
LAB-7410 Developing Grid Applications with Compute Server Technology
LAB-7420 The Real-Time Programming Challenge on the Java Platform: How to Build Real-Time Solutions for Real-World Devices
LAB-7430 Developing Distributed Wireless Applications Using Sun Small Programmable Object Technology (Sun SPOT) Systems
LAB-8400 Developing (J)Ruby on Rails Applications with the NetBeans IDE
LAB-8410LT JavaFX Script Exposed Live with NetBeans Technology
LAB-8420LT Building and Consuming SOAP and RESTful Web Services with NetBeans Technology
LAB-8430 Isolating Performance Bottlenecks and Memory Leaks With the NetBeans Profiler
LAB-9400 Exposing the Depth of Your JDK Release 7.0 Applications with Dynamic Tracing (DTrace)
LAB-9410 OpenOffice.org Extensions with NetBeans
You can find the contents of the labs here.

You can also see the videos on the General Sessions here.
 

JavaOne 2008 : NetBeans As A PHP IDE. As A Scala IDE.

Sunday, 11 May 2008 2:53 P GMT-08
> PHP.   One of the announcements out of JavaOne 2008 was the arrival of NetBeans IDE 6.1.   NetBeans has been moving ahead of its rivals in a number of areas - one area is the arrival of IDE support for Ruby, Javascript and the latest is PHP.  In addition, considerable work is being done on Groovy/Grails (targeted at being included in NetBeans 6.5).
In addition, other languages are finding their way into the IDE.  Scala being the latest and coming from Cayoyuan.  Caoyuan's blog has a number of screenshots showing the excellent work being done on a NetBeans Scala IDE.  You can find out more about Scala's NetBeans support here.  At JavaOne 2008, it was announced that NetBeans has added PHP support.  You can see a brief overview of the PHP Editor in NetBeans, NetBeans IDE Early Access for PHP Editor: Brief Overview, here.  You can also see how to Set Up a PHP Project here.  You can learn more about PHP development in NetBeans here.  The NetBeans wiki has more PHP information.
 

JavaOne 2008 : The Killer-App - A Java Pen

Saturday, 10 May 2008 9:29 A GMT-08
> My Java Gadget of the Year. I found my Java gadget of the year - it is an ordinary 'tool' that has been with us for 1300+ years and maybe longer if we consider a reed pen the original pen back in 3000 BC.   This year Livescribe re-invented the pen and morphed it into 21st century device.  I will tell you that I think that the history of the pen has taken an abrupt
technological leap that may change the way we look at pens and how pens are designed in the future. Listen to this keynote  (around minute 56) you will see that the pen supports Java ME CLDC and runs on a Samsung ARM 9 (32 bit, 150Mhz) processors with an OLED display,  high speed infrared camera (70 images/sec), 1 or 2 GB of NAND
storage, embedded speaker,dual smartpen microphones, 3D recording headset and a USB port. Are we really talking about a pen ? Yes... and more.  What's more is that this pen transcends simply recording what is written.  Not only can you record what you write and what you say as you are writing but it can be downloaded to your computer (currently Windows - later Mac). You can do word searches on the text or create flash movies of what you wrote and said.  Users can also select from software - such as to translate the words they write - for example if I select English-to-Spanish and I write the word "one" - the audio will replay with "uno" (Spanish word for one).  They have some examples of the translation.  Another piece of software allows you to draw a piano keyboard and then play music by selecting the keys.  Software is yet another aspect of the pen.

Of course, I had to get one.  It is very cool. 		Check it out.

JavaOne 2008 : Monitoring Your Enterprise Easily

Thursday, 8 May 2008 1:34 P GMT-08
> Jennifer.   One of the most interesting applications at JavaOne 2008 is Jennifer.  I had never heard of them before and I walked by the booth and was really surprised by the elegant GUI design and by the nice way it solves a bunch of enterprise problems.  Jennifer performs provides a real-time monitoring dashboard of web servers, user visits, response times,
app servers, even non-Java apps, Oracle database performance, system CPU, memory, disk & network usage, processing associated with backend transactions and business data.  The monitoring also reports on numbers of concurrent users, visitors per day/hour, currently active services, actgive JDBC connection assignments & status, response time graphs, JDBC/SQL monitoring, app response times, opened TCP/IP sockets by application and much, much more - including connecting into CTG, WTC, Jolt, J*Link, TUXEDO and CICS.
For me, this was one of the most useful discoveries at JavaOne.  I deal with companies with large numbers of servers (app, web, database, etc) - this solves the problem of being able to see what's happening to groups of servers and within individual servers.  Jennifer also has nice 2D and 3D visualization (with different color cues) - you can see one of the screenshots at right.  Jennifer-3D is designed to be displayed on a large monitor in a datacenter's monitoring area.  You can find more information on Jennifer here. Visit Jennifersoft.com
Select to check it out

JavaOne 2008 : Feature-On-Demand Applications, Rich Internet Applications

Thursday, 8 May 2008 9:01 A GMT-08
> Feature-On-Demand Applications.   Last night I attended two interesting BOFs.  The first was an experimental NetBeans 'Feature-on- demand' session.  This was very interesting.  Geertjan Wielenga and Jiri Rechtacek went into some details on a new model for getting features into not only the
NetBeans IDE but also platform applications.  Basically by having a stub in place that allows you to see the feature (or plural all the features available) you can select it and at runtime it is downloaded.  They went through a number of quick demos that showed features auto-magically being available (and downloaded and installed) as needed.  This allows for quick initial startup times and initially very light apps that over time become larger as certain features are used.  Some issues were brought related to - how to behave if the network goes down.  Overall very, very interesting and a way of reducing the size of the IDE to the features you use and no more.  Makes it light and generally faster.  You can find more information here.  The other talk was by Stepphan Jannsen from the Belgian Java Users Group who compared versions of DHTML, GWT, Flex/AIR and JavaFX.  He talked about building an app for delivering videos and presentations.  You can see it here.  He had a number of different implementations - his favorite so fair is Flex/Air but he said that JavaFX was moving fast and the results for both looked excellent.  One take-away, the competition between all of these - is making them all better.

JavaOne 2008 : Hands-On-Labs, NetBeans Profiler, jMaki and more.

Thursday, 8 May 2008 7:53 A GMT-08
> Hands-On Labs.  First things, first.  If you want to learn a topic like "how to profile" or "how to use jMaki" - run don't walk to the Hands-On-Lab site for JavaOne 2008.  Once there you will be able to download in total a wealth of information and tutorials dealing with all sort of Java topics.
Yesterday I helped with two hands-on-labs.  The first was Finding Memory Leaks Using the NetBeans Profiler.  This was an excellent lab for those interesting in profiling their applications and optimizing performance.  The second lab was Building Rich Web Applications With jMaki. Despite some challenges with an outage of internet connectivity in our lab session - the lab was pretty well received.  It was a very good lab that allows the developer to easily create mashups and use a wealth of different Ajax components.  Given the large of people at these labs - they went very smoothly and I'm looking forward to the reminder of labs I'm helping with - including the (building) OpenOffice.org Extensions with NetBeans.  Try them out, you will learn alot.

JavaOne 2008 : Amazon's EC2 Gets OpenSolaris

Wednesday, 7 May 2008 11:02 A GMT-08
> EC2 Gets OpenSolaris.  OpenSolaris will be available on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), a Web service that provides resizeable compute capacity in the cloud.  A select group of leading software vendors are already offering their solutions via Amazon Machine
Images (AMIs) for OpenSolaris on Amazon EC2, including GigaSpaces, Rightscale, Thoughtworks and Zmanda. Sun is also making available the GlassFish application server. OpenSolaris on Amazon EC2 is available for no additional charge. To access OpenSolaris on Amazon EC2, register at http://www.sun.com/amazon.  OpenSolaris on Amazon EC2 beta is currently available by invitation only. To request an invitation to join the program. 

JavaOne 2008 : Applets on Steroids are *really* back and JavaFX Script Is Looking Good

Tuesday, 6 May 2008 10:24 P GMT-08
> Applets are not simply back. They are back with a vengence. The demos today in the general sessions on applets were really compelling.  The new applet technology in Java SE 6 Update 10 (aka "consumer jre") corrects the problems of the past and one ups other other competing technologies out 
there. Specifically, the next generation of applets are here. Java SE 6 Update 10 is very cool.  You are basically able to drag an applet directly on to the desktop and it literally becomes a desktop application.  You can then close the browser and it will offer you the opportunity to create a desktop shortcut - which allows you to select it later to bring it up in desktop form.  Or you can simply return it to the browser.  This is one of the most compelling desktop technologies demonstrated - the battle between browser and desktop app is resolved - and the winner is both.  Now we will move to the second very cool thing - JavaFX Script.  I think the demonstrations and talks at JavaOne suggest that JavaFX Script is alive and well and is positioned to become widely used.  The power of the emerging new scripting language,  the new multimedia features including video are making for compelling technology - but the the addition of the new power desktop applets will tip the scales in JavaFX Script's favor.  Also there was nice demo during Bob Brewin's talk which showcased the use of Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator leveraging some new JavaFX plugins which allow designers to design for JavaFX Script using those products. The demonstration showed off the collaboration between designer and developer.  You can read more here. Though JavaFX Technology goes well beyond JavaFX Script - clearly JavaFX Script is at the heart of the JavaFX technology family. Check out the general sessions videos here.

CommunityOne 2008 : OpenOffice - the MacOS X version and How To Build Extensions

Tuesday, 6 May 2008 7:42 A GMT-08
> Many interesting things happened today that I found really interesting - let me start by saying that both CommunityOne and JavaOne are information- rich.  It doesn't matter which way you turn - you will find that a new topic
or one you thought you knew that has been updated or some aspect that is surprising and worth paying attention to.  I should mention that there were many today and it will take awhile to write about them.  One I found is interesting was OpenOffice.  Couple of things to get out of the way first, OpenOffice has an interesting developer snapshot if
you are using MacOS X.  You can see the OpenOffice splash-screen at right (select it to see more).  You can get it by
going to the download part of OpenOffice and downloading the MacOSXIntel_Aqua version.  I haven't looked at it in a long time but one of the OpenOffice engineers (Jurgen Schmidt) spent a good deal of time showing me some features. It looks excellent. Mind you it is still a developer release.  Now comes the really cool part.  There will be a Hands-On Lab for OpenOffice that focuses on how to extend it.  If you missed it - you can write an extension in Java (or PHP or ...) and there are some nice NetBeans plugins that greatly help.  At this year's JavaOne conference - there will be some nice tutorials that show you how to build extensions.  Okay, so here comes part three.  There are a bunch of extensions already Select to see the new OpenOffice for MacOS X
Select to see OpenOffice.org for MacOS
 to OpenOffice here.  These vary in what they do but should offer some useful extensions.  I will be at the Lab-9410, Hands-On-Lab for OpenOffice.org Extensions with NetBeans, at JavaOne (it's on Friday around 1:30 pm) helping with it.  More tomorrow on Amazon and OpenSolaris and the JavaOne 2008 startup with the General session.

First Up : CommunityOne and NetBeans Day 2008

Sunday, 4 May 2008 8:57 A GMT-08
> JavaOne 2008 is around the corner and here I am back in San Francisco.  Reality is I'm also looking forward to the start-up conference, CommunityOne.  This is a free conference which has a lot
 of content that I'm interested in as well. It will include NetBeans Day . An OpenSolaris track. Linux.  Databases.  Glassfish. and much more.  Here are some of the talks I would like to catch - Building Ajax Apps (with NetBeans),
 OpenOffice.org Extensions : Development on Java, jMaki (conflicts, ouch!), Grails Productive Web Development, OpenSolaris Installfest, Building a Web-scale Open Source High Performance Compute Stack, AWS and OpenSolaris (a must see)... very cool ...and there is tons more sessions.. check out the sessions here. >

NetBeans 6.1 : JavaScript IDE (Screencast)

Monday, 28 April 2008 6:36 P GMT-08
If you missed my earlier blog entry on how NetBeans is becoming a powerful IDE for JavaScript you can find it here.  There is a nice screencast on how to use NetBeans as a JavaScript IDE.  Roman Strobl provides a nice tour of various Javascript features in NetBeans, such as - code completion, rename refactoring, quick fix and many more.  You can find the screencast here.  

NetBeans IDE 6.1 Released

Monday, 28 April 2008 8:18 A GMT-08
You can download the production version of NetBeans IDE 6.1 now - as it is available.  You can download it from here.  You can find a descripting of all the features in NetBeans IDE 6.1 here and at the wiki's NetBeans 6.1 New and Noteworthy site which is here.  Release Notes can be found here.  Installation Instructions can be found here.  Don't forget that you can finds lots of information on using the various features of NetBeans at the Docs and Support site which you can find here.  

NetBeans 6.1 RC2 : More on Web Services Plumbing Generation, Tutorials and More...

Sunday, 20 April 2008 11:31 A GMT-08
A few days ago I mentioned the new SaaS features in NetBeans IDE 6.1RC2 - you can read all about it here. The gist of it, is that NetBeans has support for popular web services and basically now helps you with the plumbing of using these services within your application. This is very cool and I have since  done a bit more research (NetBeans search and google) and discovered a nice tutorial, Getting Started with RESTful Web Services on Glassfish. The new tutorial shows you how to generate entity classes from a database, generating a RESTful web service from entity classes, testing the RESTful web services and finally adding a Google Map feature using the SaaS feature. Note there is another version of this using Tomcat, Getting Started with RESTful Web Services On Tomcat. An older example and a worthwhile tutorial to look at is the (Draft Document) Consuming StrikeIron Web Services Using the Visual Web Pack.  I also discovered StrikeIron Visual Web Pack Demo Article. Some more informative sources can be found at SaaS UI Nodes Screenshots and  Enhanced Web Services Manager.  I'm really interested in this enhanced web services features and will look a bit deeper into this.

You can download NetBeans 6.1 Release Candidate 2 here.		 NetBeans 6.1 + Amazon S3 Service
 

NetBeans 6.1 RC2 Available : Let the IDE Do The Web Services Plumbing For You

Friday, 18 April 2008 4:39 P GMT-08
If you missed it - NetBeans 6.1 Release Candidate 2 is out and available .  Of course, there are the usual huge feature-set. You can read all about it here.  One feature jumped out at me - the second to last entry on the page is "Support for Popular SaaS Services". This feature brings in support for web services from Google, Amazon, Facebook and other web services.  The result is you can simply drag-and-drop operations under those services into a POJO, servlet, JSP and RESTful web service. The IDE will then build the plumbing code to access those services.  You can see that if you use Amazon AWS or S3 things just got easier. For example, the drag and drop action of a specific AWS S3 service operation will create client code to call into that. All needed programatic pieces you need to authenticate and invoke them from java is auto generated for you including the needed java POJOs to manipulate the returned data.  Check out the image at right - which shows access to Amazon S3 from with NetBeans 6.1 RC2.  This is a wonderful game-changer for developers - the IDE basically is doing the underlying plumbing for you on key web services. You can download NetBeans 6.1 Release Candidate 2 here. There are plenty of new features and you might want to look at the above link to see what else is new.  (Thanks Srividhya Narayanan )
 NetBeans 6.1 + Amazon S3 Service
 

Bits : NetBeans 6.1 Release Candidate Available, JavaFX Script on Java ME

Monday, 14 April 2008 8:30 A GMT-08
>A couple of items are crossing the wires.    First, if you missed it - the first release candidate, NetBeans IDE 6.1 RC, has been announced and is now available for download.  Please note if you are using Grails with it - stick to the developer early access releases.  You can see the list of features that NetBeans includes here and here.  Release Notes and Installation instructions are both available for you to peruse. > Hinkmod Wong's blog shows JavaFX Script now running on a Java ME Pantech Duo cell phone. Very cool.    

CoolThreads' Marambas Are Here And Already Java Record-Setting

Wednesday, 9 April 2008 7:52 P GMT-08
The new CoolThreads Maramba servers were announced today.  I was lucky enough to be involved with some of the engineers that created these systems and visited the labs a number of times to see what the pre-production units could do. Now they are shipping real production systems and there pretty amazing systems.  If Sun's earlier CoolThreads systems were well received - especially for consolidation (and virtualization) of the DB/Java/web tier - these are going to really rock the boat.  Up to now we have seen single socket CoolThreads systems with eight cores and 64 hardware threads, onboard 10GigE, 8 floating point units (one per core) and one encryption unit (one per core) in the T5120 and T5220 systems.  Today the dual socket T2 Plus systems offer 128 hardware threads and a total of 16 cores per system. There is a 1U (T5140) and 2U (T5240) system that was introduced. Very simply :
system processors =
2 sockets x 8 cores per socket  =
16 cores =
8 hw threads per core x 8 cores x 2 sockets =
128 hw threads
Jonathan if you are reading, I want one.  I can think of a whole bunch of things I could use these for.  Engineers, developers, DBAs and sys admins are going to  love these systems and already we have seen some pretty cool blogs describing what people are doing with them. Check out Jignesh's blog on using resource pools, zones, PostgresSQL and Glassfish v2.  He talks about the sheer power of these systems - run psrinfo and you get a report back of 128 cpus. David Dagastine's blog show the new T5240 systems doing some stunning Java record-setting - breaking the SPECjbb2005 records and in the process badly beating the IBM System P 570 which had 4 sockets of 4.7 Ghz Power6 cpus!  Yow! I also ran into this nice whitepaper, Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120, T5220, T5140 and T5240 Server Architecture, that describes these systems. 		Go To CoolThreads Technology Site

NetBeans 6.1 : Building In A Killer JavaScript IDE

Sunday, 6 April 2008 2:02 P GMT-08
Just as NetBeans' Ruby IDE has emerged - so is NetBeans JavaScript IDE emerged. NetBeans 6.1 which is in development (Beta and Dev builds )  has supported XHTML/JavaScript/CSS elements in the past - but they are getting much, much better.   Java, C and C++ have always had the best tools for development.  Now Ruby/Rails, Groovy/Grails, PHP and JavaScript IDEs are being delivered with powerful feature-sets.  NetBeans JavaScript IDE has now emerged with a set of very powerful featurs that include code completion, type analysis, code folding, refactoring, templates, mark occurances, browser compatibility choices,  sytax highlighting, quick hints/warnings and much more.  The NetBeans' website shows the full range of features at NetBeans' JavaScript wiki site. Tor Norby talks about some of the recent work on JavaScript here.  You can also find a nice writeup on the new JavaScript IDE here.   There is also a nice NetBeans JavaScript Users Guide which you provides more information.    

jRuby 1.1 Emerges. Big Feature and Performance Gains.

Saturday, 5 April 2008 2:50 P GMT-08
Congratulations go to the JRuby community!  jRuby 1.1 is out and constitutes the second major release of the jRuby project.  It is a big release because it offers up some major features :
- a compiler which compiles Ruby to Java Bytecodes (in AOT and JIT modes)
- Oniguruma port to Java
- Refactored IO implementation
- Improved memory consumption
- thousands of compatibility fixes
You can download it from here.  You can find more information here.  Performance is now beginning to exceed Ruby 1.9 and lots of reports of apps exceeding the performance of Ruby 1.8.6.		  

Java SE 6 Update 10 (Beta Early Access) Is Now Available

Wednesday, 2 April 2008 1:39 P GMT-08
Java SE 6 Update 10 Early Access (BETA) is now available.  You can find more information on it at the Java SE 6 Update 10 overview site here.  This will is not available on MacOS X - but this version will work on Solaris, Linux and Windows.  

Crossbow : Network Virtualization & Resource Management

Monday, 24 March 2008 9:36 P GMT-08
So my current focus is populating my Toshiba laptop with two Solaris Containers - a MySQL container and a GlassFish container.  Now the Toshiba laptop is an ancient creature and I'm  wondering how it will stand up to all this poking and prodding. I was looking at the network interface aspect (of multiple zones) and I learned something really cool and very interesting - Crossbow.  Crossbow provides the building blocks for network virtualization and resource control by creating virtual stacks around any service (HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, NFS, etc.), protocol (TCP, UDP, SCTP, etc.), or Virtual machines like Containers, Xen and ldoms.  The project allows the system administrator to carve out any physical NIC into multiple virtual NICs which are pretty similar to real NICs and are administered just like real NICs. Each Virtual NIC can be assigned its own priority and band-width on a shared NIC without causing any performance degradation. It is a project in the OpenSolaris project.    


Three Grails Articles : Starting, GORM, Groovy Server Pages

Monday, 24 March 2008 2:31 P GMT-08
Scott Davis has a nice Mastering Grails series on Grails.  He has three articles.  In the first article,  Building Your First Grails Application, he shows how to build a quick Grails app. In the second article, GORM: Funny name, Serious technology,  he introduces the Grails Object Relational Mapping (GORM) a persistence framework.  He demonstrates how easy it is to create relationships between tables, enforce validation rules and change the relational databases in your apps.  Finally, in the third article, >
 Changing the View with Groovy Server Pages,  Scott introduces Groovy Server Pages and shows how to use Grails TagLibs, mixes partial fragments of GSP and customizes the default templates for the automatically generated (scaffolded) views.

Two New Articles on MySQL : Tuning, Developer Stack

Monday, 24 March 2008 1:20 P GMT-08
There are a couple of interesting articles on MySQL and Sun.  There is a new tuning article, MySQL InnoDB Performance Tuning for Solaris 10, the paper is intended to help you define tuning parameters and tune them in your environment.  You can maximize the performance of MySQL on the Solaris platform through configuration and tuning of the database server, along with optimizing the Solaris OS for MySQL.  Another article, Sun and MySQL : How It Stacks Up for Developers, provides a look at how MySQL and Sun are offering a very strong open source stack for developers. Select to see entire image.
Note that NetBeans 6.1 Beta offers new MySQL support in its Database Explorer.  You can register your MySQL servers and then view, create and delete databases.  It also allows you to lanch the MySQL administration tool via NetBeans.

Article : Rails or Grails + Glassfish = Power, Flexibility, Clustering, Availability, DB Connection Pools,...

Saturday, 22 March 2008 9:21 A GMT-08
There is a new article, by Arun Gupta,  introduces JRuby, jRuby on Rails, and the GlassFish application server. The article, Rails Powered By the Glassfish App Server, presents a traditional Ruby-on-Rails application deployment, describes an alternative using the GlassFish application server, and explains the various options for deploying JRuby applications on GlassFish. He shows how to deploy Ruby-on-Rails web apps as a WAR-file or in a Directory-based way using Grizzly for connection management.  In the process of showing how to deploy the app he shows off the Glassfish Update Center.  He also makes a strong case for using Glassfish in conjunction with Ruby - multiple apps in one containers, dev and deployment environments are identical, multiple requests by a single app, easy redeployment of apps, database connection pools, co-hosting of Ruby and Java apps, clustering, load-balancing and high availability. You can find the article here.  It isn't only Rails - but the Groovy/Grails combination is also seeing Glassfish as a way to aggregate the strength of Groovy and Grails and Glassfish - you can read about that here .  

Screencast and Podcast : NetBeans & MySQL (screencast) and What's in NetBeans 6.1Beta (vpodcast)

Friday, 21 March 2008 8:33 A GMT-08
There are a bunch of new great resources on NetBeans and MySQL.  First up, there is a nice screencast by Roman Strobl,  NetBeans and MySQL, where Roman walks through in a bit over seven minutes how to connect to MySQL, how to use the SQL Editor in NetBeans, how to develop data-aware applications using MySQL, exposing the data using RESTful web serverices and much more. This is an excellent screencast if you are trying to build database apps and you want to see how to build apps. Another new screencast is an interview with NetBeans evangelist Gregg Sporar who covers what's new in NetBeans 6.1 Beta.
  

New Tutorial : Creating A Simple (JSP) Web App Using MySQL

Friday, 21 March 2008 7:11 A GMT-08
There is a newNetBeans tutorial, Creating a Simple Web Application Using the MySQL Database, which describes how to create a simple web application that connects to a MySQL database server. It also covers some basic ideas and technologies in web development, such as JavaServer Pages™ (JSP), JavaServer Pages Standard Tag Library™ (JSTL), the Java Database Connectivity™ (JDBC) API, and two-tier, client-server architecture.   You can find it here.  

Tutorial : Using NetBeans With Solaris Web Stack

Thursday, 20 March 2008 10:01 P GMT-08
> What a nice find!  If you are using NetBeans and developing on or for deployment on Solaris 10 - you may be interested in this whitepaper, Using NetBeans IDE with Solaris Web Stack.  The paper walks you through the open source web statck (SAMP) in Solaris - Apache2, MySQL, PHP (and PHP modules),  Ruby/Rails (+WeBrick), PostgreSQL, Java DB, Tomcat, Web Services development and a number of other things along the way.  This is an excellent guide if you in aggregating the open source technologies with Solaris and NetBeans.  There are also a number of other tutorials and examples that show you how to aggregate OpenSolaris technologies, like  Solaris Containers, Resource management which allows creating resource pools of
CPUs, setting CPU share settings using the Fair Share Scheduler, capping memory/shared memory, using ZFS to provide advanced replication for you, capping network bandwidth per zone or showing you how to cluster and fail-over zones.  All of this allows the open source stack to flourish on what is the most advanced open source operating sytem on the planet.
 

NetBeans 6.1 Beta : Arrival of Groovy/Grails Plugins

Thursday, 20 March 2008 7:51 P GMT-08
Select to See The Whole Image
Select to see the whole image.
 I have been buried in Solaris Containers -land and I have to say I'm really, really blown away at how light, fast and performant these the Solaris Containers are.  I've also been looking at VMware and LDOMs - but Solaris Containers are a real pleasure.  Anyway - this isn't the topic of this blog - no something equally interesting. I have been trying out Martin and Matthew's Groovy/Grails NetBeans plugins and I'm blown away with this as well.  If you missed it - read Matthias Schmidt's blog.  First, congratulations go to both Martin and Mathias - they have done an amazing piece of work (using another amazing piece of coding, GSF, by Tor Norby). Really tremendous. Note Matthias's blog shows some nice screenshots of method completion including JavaDoc display for both Groovy and Java,  code folding,  starting and stopping the Grails server,  Groovy/ Grails location preference, importing existing Grails projects,  marking of sourcecode errors, navigation of groovy sourcecode, customizing
Grails & server, starting Grails tasks and  syntax highlighting.  They are working on debugging support, multi-view for easy navigation and refactoring.  This really is a tremendous work for the Groovy and Grails & NetBeans communities. I've been banging away at it and it seems to be holding up very well.
 

Bits : JXTA on MIDP, Java on iPhone

Monday, 10 March 2008 7:16 A GMT-08
One of Java's strongest areas is in Mobile Java - Java is almost everywhere on cell phones.  One of the rare exceptions is the Apple iPhone. Good news for Apple iPhone users is that Sun is bringing the Java standard to the iPhone. You can read this and this which covers the announcement.  On another front, note that there is an excellent video interview on JXTA on MIDP.  In this Deep Dive Session, JXTA project architect Mohamed Abdelaziz discusses JXTA, a network protocol for peer-to-peer communication, and demonstrates how JXTA for MIDP 2.0 allows handheld devices to participate as first class devices in a JXTA network. Some nice demos are shown and examples where JXTA is taking off.  

MySQL and Java : New Tutorial, Article and Resources

Sunday, 9 March 2008 4:20 P GMT-08
There is a new article, Sun and MySQL : How It Stacks Up For Developers, that covers a number of aspects of the MySQL architecture and some details about MySQL.  Deeper dive details about using MySQL with Java can be found in a resource page, Using MySQL with Java.  Finally, there is a new tutorial that shows how create a simple web application by using both NetBeans and MySQL to quickly and easy create the app.  The new tutorial, Creating a Simple Web Application in NetBeans IDE Using MySQL,  covers getting the software, planning the structure of your web app, creating a new project, preparing the web pages, deploying them to the server, implementing the data layer, implementing the logic layer and implemementing the presentation layer.  Check it out.