Oracle has officially responded to the Apache Software Foundation’s attempt last week to foment mutiny inside the Java Community Process saying: “Oracle nominated Apache for a seat on the Executive Committee in recognition of Apache’s continued participation and valued contribution to the community. The recently released statement by the ASF Board with regard to their participation in the JCP calling for EC members to vote against SE7 is a call for continued delay and stagnation of the past several years. We would encourage Apache to reconsider their position and work together with Oracle and the community at large to collectively move Java forward. Oracle provides TCK licenses under fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms consistent with its obligations under the JSPA. Oracle believes that with EC approval to initiate the SE7 and SE8 JSRs, the Java community can get on with the important work of driving forward Java SE and other standards in open, transparent, consensus-driven expert groups. This is the priority. Now is the time for positive action. Now is the time to move Java forward.”
Closing arguments in Oracle’s copyright infringement suit against SAP are set for next week. Oracle rested its case Monday without showing the jury its videotaped deposition of HP’s new CEO Léo Apotheker, who’s still MIA and likely to remain so until the jury figures out how much money SAP should pay Oracle for pinching its software. Oracle expects to get mileage out of the fact that Apotheker has been playing hide and seek and staying outside the reach of its process servers. It could show the video during rebuttal. According the Dow Jones blog All Things Digital, Oracle’s star litigator David Boies told the press last Friday outside court that “Maybe we’ll just let the jury know that [HP’s] hidden him. I think it may be better for the jury to know that here’s this guy who was at the center of all this [and we can’t find him].”
Considering a switch from WebLogic to JBoss Enterprise Application Platform? The Red Hat Migration Planning Guide details key considerations for planning a move from WebLogic to JBoss Enterprise Application Platform as well as common implementation and training standards and best practices.
Apple late last month washed its hands of doing any more Java updates for Mac OS X and even suggested a Java runtime could disappear entirely from future versions of the operating system. Monday Apple said that OpenJDK would produce the Java widgetry for Mac OS from here on out.
Software maintenance is a tedious and challenging job. As long as the software functions as expected, it looks great. Imagine the situation, your pager keeps buzzing in the midnight (Not a happy feeling, right?). Any software system, no matter how well it has been built and quality tested might get into run-time performance issues. The reasons can be within the functional boundary or can be from the external environment. Software systems are built on certain assumptions and pre-conceived notions. However, when they go live, the assumptions may turn out to be false causing the system to malfunction. In enterprise J2EE systems which generally have very large user base and involve interactions between heterogeneous systems, one of the general runtime issues reported is the system slowdown or system "hang". In such situations, the general trouble shooting pattern would be to analyze the Java thread dumps to isolate the threads which are causing the slow-down or hang. This article discusses the Java stack traces; anatomy of Java Threads and how to read thread dumps in general.
Last month, Oracle announced that it was collaborating with IBM to support the OpenJDK development roadmap and delivery of Java SE [Standard Edition] . Now Oracle and Apple have announced the OpenJDK project for Mac OS X. The initiative will lead to Apple's Java technology becoming available to open source developers. Apple will be giving up all the necessary tools required for the free and open source Java SE 7 implementation on Mac OS X including a 32-bit and 64-bit HotSpot-based Java virtual machine, class libraries, a networking stack and the foundation for a new graphical client. The company said that Java SE 6 will continue to be available from Apple for Mac OS X Snow Leopard and the upcoming release of Mac OS X Lion. Java SE 7 and future versions of Java for Mac OS X will have to be procured directly from Oracle.
When the time had come for pizza chain Pizza Nova to upgrade their IT, they tapped restaurant point of sale software developer Volante Systems and their Java based, Pizza POS solution to do the job. And it runs on Linux, too. Leading Canadian pizza chain Pizza Nova has been satisfying hungry appetites with authentic Italian cuisine since 1963. When the time had come for an IT upgrade, they hoped to improve communications, increase efficiencies and save money at the same time. To acheive all this, they tapped restaurant point of sale software developer Volante Systems and their Pizza POS solution to do the job.
The highly respected Apache Software Foundation (ASF), recently re-elected in a 95% landslide to the Executive Committee (EC) of the Java Community Process (JCP), is using its bully pulpit to incite mutiny, calling on other JCP members to vote down Oracle’s next proposed version of the language, Java 7. It wants the Java compatibility test kits (TCKs) that Sun promised in a letter of intent so it can certify Project Harmony, its breakaway open source version of Java Standard Edition for Linux, and it wants an end to the Field-of-Use (FOU) restrictions that Sun slapped on Java and Oracle means to continue. It’s threatening to walk out on the EC and slam the door behind it if it doesn’t get its way.
In the first and second articles of this series I discussed benchmarking and different approaches towards optimization of web application. As already mentioned in the last article, as soon as you get used to working with Key Performance Indicators you will want to automatically monitor them. ShowSlow is a great example of how you can track performance metrics over time. dynaTrace also sends performance data to the public ShowSlow instance on a daily basis. You can read more on how we test about 3000 URLs every day.
Intel made the hairs on the back of the necks of the world’s great contract manufacturers stand up Monday when it said it would make somebody else’s chips for them. It’s never done that before and who knows where the experiment will take it. It’s going to make Achronix Semiconductor’s Speedster22i FPGAs on its drop-dead state-of-the-art 22nm process, which will only come on line next year.
We recently had the requirement to log all incoming and outgoing parameters from Bounded Task Flows (BTF) for JDeveloper 11g. Via the kind assistance of Simon Lessard and other OTN Forum helpers (of whom I'm very grateful) we were able to come up with the following solution. I share it here for others to benefit from Simon's advice.
JetBrains adds GitHub support in IntelliJ IDEA 10 and other IntelliJ based products. Have you heard about Github and/or using it for your projects? GitHub support is coming in IntelliJ IDEA 10 and in other IntelliJ based products. With a new GitHub plugin installed you’ll be able to checkout your existing GitHub repository and auto-open it as a project or share a project on GitHub instantly. You can checkout an existing project and start coding in a few seconds!
Garden Fresh is a company with 119 Souplantation and Sweet Tomatoes restaurants operating in 15 states, offering fresh produce and salads, made-from-scratch soups, hot-tossed pastas, freshly baked breads and more. Since 1978, Garden Fresh has kept a commitment to delicious and healthy dining. The very first Souplantation restaurant was the first casual eatery brand to serve fresh, wholesome menu options, and the concept continues to resonate with customers.
Told ya so. Told ya so. Told ya when Larry Ellison said, “You’re going to see us buying chip companies” a few weeks ago he didn’t mean AMD and that something like Mellanox Technologies was more up his alley if for no other reason than Mellanox is big in InfiniBand and Larry is big on InfiniBand. According to him, “InfiniBand is by far the fastest and most efficient switch fabric for running enterprise data centers.” Well, rather than buy the joint, Oracle Wednesday said it bought 10.2% of the profitable-but-not-hysterically profitable publicly traded company’s ordinary shares. It didn’t say how much this “strategic investment” cost but Mellanox has a market cap of around $740 million.
Although it won’t be official until the Top 500 list comes out in November, but it looks like the fastest computer in the world at the moment by Linpack benchmarks is a 2.5 petaflops (theoretically 4.7 petaflops) beast called Tianhe-1A built by the Chinese out of 7,168 Nvidia Tesla M2050 GPUs and 14,336 Intel processors. The U.S. currently holds the number one spot with a 1.75 petaflops machine called Jaguar and has only lost the title once and then briefly a few years ago to Japan.
The piano wants to write the next few pages of the “Cloud Concerto.” CIOs of 70 awfully big user establishments – complaining that they “can’t continue managing the cloud environment in the current way; we have to do something radically different” – have banded together as the Open Data Center Alliance to define the long-term requirements of the next-generation data center and the cloud infrastructure. They mean to speak with a unified voice and impact the industry if for no other reason than they collectively represent a $50 billion-a-year IT spend. And they are looking for new recruits. The companies say they want open solutions based on industry standards that can be sourced from multiple vendors and interoperate across data centers. They’re concerned about increasing complexity, the speed of change, cost and vendor lock-in.
It is common for cloud computing articles to talk at length about the abundant hardware resources the cloud can offer the modern researcher or analyst, but little is typically said about the back-end data store available with cloud computing. Before any research in the cloud can take place, data must be staged in a manner that is accessible to your cloud-based compute resources. It becomes non-trivial to perform the staging portion of your cloud use if your data sets are large. The Amazon EC2 cloud provides large quantities of hardware suitable for high-speed, high-throughput scientific computing. Coupled with the AWS storage and Amazon S3 system, it makes a formidable platform for anyone looking to do large-scale, scientific computing on quantities of file-based data. In this article, we’ll explore data ingress to EC2 because download speeds out of EC2 are typically much higher, both from consumer grade and enterprise-level Internet connections. Thus, we typically see more upload than download in the practical use of AWS services. For example, large data sets get transferred into EC2, working data stays on cloud-local storage, and compact, summarized results are brought back from the cloud.
The first YouTrack version was released one year ago. Today we celebrate YouTrack’s birthday with a new Early Access Program and invite you to download and evaluate Energy EAP builds. Report bugs and feature requests to our bug tracker. Rate individual EAP builds right on the YouTrack EAP Builds page. Communicate with us via the YouTrack community forum.
The goal of this book is to teach you how to develop Java Enterprise applications with OpenXava and other Java-related technologies, tools and frameworks. In this book you'll learn, not only OpenXava, but JPA, Eclipse, PostgreSQL, JUnit, HtmlUnit, Hibernate Validator framework, Liferay, etc. And more important, you're going to learn techniques to solve common and advanced cases you'll face developing business applications.
The following documents a somewhat small issue we're having with JDeveloper 11.1.1.2.0. At this time I'm unable to lodge an SR with Oracle Support as we don't understand the circumstances under which it occurs, thus we can't build the usual simple "Hello World" test case that Support so thrives on. However as we've identified the symptoms of the problem and the associated workaround I'll publish them here for others to benefit (including my team) so we don't hit the issue again.
Note this issue is only verified under JDev 11.1.1.2.0. I have no knowledge if the issue can be replicated in other JDev versions as this stage.
Issue Symptoms
From time to time after checking out an application from SVN inside JDeveloper:
....we'd discover JDev has incidentally modified one of the project files. In the following example the ViewController project is italicized meaning it has been modified:
Pressing "Save all" and then comparing the modified file against the previous revision reveals that the ViewController project has reverted back to the default settings, losing all the changes from the previous ViewController revision:
With the ViewController modified, the project can no longer compile (because among other things it's lost the attached libraries), and the change is effectively destructive. Whatever you do, don't check the ViewController project file back into SVN as it's just plain wrong.
Workaround #1
If you've arrived at this point where a project has been automatically modified by JDeveloper when checked out of SVN, the workaround in this situation is to Revert the project file back to the previous revision.
A Known Unknown Bug
In the example above I've identified the issue with a ViewController project in an ADF application. However note this problem isn't specific to any project type (e.g. Model, ViewController, whatever). We've experienced this issue across different projects in different applications from time to time. The converse of this issue is there's been a whole lot of projects this issue doesn't occur for too (i.e. in the above example, the Model project wasn't incidentally modified too), so the problem has something to do with the specific project configuration where the error occurs. Unfortunately we're unsure what that specific configuration is. However once the problem is detected it is consistently replicable on the problematic project at hand.
Bug Preconditions
While we haven't been able to work out what configuration in the project files causes the bug, we are aware of a set of steps that do lead up to the bug.
From a day by day basis our programmers will have an application open in JDeveloper, synced with an SVN repository:
From time to time the programmer makes a decision that rather than syncing each individual file change coming from the SVN repository into the application, it's just easier to delete the local working copy of the application and check out a whole brand new copy. To do this the developer:
a) Closes JDeveloper
b) Identifies the working copy application directory on the filesystem
c) Deletes it
d) Opens JDeveloper
e) Checks out the same application from the SVN Repository into the *same* directory that the previous working copy was checked out
It's at this point we see the issue described, but as mentioned, not for all application projects, just some projects, sometimes. However once this problem occurs, repeating steps "a" to "e" from above the issue is consistently reproducible.
From what we can see for step "e" is if we check out to any other directory, the problem isn't replicated.
What we found odd about this issue is if another developer on another machine checks out the same application, the said problematic project file wouldn't be automatically modified by JDeveloper. Yet this gave us the spark of an idea of what's going wrong and how to avoid it in the first place.
Workaround #2
You'll note in the "a" to "e" description above, the developer closes JDev, then deletes the application from the file system, then re-opens JDev. What we're not giving the JDev IDE here is a chance to recognize that one of the applications it had opened has been removed completely from the file system.
The IDE seems to be partially smart in that the application is removed from the application poplist at the top of the Application Navigator when we reopen JDeveloper. Yet if we then proceed to check out the same application as described in "a" to "e" we hit the described problem.
A workaround to the problem is before closing the JDev IDE, via the Application menu selecting Close, to close the selected application. If this option is done first the end problem is not seen. The conclusion is this gives JDev a chance to tidy up it's internal state about which applications and projects are open, and somehow this avoids the bug we're experiencing.
Arguably the IDE should be able to handle this situation regardless. The fact that the bug is destructive to the project configuration is a major concern, especially if a junior programmer doesn't understand what's happening and checks in the changed project file regardless, but in the end following the workaround steps here avoid the issue in the first place.
In the next couple of weeks VMware and Google, who’s now being sued by Oracle over Java and so really likes VMware’s Spring widgetry as an alternative to Enterprise JavaBeans for enterprise Java application development, will put out “the first in a series of technology collaborations” starting with a set of universally usable tools for building, deploying and managing cloud-based applications.
VMware on Thursday announced with Google the general availability of the first in a series of technology collaborations to make enterprise software developers more efficient at building, deploying and managing applications within any cloud environment on any device. The collaborative projects that will be available in the next two weeks include Spring Roo and Google Web Toolkit, Spring Insight and Google Speed Tracer, SpringSource Tool Suite and Google Plugin for Eclipse. "Together, Google and VMware enable enterprises to develop and deploy rich Spring Java applications across multiple clouds and devices." said Rod Johnson, SVP, application platform division at VMware. "Today we have reached an important milestone where these modern applications can run smoothly within the firewalls of a company's production datacenter or in a trusted provider's cloud environment."
For a bunch of open source geeks, the MySQL mob sure is a proprietary lot. They weren’t kidding when they called the thing “My” SQL because that’s the way the original team feels about it. For them only people with the right pedigree – who were there at the beginning – are fit to touch it. Geez, you’d think it was the Ark of the Covenant. Hey, wait a minute, maybe there’s something to that. Sun touched MySQL with its un-priestly hands and look what happened to Sun, a fate straight out of “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” Anyway, some of the old MySQL originals, inspired by MySQL co-founder David Axmark, have banded together to make sure Larry Ellison doesn’t get his grubby mitts around all of MySQL.
Azul Systems this week began what may turn out to be an orderly retreat from its high-priced high-maintenance hardware – appliances based on ever so chi-chi many-core proprietary chips and 10 rounds of VC funding that tops $200 million. By fielding software that runs on 64-bit garden-variety x86 commodity servers and does essentially the same thing as its six-year-old Vega boxes, which is to tickle the performance of ye ole stodgy, garbage collection-constricted Java applications, the company could wind up in the arms of some sugar daddy with a fat pocketbook. The software is the Zing stuff Azul said it was developing over the summer and now it’s here, an elastic runtime platform for all kinds of configurations of Java apps, especially those high-volume ones like web portals, trading platforms and e-commerce web sites, where response times just might be important.
Netbiscuits, the world’s leading cloud software service for cross-platform development, operation and management of mobile sites and apps, today announced the realization of a mobile learning portal to help users prepare for the trading examination of Eurex, one of the leading international derivatives exchanges. By visiting the mobile optimized website http://m.eurexchange.com users can view the entire question catalogue and test their knowledge with an exam simulation. Netbiscuits developed the mLearning web application for Capital Markets Academy, the central advanced training institution of Deutsche Börse Group.