Archive for December, 2007
Amazon SimpleDB is not a database!
December 30th, 2007Amazon recently released a new service, SimpleDB, which provides simple persistence and query services for applications running on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). SimpleDB is part of Amazon’s web services strategy (or cloud computing services) and seems to compete…
The Spring Experience
December 23rd, 2007I’ve been meaning to post this for a while after a long trip to NY and the Spring Experience in Hollywood, Florida. This was a fairly nice and long trip, with my kids and wife joining me - including some…
Opinionated Architecture
December 20th, 2007I first heard the term “opinionated architecture” in Keith Donald’s presentation during The Spring Experience. He used this term to describe the emergence of new web frameworks, such as Grails and Ruby on Rails. The term immediately caught my attention,…
Get some “space” over the holiday season
December 19th, 2007You’ve already heard or read me talk plenty about OpenSpaces and Space Based Architecture, and how both can be used to scale out your application. Well, here is a testimonial from Srini Penchikala who just gave it a try and,…
GigaSpaces Customers Speak-Up on LinkedIn
December 18th, 2007Gojko Adzic, who works at software consulting firm Neuri out of London, posted a question on LinkedIN: Are you using GigaSpaces in production? Gojko further asks: "What are your experiences with it? What are the pitfalls? What were the biggest benefits?"
Several of our customers and partners have weighed in with their responses and we [...]
The Missing Piece in Virtualization: Middleware Virtualization
December 18th, 2007Nati Shalom recently wrote The Missing Piece in Cloud Computing: Middleware Virtualization. In this blog, Nati talks about the role middleware should play in making it simple to build applications to run on the cloud and he introduces the concept…
Recent Talks on GigaSpaces and Scalabilty - Now Online
December 18th, 2007A couple of videos with me are now available on the web. The first one was taken at TheServerSide Java Symposium panel discussion on performance, in which i joined John Davies as the moderator, and panelists Bob Lozano, Founder &…
New GigaSpaces/OpenSpaces.org Forums
December 17th, 2007As part of our ongoing effort to build and serve the fast-growing community around GigaSpaces and OpenSpaces.Org , we've re-launched our discussion forums , using Jive Forums. We have migrated all of the posts from the old forums and simplified the forum structure. So please, check them out .
The new forums are the [...]
Who needs standards anyway?
December 16th, 2007There is an interesting debate taking place on InfoQ: What role will the JCP play in Java’s future? “Alex Blewitt described the Java Community Process (JCP) as dead, likening it to a headless chicken which “doesn’t realise it yet and…
TechTalk with Nati Shalom is now live on TheServerSide.com
December 16th, 2007Joe Ottinger from theserverside.com recently interviewed Nati Shalom, GigaSpaces' founder and CTO, and asked him about scalability issues faced by modern applications, and what does it mean to scale an application.
When scaling an application there are a few principles that need to be followed. GigaSpaces helps developers build applications with little or no code [...]
Opinionated architecture - blue prints without the middleman
December 16th, 2007While at the Spring Experience this past week, I was delighted to learn a few things.
I got a good look at an OSGI environment, discovered what it felt like to turn rapidly in a circle on a cigarette boat doing well over 40 knots, and was introduced to the term “Opinionated Architecture”.
To my new understanding, an opinionated architecture, or framework, or solution, is one that proclaims a mandatory set of conventions in various things such as directory structure, configuration and code artifacts, naming conventions, and patterns of use. Due to the specification of these and possibly other things, the adopter of the solution will benefit from the use of the naturally occurring wizards and reusable templates that exemplify the mandatory bits and pieces. More than the traditional “blue-prints” offered by some, the essence of the available and proper use of the
opinionated solution depends on the erasure of alternative paths lest disaster strike.
This is not a trivial course to take. The author of the solution must have effective and real knowledge of the problem domain addressed by the solution - hopefully informed by enough failures that the successful path as declared is completely valid to the limits of the conceit of the solution.
For instance, web frameworks such as Grails provide rapid application development to those who agree to adopt the programming paradigm made possible and pushed by the elected framework. The result is a religious fervor adopted as those who share the faith and bend to the will of the higher, more-knowing, technological power are validated by their successes and spurred to greater adoption and recognition of the awesome power of the solutions’ prescription.
Caution: some wordiness follows:
The topic of the effect of poor planning and proceeding with lack of effective guidance down the enterprise architectural path was touched on in a BOF on high-performance Spring apps that took place late Friday night. (After the keynote filled with Monty Python references) During this talk, it was made clear that only experience can fulfill the needs of the architect challenged by a huge problem. What was also revealed is that humans frequently fail to avoid making the same mistakes numerous times even when presented with compelling alternatives. Old habits die hard it seems.
I am (tonight) of the opinion that unless your solution infrastructure mandates a path of best results and guides you to a proven successful state, you are more than likely to wander into the woods of competing best practices overgrown with budget constraints, lack of innovative and experienced resources, and just plain lack of understanding. It is therefore better to adopt a winning solution set whole-heartedly and when all the Kool-Aid is gone, agree to be dictated to by a benevolent dictator who has the right stuff.
The experience of a journeyman or artist is really very similar. In classical Ballet, for instance, the student rarely questions the validity of the techniques demonstrated by the Maestro leading the class/company. There is an element of necessary blind faith in the chosen path and the guides you choose to follow down it. Once one determines that the task at hand is indeed Ballet, one really has no choice but to turn out hips, point feet, and develop habits of posture that will sustain them through the most grueling choreography - for it will surely come and in spades. The student/apprentice is not well served to strike out on their own until a mastery is attained of the subject matter *through experience* that validates new choices and proves that through their adoption, greater success is to be found. The opinion therefore exhibited must be one based on hard-earned experience and still based predominately on a foundation made real and sustainable by the experiences of many others.
As it happens, I have watched the growth of OpenSpaces over the last many months with the skeptical eye of a - er skeptic - not realizing that the purpose of the framework is not only buzzword compliance and the implementation of popular development practices, but in the context of GigaSpaces and what is offered to our prospects and customers, a truly opinionated framework that takes the vastly flexible GigaSpaces infrastructure and service implementations and distills *the* successful use of it all into enforceable use of the Spring programmatic approach and technologies, thus empowering the neophyte and thought-leader alike with the unmistakably opinionated path to success.
The beauty of the switch to the prescriptive and formulaic from the free and often flailing style, is the stunningly rapid improvement in adoption rate, early prototyping successes, and sustained production-systems that continue to reinforce my growing certainty that we got our bit of it right this time.
Yes, OpenSpaces and by our support of it, GigaSpaces, has become an opinionated architecture/solution. As more and more tools and samples become available, and more wizards like my somewhat primitive, yet highly effective Project-creator, are built and offered, that fact will be obvious to all and joyfully so to the initiates and practitioners of the Linearly Scaling Aplication Arts. (The LSAA)
Write Once, [our way]
Scale Anywhere
Cheers,
Owen.
My Perspective Of JavaPolis07
December 14th, 2007
I had, again, the pleasure to attend the JavaPolis event in Antwerp, Belgium. This conference is characterized by it’s great atmoshphere, very much open and friendly. Also, the exhibition was very prodcutive for me, and in the evenings Red Hat and Sun competed on who is getting us most drunk with their free beer.
My "Agile" session, on Monday, went really well. And in fact, this year there were many sessions about the "soft" side of software development, technieques and practices. It may sound weired at first, and I keep getting the following question a lot: "Why is it that so many people are more and more interested in others experiences of agile and lean methodologies implementation". Well, I’m not sure that I have the full answer, but it is clear that this is indeed the case. More and more people are trying to build software better. There is no common denominator to the software being built, the problem domains vary between Command And Control Systems, middleware products to business applications, all are trying to improve their practices and to learn from one another. This atmoshpere of knowledge sharing and experiences exchange seems to be the core value of JavaPolis, and I really like it a lot!
Many of the tools is this area have been presented as well; It was also very nice the see the progress the Rational guys had with Jazz. What I liked most in Erich Gamma’s presentation about Jazz was the analysis of the rational (no pun intended) behind the tooling, and the fact that these guys are actually using their own tools. In fact, most of the companies who deal with tooling around software development management are heading to similar directions. TeamCity is now at it’s third release, and Atlassian is also putting their products more tightly integrated.
I personally think, that the tools that are going to be the most agile in their core will get the most adoption. The key for "Kaizen" - continuous improvement, is to review your practices and improve on them immediatly as you need to. Tools tend to be very good as a starting point, however, it is yet to be seen how well they can be adpated to organizational changes in practices. Time will tell.
Roberto Chinnici of Sun presented the direction of JEE. They call it "Right Sizing JEE", and by that they intend to reduce the bloat of the platform. The proposed way to do it is through profiles. Where the first one to be defined by the expert group is the "Web Profile" - probably Servlet, JSP and JPA. Sun essentially adopts the trend of Jetty/Tomcat Spring Hibernate/JPA as the defacto stack for web applications. The JEE expert group is relaxing the spec by only well defining the integration points. I think it is a very good move from Sun.
The presentation that got most of the attention, was of Joshua Bloch, which was initially called "Effective Java Reloaded" and than changed to something like "Will Java adopt closures". Bloch was expressing his concerns that Java may get to a state of over complexity that will make the language unusable. This is why he is reluctant to support addition of closures into Java. In his opinion there should be pre-spec implementation of closuers that will enable getting feedback about what/which/how/if closures should be supproted in the language. One of the interesting questions from the audience were about his current position inside Google. He didn’t provide a clear answer, however, his immediate next act on stage was to recruit people to Google. So, you can guess by that what is it that he does for Google.
One last thing, for those of you who attended my sessions, I would really love to get some feedback, please feel free to do so.
I really enjoyed JavaPolis, see you all next year.
