Oisín Hurley's Weblog

I got a chance to attend, and speakThe ServerSide Java Symposium in Barcelona at the end of June. The talk I gave was about how Enterprise Software can be delivered using Open Source as the basis for satisfying some of the most common Enterprise Software requirements. I wasn't talking about business logic here -- I was talking about the nonbiosphere that surrounds a piece of Enterprise software, including process automation support, addressing chargeback in a transparent manner, managing middleware heterogeneity. I also guaranteed the listeners that I wouldn't use any buzzwords :)

You can download the slides and notes and check it out. From the top of the room, I observed the reaction: a healthy mix of boredom, horror, torpor, confusion, outrage, interest, catatonia and crackberry tapping. After the talk, I did get some compliments and interesting questions. No pitchforks and torches, so that was good.

On the subject of pitchforks and torches, I was lucky enough to be invited to sit on a SOA Industry Leaders Panel with Martin Fowler and Gregor Hohpe. It was an interesting thing to site between those two guys, whose books and articles I've avidly consumed in the past. Mainly I worried about looking like a total idiot. According to Jay at DeCare Systems, I did ok - if you read that entry, you'll see the torches reference I made earlier.The whole thing was filmed, so perhaps we will get to see it online sometime. The panel moderator, the inimitable Ted Neward, gets my vote for best panel mod evah, coaxing some excellent tough questions from what turned out to be a good audience. It was with a mental sigh of relief from me that Gregor got in first on the inevitable What is a Service, anyway?.

Update - check out Ade's experiences at TSSJS

I'm waiting for my flight to Frankfurt to attend the Eclipse Summit Europe that is being held in sunny Ludwigsburg, in Germany. Due to a typical pebkac error, I'll be staying in 3 hotels over the 5 days that I will be there :)

The Euro Summit is an interesting conference - the content is usually good, the venues conducive to meeting people and of course the German beer is without peer. This adds up to a fun-filled few days. During the conference, Adrian from STP will be updating us on what's new and noteworthy on the project, and of course bringing us up to date on the old material too. One of the evenings will contain an STP BoF, although the date has to be confirmed.

Eclipse users and developers know that the Eclipse platform is a bit of beast - there is just so much in there that if you don't get the chance to poke your head out of your own personal Eclipse-interaction light cone, you can miss out on some cool stuff. And it turns out that the best way to do that is to come to these kind of conferences :) Here's some things I found out about yesterday.

Plugin Spy
Select something in the UI, hit Alt+Shift+F1, and you get a window containing an introspection of the current widget/part that you have selected. Check out the PDE Incubator page, and a blog entry from Chris. If you are using Eclipse 3.4M2 or later, you will find this feature already built-in.

Clean Ups
I use Checkstyle in most of my project work, and it and I have an uneasy relationship. The sort of one where the dishes get broken and people come around to bring the pets away. I have always whined that if Checkstyle is so smart, why doesn't it get rid of that trailing space it spotted for me and stop bothering me? Well, it can't do that, but Eclipse Clean Ups can. Woot!

A Clean Up is just a collection of refactorings that you use regularly on your code to keep it squeaky. You can run 'em manually, or have them run automatically when you save a Java file. Go to this developerworks article to find out more.

EclEmma
If you are familiar with the Emma Project then you will have probably guessed that this is a test coverage tool for Eclipse, based upon Emma. I've always found test coverage to be an invaluable tool for showing you where the great, gaping, black holes of non-deterministic behaviour reside in your code. There's a lot of tools that can do coverage, and there are Eclipse integrations at varying levels of quality. What I liked about EclEmma is that it is quick and straightforward to use on a single Eclipse project, and gives me the results fast. Although the results are not always welcome :)

Update: Jeff McAffer's Eclipse Update Talk [pdf link] has details of Plug-in Spy and Clean Ups.

At the Eclipse Summit 2007, Jeff McAffer gave a presentation [link to slides not available yet] on what has been happening with Equinox. I missed the talk itself, but later on I had lunch with him, Naci Dai of WebTools and Jerry Preissler of Swordfish and we talked about the Eclipse Provisioning Project, aka p2

p2 is a framework which is all about configuring things and putting them somewhere. That's as generic as I can make the definition :) In the example on the website, p2 is being used to move bundles around. The SoaTools, Swordfish and WebTools projects already do this kind of thing, and we have a set of deployment frameworks which allow us to configure and deliver things (WAR files for example) to different places (server runtimes for example). That's why we are interested, especially since there are visible moves in the direction of OSGi based runtimes for hosting Services .

I'm just at the point where I need to drill into the information on the web. As per usual, I'm confused about how p2 and Buckminster appear to do exactly the same thing. And I want to see how p2 matches up with the SoaTools SOAS component. If we could do something around extending p2 (if appropriate) then we could reduce the STP workload a bit. I guess that WTP and Swordfish are thinking the same thing.

I feel a workshop coming on here :)

A tangential point: as far as I know, and I am open to correction here, the p2 project was brought into the Eclipse ecosystem as an effort to replace the aging Update Manager mechanisms. Certainly over the course of the last couple of years, many interesting behaviours of the UM have come to light, but it might have been a good idea to fix those in conjunction with starting a new development effort. As per usual, if you have patches, feel free to open a bugzilla :)

Another tangential point: there is a project proposal called Riena which will also be interested in the p2 capabilities. I don't yet understand what Riena is trying to do - all I know is that it is about 'smart clients', the committers are mostly tall, and that they all wear the same teeshirts. When I find out more I'll let you know. In the meantime visit the top-level page on wiki for p2 for details.

I'm just back from Javapolis in Antwerp. Javapolis is a conference put together by the BEJUG, Antwerp is a big city in Belgium and the second largest seaport in Europe . For a conference put together by a group of folks that are not pro conference makers, it was pretty impressive. The fact they have kept the price down to less than €300 is particularly amazing.

I was there to check out the conference, but even more importantly to get to have a chat with some of our new committers on the Eclipse SOA Tools Project. We've had a number of new components just added to source control (more about that in another entry) and now I was getting the chance to meet some of these developers for the first time. Even better, I got to hang out with Bruce Snyder, open source aficionado extraordinaire, and Stephen McNamara, a buddy of long standing and enterprise survivor.

First off the bat I had a chat with Mark Little whom you may know from JBoss ESB and the world of transactions in general. We marvelled at how world+dog is currently refactoring their {insert runtime tech of choice} to be composed platforms using OSGi bundles. This is going to be very interesting as it will open up the containers, which will hopefully bring more control to the customer platform developers on the one hand, and introduce with the other a whole raft of new interoperability issues :)

James Gosling's keynote was a round-up of everything that has happened in Java land for the last year. It's easy to see where his interest lies - realtime java and the spread of java-controlled devices, using SunSpots and similar tech. He also spoke of the mobile services architecture (JSR248) and how that was to be a "grown-up CLDC". I polled a few individuals over the next few hours and there was a keen interest in seeing how Google and the OHA will eat Sun's lunch on this one.

Key point for me was that mobility is coming of age at last, something like 2 years after we pulled our enterprise-mobility product. Timing is everything after all.

Netbeans 6 hit the presses during the week, and James was keen to point out some of the new and shinies in the bag. Enhanced mobility support was one thing, an holistic Java model that makes for keen context-sensitive refactorings, REST service development tools and advances in report design and generation were some of the things he mentioned. I'll be looking at the REST tools, because we are developing REST tools in STP too, but the Eclipse refactoring and reporting facilities seem to be at least a couple of years ahead in terms of feature comparison. I've not using the mobility gear in Netbeans or Eclipse, so no comment on that.

He also mentioned JavaFX, and later on in the week I attended a talk/demo on it. It looked faintly interesting until I spoke to the guy sitting next to me. He had attended a talk at OSCON where the JavaFX demo was followed up by a Flex demo which blew it out of the water totally - the SUN demo person looked pretty squirmy by his account. Flex is very very impressive, but perhaps JavaFX may beat it on the phones.

The guys from OW2 had a talk about all of the stuff that they have and how it can all be linked together. It had BPM, BAM, SOA, portals, workflow, monitoring and all other aspects of the enterprise buddha nature. My poor brain filled up early in the talk, so I will need to look into it in bite-size chunks later. I'm delighted that Eclipse STP counts among its committers a number of individuals that are involved in the OW2 community-- Christophe Hamerling, Adrian Mos, Andrea Zoppello, to name but a few and of course Alain Boulze, who is an STP PMC member.

In between the corridor work I managed to get to a few more talks. I experienced a good quality brain melt at Joshua Bloch's closures talk and attended a very informative talk on JSR311 and REST from Paul Sandoz. Andrea Zoppello did a very interesting demo on going from BPMN to runtime monitoring at the Eclipse stand and I got to catch up with the Eclipse stalwarts Wayne Beaton and Ralph Müller. In the photo below you can see the inimitable Bruce Snyder being totally mobbed by adoring geek fans after his talk on ServiceMix and Camel. [Note - picture is blurry due to awesome flux of worshippon particles]

If you are in the market for a Java conference, and a bit short on budget, Javapolis is well worth your while, methinks. I would just ask them to do two things for next year - first, open up the program to allow submissions from whoever wants to submit java related stuff; second, put some evaluation sheets out there guys! That panel with Bloch, Gafter, Gosling, et alii was really really terrible! Having Bloch and Gosling waffle on about unsigned int for nearly 20 minutes was a total waste of time. Got to hand the beachball of blame to the moderator there - should have put the squeeze on them, Carl!

For photos, hit Flickr with a keyword search on JavaPolis.