JavaOne 2009, day two

So day two started with a general mobility technical session which I am afraid I didn't stick around for very long in. It did appear to introduce a new word "Trendencies"; but still nothing being demoed really caught my eye. JavaFX for mobile is interesting I guess; but still iPhone appears to have a better experience. (Not that I actually own one of the beasties.)

Back to the speakers lounge then for presentation prep and catching up on emails.... until the real fun of the day begins.

TS-4641 State: You're doing it Wrong - Alternative Concurrency Paradigms on the JVM

I have to say that in general I was really impressed with this presentation although I was slightly disappointed that all of the examples given were in languages such as Clojure and Scala. He did make some convincing arguments though at in some particular cases you can on deal with this problem with language support and that with the VM you can ring fence that code.

The basic problem is that in order to deal with multi-core processors you need some way of dealing with shared state There are some helper classes in the VM with the addition of locks and queue; but that the basic model of synchronization is hard to use and maintain. Most people make mistakes at one time or another.

He first covered share transactional memory using Clojure, (more on Clojure state managment here.). Showed some pretty powerful examples, I would recommend you download the presentation when posted on the JavaOne site in a few weeks. It was one of those dense presentations where if you took notes you missed something important or interesting.

Then we went onto the Actor model. which is better for co-ordination applications. The examples where in Scala; but the classic implementation of this is in Erlang. Interesting case study of Ericson using this model to achieve 31ms of down time a year in there ATM switches.

The final topic covered was Data Flow Concurrency using either Oz or a library knocked together library based on Scala that the presenter has put together. The intriguing thing about this model is that the model is deterministic. It will either always deadlock or never deadlock, which makes testing so much easier.

Again very dense; but the slides were very detailed so well worth reading when they become available.

TS 5154 XTP: Patterns for Scalng the SOA, WOA and REST Predictably with Java Technology-Based Data Grid

Now this was actually by an oracle bod; but sometimes the easiest way to see these presentations live is at conferences. This was concerned with dealing with cases where you need to deal with high loads, XTP == eXtreme Transaction Processing.

Now in SOA you tend to end up passing a particular document through various steps via technologies such as ESB. Each hope can be expensive and XML is moved and serialized. You can't throw more hardware at this problem and at some point you need to changes how things are put together.

The suggestion is to use the Application Grid to store the information passed into the system and then pass a key into this share memory store around. You can also rely on asynchronous writes to the SQL database from the grid which means that you are never blocked in this way.

One other interesting use case is that use of caching in a data grid as described in the presentation can save a lot by reducing load on Mainframes. Maintenance contracts on old big iron is often related to load so reducing the amount of network accesses can result in cost savings. Interesting not only in this context.

You can find more on this topic in this article in SOA Journal.

Food at the Moscone

A brief interlude to talk about the lunches at Moscone: yuech. Now I have gotten that over with...

TS 5217 "Effective Java": Still Effective After All These Years

Josh is always a engaging speaker it is well worth going even if you have read the 2nd edition of the book. (For one reason of another I just got around to the updated version). I wont cover this too much as you should just read the book but it is worth mentioning the "PECS" mnemonic in Item 28 when coverings designing APIs.

PECS = Producer extends, consumer super

This is useful when you are trying to decided whether to use "super" or "extends" when defining generic parameters. It is slightly tricky because you are considering what the parameter to the method is doing not the method itself. For example:

public interface Stack<<E>
{

   public <E> pushAll(Set<? extends E> src); // src produces objects
   public void popInto(Collection<? super E> dst); // dst consumes items from the stack

}

There is an interesting corner case that the JDK doesn't deal with cases where the defined generic types are not directly related. You need to us an explicit type parameter which I have not come across before.

Set<Integer> ints = ....
Set<Double> doubles = ....
Set<Number> numbers = Set.union(ints,doubles);

// Wont compile, instead use an explicit type parameter

Set<Number> numbers = Set.<Number>union(ints,doubles);

Again just buy the book. :-)

TS-5295 Designing and Building Security into REST Applications

This was a presentation that didn't 100% match the abstract; but was interesting none the less. The first part focused on REST apis for administering OpenSSO instance and some fairly basic stuff about securing the web. The second part dealt with OAuth which I had to admit I had never heard of before; but was mentioned more than once over the time I was at JavaOne.

The most interested usecase of OAuth is for delegated access. So for example you your mashup site needs to access some resources from say Flikr.com. OAuth defines how your mashup site requests authorization and provided a set of HTTP headers that allow the site to access a particular defined resource. Useful if you want to share something for just a day for example.

They have recently checked in a bunch of Jersey filters to help implement OAuth on the client side. Nothing documented yet outside slide sets but you can peek at the source here.

TS-4883 Coding REST and SOAP Together

I was hoping that this presentation would give some insights on how to make a resource hierarchy into SOAP messages and vice vera. They didn't go into such details which is a shame as this topic would really be quite interesting. Probably I didn't read the abstract closely enough.

One point work mentioning is that if you take a class with both JAX-WS and JAX-RS annotation on it remember you have to secure it twice. Securing the service with WS-* won't protect the REST side.

More food

I was kinda obsessed by food that day having forgotten to eat yesterday so decided to skip out of the conference center for some food, I ended up at Lori's diner on Powell Street. Nice fresh air before diving back into dungeon.

BOF-5105 Hudson Commnity Meet-Up

The most interest part of this presentation was on a Hudson extension called drools. (Documentation to come) This allowed you to basically draw a process flow for you build system, including human step and splits joins etc, and deploy it to the hudson server. Look quite powerful to me. Hopefully there will be some more documentation on this soon so I can download and start playing.

There was also some demos of Netbeans integration. Being able to create a hudson job from a project was nice - also some monitoring tools.

There was one question about maintaining and building project branches; but the answer was to either clone jobs - which we do already or write your own extension.

BOF Test tools BOF

This was a little bit of a infomercial for PushToTest; but it did contain some interesting bits and bobs.

First of was the Windmill project as an alternative to Selenium. Appears to be moving faster and support authoring on more platforms. The second was they by using Rhino HTMLUnit is now able to run most of JQuery without even involving a web browser. Interesting from an automation point of view. Push to test have an open source script fixture that mashes up Selenium and HTMLUnit to this affect; but the life of me I couldn't find it on the website.