TomEE: Be small, be certified, be Tomcat!

Posted on October 12, 2011 by admin

Initially making its debut at a JAX London, TomEE has now officially passed the java EE 6  Web Profile TCK, with the certification being announced at JavaOne. We caught up with project lead David Blevins who talks about the status quo and the future challenges of TomEE.

 

JAX London: Hi David, you are the project lead of the new Apache Server Project TomEE. What is TomEE?

 

David Blevins: In short, TomEE is the Java EE 6 Web Profile certified version of Tomcat.  TomEE is what you get if you take a plain Tomcat zip file, add missing jars such as OpenWebBeans, OpenEJB, OpenJPA and MyFaces and integrate them all together in a way that doesn’t strip Tomcat of its identity or functionality.  We have three focuses with TomEE; be small, be certified, be Tomcat.

 

 

 

JAX London: TomEE has been officially certified for the Java EE 6 Web Profile. What does this exactly mean?

 

David Blevins: Obtaining certification is very much an act of passing an incredibly large compliance test suite that challenges every single API and integration point between APIs in all of the Java EE Web Profile.  It’s no small task to be sure and is a major reason why it takes so long for vendors to be certified.  The Java EE 6 specification closed in 2009 and many vendors only reached certification this year.  The fact that such a small open source project was able to do this at all is quite impressive and the fact that we’ve done it in such a light fashion is really unique.  Our download is only 24MB and we can pass the entire TCK without increasing the memory on the JVM.  I don’t think that has ever been done.

 

The secret to our success is an incredibly passionate community and a setup in Amazon EC2 that allows us to run the tests in a cloud.  We can turn days into hours and reduce the problem into something our small group of volunteers can handle.  TomEE’s small and agile profile is very much indicative of the community who built it.

 

 

 

JAX London: TomEE is said to be an alternative to other Java Application Servers such as GlassFish, JBoss AS or Apache Geronimo. What is the difference between TomEE and these other server systems?

 

David Blevins: Each of those servers are of course very different from each other.  TomEE is born out of OpenEJB where the core values are getting out of people’s way, letting them do what they need to do, and being fast, small, embeddable and testable.  JBoss AS7 is probably the closest to TomEE and the two will likely remain very close as we push the boundaries of testing.

 

In terms of download size and memory footprint, TomEE seems to be one of the lightest options out there.  Some of the app servers take hundreds of MBs of memory just to boot.  I’m very much looking forward to some impartial comparisons from the Java EE community at large.  I think the numbers could be quite surprising.

 

Already TomEE looks like a very strong runner for cloud usage.  We run TomEE in the cloud every day on hundreds of EC2 ti.micro instances, I don’t see why anyone else couldn’t do the same.  We’ve very intentionally kept the memory usage of TomEE small as we consider the rest of the memory beyond the default to be the “user’s property”.  What good does it do to boot an app server on a t1.mirco instance with only 613MB of memory if the server itself takes 512MB of that memory.  There’s not much left over for an application at that point.

 

 

 

JAX London: Can you tell us a bit about the project history?

 

David Blevins: As mentioned, TomEE is born from the OpenEJB project.  For years there’s been an “OpenEJB/Tomcat integration” as we’ve called it. When the Java EE 6 Web Profile came about, it seemed like it had our names all over it.  It was a definite call to action.

 

The interesting thing is that if you had asked me a year ago how close we were to the Web Profile I would have said “quite close, we pretty much have it.”  In this gruelling process of certification it’s become clear how truly far from complete we were.  It has been humbling and rather enlightening how important working with a certified product really is.  You’re never as close as you think you are.  It’s a risky proposition to be playing with a home grown stack when there are good certified alternatives.

 

 

 

JAX London: Who initiated the project, who is developing it today?

 

David Blevins: The “who” is one of the most interesting parts of TomEE.  I’ve personally been working on the parent project, OpenEJB, for over ten years.  That’s not at all the interesting part.  If I had what it takes to build something like this alone, it would have been done ten years ago.  The real stars of TomEE are the people who work on it.  TomEE is filled with individuals who clock out of work at 5pm then come home and hack on TomEE till 12am.  As much as they might look to me for inspiration it’s quite the opposite, they inspire me.  How do you give up with a community like that?  You can’t.  None of us has a full time job working on TomEE, but we aren’t letting that stop us.

 

There’s an open door policy on TomEE as well.  We welcome anyone to come help out.  Throw the resume in the trash and just bring your editor.  Trust me, we’ll find something for you to do.  Be warned, though, not all work on an open source project is glamorous.

 

 

 

JAX London: Is there commercial support for TomEE?

 

David Blevins: TomEE has taken everyone by surprise and, currently, there is no one prepared to offer commercial support for it.  The project itself has been so incredibly focused on pushing this huge rock over the hill that none of us have had much time to think about other things.  Sometimes you just need to go for it and worry about the rest later.  I do hope to see companies start offering support for TomEE and I hope to be a part of it when that happens.  There are some great people on the project who really deserve to benefit from all this work.

 

 

 

JAX London: What are the next steps for TomEE?

 

David Blevins: Several things.  We’re fully functional and compliant, but released as beta to give users their chance to have an impact before TomEE goes final.  So right now it’s all about users and what they want.  Documentation is a big part of this.  Once we get all that feedback incorporated and the polish applied and TomEE out the door as final, there’s still quite a lot of work to be done on TomEE Plus.

 

We had several features in TomEE such as JAX-RS, JMS and JAX-WS which are beyond the Web Profile and not yet fully compliant.  For certification purposes, we needed to strip these out and put them in a different download.  This became TomEE Plus, so there’ll be plenty more certification work on TomEE Plus over the coming months.  Anyone out there thinking they wish they would have been able to participate in certifying something like this, you still have a chance – there’s still tons of work to do.

 

Aside from that, the embedded flavor of TomEE is already getting quite a lot of attention and improving rapidly.  There are a lot of optimizations planned to take our 2-3 second start-deploy-test-undeploy-stop time down even further.  Ideally, we’d get that down to 1 second flat which is where OpenEJB 4.0.0-beta-1 ended up.  OpenEJB basically has everything TomEE has except Servlets, JSP and JSF.  We’re looking to tune TomEE’s time down to the point where you never have to be tempted to “just” use OpenEJB and it becomes just as easy and light to use all of TomEE.

 

It’s difficult to see out even further, but there are plenty of fun concepts we’d like to see in TomEE such as Meta-Annotations, further CDI and EJB alignment, “proxy” beans and whatever crazy idea we can come up with.  Ideally TomEE could be used as a platform to drive change into Java EE 7 the way OpenEJB did in EJB 3.1.

 

And of course, grow.  The project could easily double in size over the next year.  That will really be fun to watch.

 

 

 

JAX London: Thank you very much!

 

David Blevins is co-founder of the Apache OpenEJB project, a founder of Apache Geronimo, and contributor to many other Open Source Java EE related projects for over 10 years. David was an active member of the EJB 3.0 (JSR 220), EJB 3.1 (JSR 318) and Java EE 6 (JSR 316) Expert Groups, and contributing author to Component-Based Software Engineering: Putting the Pieces Together from Addison Wesley. He can be found speaking on these topics at JavaOne, ApacheCon, and O’Reilly Open Source Convention.

By James Trew | Online Editor | S and S Media

www.jaxlondon.com

JAX is the most comprehensive Java Ecosystems conference covering web and enterprise development. It is the ideal forum for software developers, project managers and architects to learn about the latest Technology, Architecture and Agile Methodologies.

 

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JavaOne drew the short straw

Posted on October 6, 2011 by admin

JAX-Chairman Sebastian Meyen comments on the status of this year’s JavaOne and talks about the changes the conference has undergone since Oracle´s acquisition of Sun.

JAX London: You’ve regularly been to the JavaOne conferences since the 90s. Are you attending JavaOne this year?

 

Sebastian Meyen: Actually, I’ve not been to San Francisco all that regularly, but it’s true that since 1999, I have attended JavaOne many times, just not every year. This year it didn´t fit in with my schedule, so I’m following the most important keynotes online – fortunately you can pretty much watch most of it almost live.

 

JAX London: It’s now the second JavaOne under Oracle’s stewardship. What are your impressions?

 

Sebastian Meyen: JavaOne and the Moscone Center, this huge underground conference complex in San Francisco, have always formed a single unit. Inconceivable to the traditional Java community that JavaOne would one day not take place there anymore. But then, Oracle decided last year to organize JavaOne in parallel to its Oracle Open World. JavaOne drew the short straw, and the Oracle Conference occupies the Moscone center as of last year, while JavaOne has been relegated into a nearby Hilton. Unsurprisingly, many Java fans don´t like this very much.

 

JAX London: What did you think of yesterday’s opening keynote?

 

Sebastian Meyen: I found it very sober, but let me explain why I say this. JavaOne has always been a bit of a myth for the Java community. Every year at JavaOne since the mid-1990s, Sun has evoked a fantastic team spirit, which the Americans in particular, are especially susceptible to. It all goes back to a time when Java developers could truly feel the better man via-à-vis the Microsoft developers; Java was more than a technology, it was an idea, almost a worldview. Java was not proprietary like the evil world of Microsoft, Java was a joint project that unified many players in the IT world and, last but not least, Java promoted open standards. It may sound silly today, but at a certain time Java stood for a better world.

 

Having in mind this pathos factor of former JavaOne events, what we saw yesterday was just a tired imitation of the legendary JavaOne keynotes. No live music before the session and a very sober speech by Adam Messinger, who somewhat quickly handed over to the sponsor, Intel.

 

No invocation of the spirit of the Java community, no appreciation of the Brazilian Java fans who year after year, showed their appreciation with noise and applause; gone are many of the much loved show elements.

 

Less show, but more substance – that wouldn´t be such a bad thing. However, in times of transparent roadmaps and release plans there shouldn´t be many substantial surprises anyway. On the contrary, I would be annoyed if there were surprises of a technical nature, because this would be proof that there is a problem with transparency in the community.

 

And yet I think this continued silence, of how it actually is with the Java Community Process, how relations with Spring, with the OSGi Alliance, with Android, are etc., is inappropriate. If there’s nothing to report in terms of technical sensations, then JavaOne would be at least a place to present new alliances, new concepts for innovation, collaboration, etc. This has been, unfortunately, entirely lacking yesterday, and because of this, I found the keynote very boring.

 

JAX London: Were there any big announcements?

 

Sebastian Meyen: Not many. Intel has unveiled a couple of benchmarks that show how fast Java is running on its latest processors. Oracle provided info about Java 7 and 8 and the next Enterprise Edition, which will be dominated by PaaS. All of this has already been said several times, for example, almost verbatim at our California JAX Conference in late June.

 

One session had the GA version of JavaFX 2.0 and the JavaFX 2.0 Developer Preview 2.0 for Mac OSX. At some point during this presentation there was a brief moment of wonder and enthusiasm as the 3D animations that were being shown on the basis of JavaFX 2.0 were quite cool and ran smoothly across the stage. However, whether the world really needs JavaFX, remains to be seen. JavaFX was announced to get a direct support for HTML5, this could give the JavaFX technology, which has been announced repeatedly over the last four years, a bit more  up-to-dateness.

 

Unfortunately the announcements in the domain of mobile technologies were very thin – a couple of new partnerships with telephone companies, some revised APIs, but nothing along the lines of the trendy multi-touch world, which one sees at most conferences nowadays. It’s a real pity that the Android topic, which is so important for the Java ecosystem, is virtually nonexistent.

 

JAX London: What do you expect in general from this year’s JavaOne?

 

Sebastian Meyen: This question is difficult to answer. Oracle may have another ace up their sleeves and will announce an important message for the Java world, or maybe nothing else of note happens.

 

In any case, JavaOne won´t be comparable any more to what it has previously been, but I don’t want to comment here on whether this is good or bad, as a technology community probably needs an epicenter in order to celebrate certain things.

 

Technically speaking, JavaOne is largely an Oracle conference – which again is not bad – but needs to be taken into account, as about half of all sessions will be held by Oracle speakers. Even if JavaOne is trying to be more open under Oracle in comparison to the Sun times – e.g. Eclipse, OSGi, Spring, being adequately addressed in the conference sessions – the program still clings to something political. We should not forget for example that the word “Android” appears just once in a catalog of hundreds of lectures.

 

But everything else is mere speculation, I’m looking forward to the rest of the keynotes, which are always transmitted at 17.30 clock our time (German time), as well as the personal reports of the many friends and partners who are on site.

 

JAX London: Thank you for this interview!

What do you think of the changes Oracle has made to JavaOne? Is it the same conference it used to be? Or is it better or worse?

Sebastian is Chief Content Officer at S&S Media. He has been actively involved with the IT industry for more than 10 years. As a journalist he is constantly in touch with thought leaders in software development and architecture. He is editor in chief of the German speaking Java Magazin and program chair of the JAX conferences since 2001. Prior to joining S&S Media, he studied philosophy and anthropology in Frankfurt, Germany.

By Hartmut Schlosser | Online Editor | S and S Media

www.jaxlondon.com

JAX is the most comprehensive Java Ecosystems conference covering web and enterprise development. It is the ideal forum for software developers, project managers and architects to learn about the latest Technology, Architecture and Agile Methodologies.

 

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What’s New in Android Development Tools 14 Update?

Posted on September 29, 2011 by admin

A preview build of ADT (Android Development Tools) and SDK Tools, r14 has been released. This update features some major changes to the build system, for both Ant and Eclipse users. (http://tools.android.com/recent/buildchangesinrevision14)

What does it mean for Ant users?

For Ant users, the build system has been completely overhauled in this release. Dependency check is now supported prior to any actions, meaning that stages such as aidl compilation amd resources ID generation, will no longer run if no file has been changed. This should result in faster compilation times. The Ant build rules have also been revamped, with the previous three rule files now forming a single file.

 

And Eclipse?

Eclipse users will also see changes to the build system. The output of javac has been changed from bin/ to bin/classes/. This change has been implemented as, previously, other files and resource items were placed in bin/ and dex previously used this folder as the source of the dex step. bin/ will now show up in the Package Explorer view, although .ADT will continue to use bin/ as its top-level output folder for Android-specific files.

 

Android team continue their efforts to optimise the aapt command

This release sees the Android team continue their efforts to optimise the aapt command. ADT 12 introduced the ability to disable the final packaging steps during an incremental build, and added an option to only generate the R class and compile the Java source code on automatic builds, upon file save. This allowed the developer to skip the bytecode conversion and resource packaging steps, and thus save time. R14 builds on this, adding the ability to detect whether R.java must be regenerated, and only running aapt when it is required.

 

In addition, there are further, general build improvements that will affect both Ant and Eclipse users. Now, r14 only needs to run aapt once, to generate all the necessary files; previously, the command ran multiple times, which could result in a long build time for larger projects. R14 now processes png files outside of the apps packaging step and caches them, whereas in previous releases, each build went through all the png files and always processed every one, which could become time-consuming for larger projects with multiple png files.

 

Changes for the library project

The library project has also undergone some changes. Library projects in Android are development projects containing shared Android source code and resources, that other Android app projects can refer to, allowing them to include the compiled source in their own .apk files.  R14 moves to library projects generating a jar file, that is directly used by other projects. This is an effort to alleviate several problems, including Eclipse JDT requiring source code to be located in a source folder under the project, which forced ADT to add and remove virtual source folders whenever a project was opened or closed. This resulted in Eclipse having multiple representations of the same on-disk file; something that Eclipse struggles with.

 

Other updates in r14, include:

 

Quickfix for extracting Strings when the caret is inside a String.

 

A new XML formatter, which formats XML files according to the standard Android coding style.

 

A new “Remove Container” visual refactoring, which removes the children of a container up to the top level, and can transfer layout and namespace attributes if necessary.

 

A preview of r14, can be downloaded now from the Android Tools project site (http://tools.android.com/download/adt-14-preview)

 

By Jessica Thornsby | Online Editor | S and S Media

www.jaxlondon.com

JAX is the most comprehensive Java Ecosystems conference covering web and enterprise development. It is the ideal forum for software developers, project managers and architects to learn about the latest Technology, Architecture and Agile Methodologies.

 

 

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New IDE Released from Meme Apps

Posted on September 26, 2011 by admin

Meme Apps recently announced the beta release of a new, Eclipse-based, cross-platform tool for developing and managing business applications, Meme IDE (http://www.memeapps.com/.) In this interview, we speak to Meme Apps CTO Simon Monk, to find out more about this new IDE.

JAX London: You have just launched a beta of the Meme IDE. In your opinion, what sets Meme apart, from other IDEs?

 

Simon Monk: I think the key thing that we do differently is to focus on a platform for business applications, rather than games or consumer apps. This is reflected in our initial choice of platforms – Windows Mobile 6.5 and Android 2.1. Windows Mobile 6.5 is still the platform of choice for most business applications, especially on rugged devices; however we are seeing a great deal of interest in Android. We see the ability to build for both of these platforms, from the same source code, as future-proofing business solutions against the vagaries of the mobile OS market.

 

JAX London: What technologies play a role in the Meme IDE?

 

Simon: Meme IDE is built using the Eclipse RCP. It is a stand-alone IDE that you can run on Windows, Mac and Linux. Many people are surprised to find that they are able to build Windows Mobile applications from Mac and Linux.

 

The Apps are built using a combination of graphical editors tailored to WM and Android and the Meme Script language. This separates the presentation, which is platform specific, from the business logic that is not.

 

JAX London: What functionality is currently available in the beta release?

 

Simon: The current beta release (1.10) includes most of the core functionality for Windows Mobile and Android. It can be downloaded from www.memeide.com

 

The key features are:

 

  • Graphical Editors for both platforms
  • Full set of UI controls for both platforms
  • HTTP and HTTPS requests
  • Persistent storage of data on the devices
  • Signature capture on Windows Mobile
  • Android Emulator support

 

JAX London: What do you have planned, for future releases of Meme?

 

Simon: Version 1.11 beta is due for release on September 1st 2011. As well as many minor incremental updates, this will also include support for SQLite databases.

 

The development team is currently issuing a new release every 2-3 weeks. The priority of new features and bug fixes are informed by the feedback from the beta process. The first commercial support programs for Meme IDE will become available at the end of the beta process (end of September 2011). The Meme IDE will remain free to use after this time. iOS platform support will be available Q1 2012.

 

I am presenting a series of webinars on the Meme IDE. Details of these can be found on the Meme IDE website (http://www.memeapps.com/)

 

What do think about the new IDE? Is it something you could see yourself using?

 

Simon has been active in mobile software development for ten years. He has a PhD in software engineering and co-founded the mobile software consultancy and technology company Momote. He has spoken at a number of international conferences including SD Best Practice in Moscow. His professional interests are centred around mobile application development, as well as software development processes.

By Jessica Thornsby | Online Editor | S and S Media

www.jaxlondon.com

JAX is the most comprehensive Java Ecosystems conference covering web and enterprise development. It is the ideal forum for software developers, project managers and architects to learn about the latest Technology, Architecture and Agile Methodologies.

 

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Oracle and Google CEOs Fail to Settle Over Android

Posted on September 22, 2011 by admin

Earlier this month, Google and Oracle’s CEOs, Larry Ellison and Larry Page, were ordered to participate in settlement talks, over the alleged patent and copyright infringement against Oracle, by the Android OS. Both parties responded positively to the notion of a settlement court, with Oracle issuing a statement to the court that:

“Oracle concurs with the Court’s view that an additional attempt at settlement of the case through mediation before a United State Magistrate Judge is warranted. Oracle has found previous efforts at settlement, including private discussions between the parties, frustrating for lack of follow-through, and believes that those efforts have not exhausted the possibilities for resolving the case.”

 

This isn’t the first time that Oracle have been in favour of facing the Google CEO in court. In a court filing last July, Oracle requested the court’s permission to take Larry Page’s deposition, stating that he made the decision to acquire Android, and participated in negotiations between Sun and Google, regarding a possible Java license for Android. Google reacted by calling Oracle’s request a “harassing demand,” according to Reuters (http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/07/15/us-oracle-google-lawsuit-idUSTRE76E08U20110715).

 

Google initially reacted to this new court order by proposing Andy Rubin, Senior Vice President of Mobile at Google, and Kent Walker, Vice President and General Counsel of Google, attend on behalf of the search giant. However, US Magistrate Judge Paul Grewal forced both Larry Ellison and Larry Page to turn up for the settlement talks, with an order that stated:

 

“The party representatives required to attend this and any further conference include, but are not limited to, Larry Ellison of Oracle and Larry Page of Google.”

 

According to a report by the Wall Street Journal (http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20110920-700312.html,) the two companies failed to settle during the face-to-face meeting on Monday 19th September, but a court filing reveals that the U.S. Magistrate Judge Paul Grewal scheduled a second settlement conference for Wednesday 21st. It is unclear whether the two CEOs were in attendance.

 

 

The court can still order the CEOs to additional meetings, but the long-awaited trial between Google and Oracle over is currently set to begin on the 31st October.

 

By Jessica Thornsby | Online Editor | S and S Media

www.jaxlondon.com

JAX is the most comprehensive Java Ecosystems conference covering web and enterprise development. It is the ideal forum for software developers, project managers and architects to learn about the latest Technology, Architecture and Agile Methodologies.

 

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An Intro to Neo4j and Doctor Who at JAX London 2011

Posted on September 19, 2011 by admin

JAX London is returning for a second run in 2011, with a brand-new track dedicated to Android, and the usual blend of full day tutorials, community events, sessions, and speakers’ panels. And, we are proud to be hosting 2011′s JAX London Autumn Edition, alongside JBoss’ JUDcon London 2011!

 

As part of JAX London, Neo Technology’s Ian Robinson will deliver a full-day workshop on RESTful Web Service techniques, and a session on Neo4j and Doctor Who. In this interview, we speak to Ian Robinson, about the link between the science-fiction TV series and the Neo4j graph database, and what to expect from his full-day introduction to REST.

JAX London: As part of Jax London, you will run a full-day workshop; ‘REST in Practice – A Workshop on Web-based Distributed Systems.’ What are the main topics you plan to cover, in this workshop?

 

Ian Robinson: The core focus for the workshop is on designing and building hypermedia-driven Web-based systems. The workshop starts by baselining everyone’s understanding of the Web’s architecture and its foremost application protocol, HTTP. We then very quickly get into the details of designing resource-oriented systems that implement complex workflows using HTTP and the simple navigation mechanisms we’re all familiar with from the human Web – links and forms. Here, we run through a couple of detailed examples, each of which illustrates a number of different design and implementation strategies. The workshop ends with a look at a couple of staple enterprise concerns: event-driven systems, and security.

 

JAX London: In your opinion, what impact is the rise of the web having on traditional enterprise architecture approaches?

 

Ian: The Web is now twenty years old, but it’s only in recent years that we’ve come to view it as a viable application platform for enterprise systems. Though it began as a publishing platform, it is now emerging as a means of connecting distributed applications. The Web as a platform is the result of its architectural simplicity, the use of a widely implemented and agreed-upon protocol (HTTP), and the pervasiveness of common representation formats. It succeeds as a platform in large part because it combines architectural simplicity with a small set of widely accepted technologies, providing scalability, security, and reliability for those systems that embrace its simple tenets.

 

Traditionally, distributed systems development has focused on exposing custom behaviour in the form of application-specific interfaces and interaction protocols. Conversely, the Web focuses on a few well-known network actions (the now-familiar HTTP verbs) and the application-specific interpretation of resource representations. The Web’s low-ceremony middleware environment comprises a set of widely deployed, commoditized servers. From the obvious — web servers that host resources (and the data and computation that back them) — to the hidden: proxies, caches, and content delivery networks, which manage traffic flow. Together, these elements support the deployment of a planetary-scale network of systems, with the result that our systems architecture focus has shifted from intricate object models to information and document sharing using hypermedia.

 

JAX London: What can attendees expect to learn from your ‘An Introduction to Neo4j (and Doctor Who)’ session?

 

Ian: Attendees can expect to learn about 2 things dear to my heart: Neo4j and Doctor Who. Neo4j is a graph database, a type of NOSQL database that allows us to model, store and query extremely complex, densely connected data using document-like nodes and named relationships. I’ll show how to create and query data using Neo4j’s Java APIs, before going on to describe a supply chain traceability problem based on the history of the Dalek props from the popular British science-fiction show, Doctor Who. Using Neo4j’s new graph query language, codename Cypher, we’ll identify the hardest working Dalek prop part in showbiz – an enduring piece of TV memorabilia which, like the graph theory behind Neo4j, is older than Codd’s relational data model.

 

JAX London: You are the Director of Customer Success for Neo Technology, the company behind Neo4j. Neo4j 1.4.1 GA was recently released. What’s new in this release?

 

Ian: To the features introduced in 1.4 – Cypher, our new graph query language; automatic indexing of nodes and relationships; paging and batching in our REST API; self relationships; an improved Webadmin tool; and many, many performance improvements – 1.4.1 adds some small changes to our support for large backups, better cross-platform server scripts, and more predictable commit semantics when working with indexes. 1.4 was the summer’s big release: 1.4.1 added some less glamorous, but nonetheless important features that early adopters of 1.4 had requested.

 

 

Ian Robinson is Director of Customer Success for Neo Technology, the company behind Neo4j, the world’s leading open source graph database. He is a co-author of ‘REST in Practice’ (O’Reilly) and a contributor to the forthcoming ‘REST: From Research to Practice’ (Springer) and ‘Service Design Patterns’ (Addison-Wesley). He presents at conferences worldwide on the big Web graph of REST, and the awesome graph capabilities of Neo4j, and blogs at http://iansrobinson.com.

By Jessica Thornsby | Online Editor | S and S Media

www.jaxlondon.com

JAX is the most comprehensive Java Ecosystems conference covering web and enterprise development. It is the ideal forum for software developers, project managers and architects to learn about the latest Technology, Architecture and Agile Methodologies.

 

 

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Google Documents Shed New Light on Android’s Past

Posted on September 15, 2011 by admin

U.S. District Judge William Alsup has recently taken the step of denying Google confidentiality for several documents related to the Oracle/Google lawsuit. These documents are now public, and they shed an interesting new light on Android’s past. Some of these documents have been published at Florian Mueller’s Foss Patents blog, including an email from Andy Rubin to Google founder Sergey Brin, which discusses the company’s negotiations with Sun Microsystems, and seems to suggest there was a time when Sun contemplated creating “a ‘distribution’ of the Android system [à la] Redhat.” Andy Rubin refers to this as “an industry changing partnership.” Current CEO Larry Page is CC’d into the email.

Sun & Google Partnership?

Mueller theorises that, in light of the email, Rubin may have been in favour of striking a deal with Sun, based on open source terms, but clearly, for some reason this partnership never materialised. Mueller suggests that Google “wanted to maximize their control over Android and ensure that parts of Android would always be closed and proprietary in order to have leverage against device makers who may consider supporting search engines and online services other than Google’s own offerings as default options for users.”

 

It is currently unclear why the alleged Android/Java open source deal never came to fruition, although Mueller guesses that this was down to a licensing incompatibility, with Google in favour of a non-copyleft license and Sun eventually open sourcing Java under the GPL.

 

Could Google’s own internal documents affected them in trial?

The newly-public documents also include an internal Google presentation that could have ramifications beyond the trial, in particular the review of Google’s proposed acquisition of Motorola Mobility. Under the heading of ‘if we gave it away, how can we ensure we get to benefit from it?’ a page from the Google-internal Android presentation, proposes:

 

“Lead device concept: Give early access to the software to partners who build and distribute devices to our specification (ie, Motorola and Verizon). They get a non-contractual time to market advantage and in return they align to our standard.”

 

Has this been Google’s plan all along?

The example of Motorola, is particularly significant as Google announced they’d entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Motorola last month. However, it should be noted that the “lead device concept” proposal is presented as part of an internal presentation; it is unclear whether this concept was ever adopted in practice.

 

There has been some debate as to whether this bullet point actually refers to the Nexus, but Mueller disagrees, citing the “time to market advantage” as proof. In his opinion, the “pure Google” aspect of the Nexus program, gives these smartphones a limited competitive advantage, as they are missing extensions that are important to the user experience:

 

“The Nexus always appealed to only a certain audience and didn’t constitute a fundamental threat to all other OEMs’ businesses. No one would stress a “time to market advantage” as an incentive if devices have other limitations that at least offset that factor,” he says.

 

What would Google’s acquisition of Motorola been for Android?

Google’s desire to acquire Motorola has already raised the question of whether such a deal would give Motorola an unfair advantage in the Android market – and the release of this presentation is likely to cause even more speculation. However, Andy Rubin, Google’s Senior Vice President of Mobile, has always stressed that Motorola will be run as a separate business, and Larry Page has stated that “many hardware partners have contributed to Android’s success and we look forward to continuing to work with all of them to deliver outstanding user experiences.” He also reiterated that Motorola will be run as a separate business, and will remain a licensee of Android.

 

The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions, and is expected to close by the end of 2011 or early 2012.

 

Do you feel this alters Google’s case? Should they be allowed to purchase Motorola?

 

http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2011/09/shocker-for-android-oems-google.html

 

http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2011/09/sun-proposed-red-hat-style-android.html

 

 

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Red Hat Bring Java EE 6 Support to OpenShift

Posted on September 12, 2011 by admin

Red Hat recently announced that they had integrated their OpenShift PaaS with JBoss Application Server 7, bringing Java EE 6 to OpenShift. In this interview, we speak to Red Hat’s Mark Little and Issac Roth, about this update, and what it means for the PaaS user.

JAX London: OpenShift now supports Java EE 6, thanks to JBoss Application Server 7 technology. What was the biggest challenge you faced, when integrating JBoss AS with OpenShift?

 

Mark Little: There was only one technical challenge and that was putting JBoss AS 7 on to Express. Because Express runs a more constrained cloud profile than Flex, it was not possible to provide all of the EE 6 capabilities. Fortunately several years ago during the EE 6 process, we were instrumental in pushing for “profiles” within EE 6. A profile is basically a persona for EE 6 and you can provide some or all of the different (full) EE 6 capabilities within a profile.

During the EE 6 standardisation effort two profiles were created: the full profile (which includes all of the EE 6 capabilities) and the Web Profile (which is intended for Web development and hence does not need all of the capabilities). The Web Profile was a perfect fit for Express and we had recently just certified AS 7.0 against the Web Profile. Obviously the Full Profile is supported within Flex and migrating from Express to Flex is therefore relatively straightforward, since Flex is a superset of Express.

 

JAX London: How does this integration help with the problem of migrating existing applications, which is often faced by PaaS users?

 

Mark: EE 6 is a standard. It is a natural evolution from EE 5 and as with all of the EE (and previously J2EE) standards, we have worked hard within the standardisation effort to provide backwards compatibility where it is possible. What this means for our PaaS, which is significantly different to other approaches, is that people who have applications that run on EE 6 and its predecessors now have a zero-coding approach to moving to the cloud, and importantly, moving out of the cloud too. Therefore, there is no vendor lock-in with OpenShift JBoss PaaS. Furthermore, the learning curve to move into the cloud is virtually zero too: if you know EE 6 then you’re pretty much there. If you don’t, then we spent a lot of time and effort in the EE 6 standardisation work to make it easier to develop applications in Java, so it is now easier to work in Enterprise Java standards than with vendor specific frameworks of old.

 

Issac Roth: One thing that is unique about OpenShift among PaaS is that it has a full UNIX filesystem underneath it, which is usable by the applications. Any application that was written to an on-premise datacenter uses the filesystem. We don’t break this and make developers re-write applications to bring them onto OpenShift PaaS.

 

JAX London: What are the next steps for OpenShift?

 

Issac: OpenShift will continue to have a better and better experience for developers. More ease, more built-in utilities for the development lifecycle, integrations with useful developer tools, more choices of frameworks and middleware.

 

JAX London: What functionality will be included in JBoss Enterprise Application 6?

 

Mark: JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 6 will support the EE 6 Full Profile that I mentioned before. Outside of that, it will have faster boot time, a more modular architecture to allow for easier upgrades, much more manageability and also will be a lot faster across the board. We’ve spent a lot of time and effort in performance optimisations and improvements, so those will be some of the most obvious benefits for all of our users.

 

Are you a PaaS user? How do you feel about the changes?

 

 

 

Bios:

Issac Roth is Red Hat’s PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) Master, whipping the clouds into shape to create the best experience for developers who build on open source and leading Red Hat’s hosted online services strategy. He was previously co-founder and CEO of Makara, which launched the first PaaS to run Java EE applications and was acquired by Red Hat in 2010. Previously recognised as an innovative leader in the APM space, Roth was a pivotal member of the team that built Wily Technology and, after being acquired by CA, Inc in 2006, built CA’s end-to-end application management business. He is thrilled to be back at the open source leader after having started his software career as the first technical support engineer at ACC Corp (Red Hat’s original name) in

Bob Young’s living room.

Dr. Mark Little serves as the senior director of engineering for Red Hat’s middleware business. Prior to taking over this role in 2008, Mark served as the SOA technical development manager and director of standards. Mark joined Red Hat through an acquisition of Arjuna Technologies, a spin-off from HP, where he was a distinguished engineer, chief architect and co-founder. Mark has worked in the area of reliable distributed systems since the mid-80′s, and has a PhD in fault-tolerant distributed systems, replication, and transactions. As lead developer and manager on a number of important products for Red Hat as well as HP, Mark was instrumental in engineering the first fully compliant OTS implementation as well as the world’s first pure Java transaction service. He has extensive experience in the areas of fault tolerance, reliability, transactions, Web Services and SOA. Over the years Mark has been heavily involved in standards, from activities in the OMG, where he was a collaborator on the Object Transaction Service (OTS) specifications since 1991, to various OASIS committees. Mark has been involved with the W3C WS-Addressing working group since its inception, and also participates on the WS-Policy and WS-CDL committees.

 

By Jessica Thornsby | Online Editor | S and S Media

www.jaxlondon.com

JAX is the most comprehensive Java Ecosystems conference covering web and enterprise development. It is the ideal forum for software developers, project managers and architects to learn about the latest Technology, Architecture and Agile Methodologies.

 

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Oracle Vs. Google : Can you Copyright an API?

Posted on September 8, 2011 by admin

Oracle’s decision to sue Google over Android, has sparked yet another debate in the open source community: are APIs patentable? According to Foss Patents’ Florian Mueller, Oracle believes so, as the company are arguing that APIs and program names should be subjected to the same copyright protection as the underlying code.

Google v Oracle

Google have already made several attempts to get Oracle’s copyright infringement claims disregarded by the courts. On August 1st, 2011 Google filed a motion for summary judgement that requested the jury throw out Oracle’s copyright infringement allegations, on the grounds that they relate to APIs, which Google urges the court to find unprotectable by copyright. If this motion succeeds, no copyright infringement would be put before the jury, and Oracle’s patent and copyright case, would be reduced to a patent-only case. However, this isn’t the first time Google have tried to have Oracle’s copyright infringement claims disregarded. In 4th October, 2010, Google filed a motion to dismiss the original claim, or for Oracle to submit “a more definitive statement.” Judge Alsup agreed that the copyright part of the claim was potentially confusing, and requested Oracle to amend their claim.

 

According to Mueller, the question of the copyrightability of APIs, could have ramifications far beyond Android. Oracle have stated that, far from APIs being exempt from copyright:

 

“No court has ever found that the APIs for a complex software platform like Java are ineligible for copyright protection.”

 

Should APIs be copyrightable?

Business journalist Dana Blankenhorn, is strongly opposed to the idea of copyrighting APIs. He warns against a world where the API is copyrightable:

“Oracle could not only claim copyright over the MySQL database, but over the interfaces that connect it to other programs, and the names of the routines within the program. This would make interoperability – a key to tying software together – impossible without the express permission and (perhaps payment to) the copyright holder. And that permission could be withheld, or taken back, at the copyright holder’s whim.”

 

He also singles the Apache Software Foundation out, stating that because Apache allows code authors to keep their copyrights, a decision in Oracle’s favour would make it “legally impossible” for Apache to continue.

 

The concept of copyrighting APIs is a controversial one – and certainly unpopular in the open source community, but Mueller warns that it isn’t a straightforward issue. In his opinion, a denial of the copyrightability of APIs can potentially create a “copyleft effect,” where all modified and extended versions of an original, free program, must also be free. Obviously, this doesn’t always fit with a commercial business strategy.

Links:

http://seekingalpha.com/article/289279-oracle-wants-all-software-to-be-proprietary

http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2011/08/oracle-defends-copyrightability-of-apis.html

 

By Jessica Thornsby | Online Editor | S and S Media

www.jaxlondon.com

JAX is the most comprehensive Java Ecosystems conference covering web and enterprise development. It is the ideal forum for software developers, project managers and architects to learn about the latest Technology, Architecture and Agile Methodologies.

 

 

 

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What’s New in ThoughtWorks ALM Suite update?

Posted on September 5, 2011 by admin

ThoughtWorks Studios recently updated their Adaptive ALM suite, bringing their Twist Agile testing solution and the Go Agile release management tool, to version 2.3. We caught up with Vishy Nagarajarao and Chad Wathington, to find out what these updates mean for ThoughtWorks’ ALM users.

JAX London: Twist 2.3 includes Selenium 2 support. What specific benefits does this bring, to existing Twist users?

 

Vishy Nagarajarao: Selenium 2.0 in a sense marks the consolidation of two drivers, Selenium and Webdriver. With Selenium 2.0, existing Twist users now have the ability to leverage Webdriver capabilities to test mobile web applications, and expand the scope of the application categories they can test with Twist. In addition, existing Selenium users who upgrade their test suites to Selenium 2.0 can now take advantage of Twist’s capabilities which promote reuse, support refactoring, improve recording etc. and significantly enhance productivity around test suite creation and maintenance.

 

JAX London: In your opinion, what are the most important new features of Go 2.3?

 

Vishy: We’ve made auditing and traceability in Go a lot more powerful. Go automatically compares the md5 checksum of your build artifacts to make sure they haven’t been tampered with. Go now allows you to view the full job history of each agent on your grid, letting you see when and where something was built. It also lets you see Go’s historical configuration at the time something was created or deployed.

 

JAX London: Overall, what updates have been made to the suite in this release, in the area of Continuous Delivery?

 

Chad Wathington: In general we’re trying to make Continuous Delivery easier and more visible. Aside from the above changes to Go and Twist, we’ve also added a new stage duration visualization and some improvements to our deployment pipeline compare features, which allow you to see exactly what’s in the binaries you’re deploying. We want to make it simple for teams and organizations to see what’s happening in their release management processes.

 

Chad is responsible for ensuring that ThoughtWorks Studios designs and delivers great products. As the Vice President of Product Development, he provides strategic vision and commercial direction for ThoughtWorks Studios. Chad Wathington joined ThoughtWorks in 2004, after a stint in strategic consulting at the Boston Consulting Group. Before joining the product division, he led the internal change management effort for ThoughtWorks’ US business. Chad also has experience as a Product Manager, Business Analyst, Quality Assurance Analyst, and Project Manager. He has worked in various software industry verticals including manufacturing, health care, financial services, and consumer services. Chad is a Caterpillar Corp. trained Six Sigma Black Belt. He received a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from Harvard University, Cambridge MA.

Vishy Nagarajarao is VP of market development.

By Jessica Thornsby | Online Editor | S and S Media

www.jaxlondon.com

JAX is the most comprehensive Java Ecosystems conference covering web and enterprise development. It is the ideal forum for software developers, project managers and architects to learn about the latest Technology, Architecture and Agile Methodologies.

 

 

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