This week has been (and will be) mostly an engineering week for me, but it’s an exciting one so I thought I’d let everyone know what’s going on.  First, I’m working on improving BAM to be easier to use from a developer’s point of view.  Essentially we moved to an introspected service instead of a strict interface for receiving events.  To give an example, the main BAM interface for receiving events is BamStream.  It contains methods like the following:

There are similar methods for queryGet, querySet, etc. These methods are event handlers that are called on a service when a new message or query arrives for the service. The problem with this is you might have to write the following dispatch pattern:

This isn’t too bad, but it looks messy when you have a ton of different message types. To fix the problem, we’ve written a base class called GenericService. Now instead of writing the code above, you would extend GenericService and write the following:

This is equivalent to the code before, but now we do the dispatch for you. Under the covers, there’s some reflection magic going on, but basically all you have to do is make methods that match the right signature and use parameter annotations like @Message, @QueryGet, @Presence, etc.

In other news, I’ve also been making sure that WordPress Mu works with Quercus. There were a couple of buglets, but those are fixed in the trunk now and it should be ready to go with Resin 3.2.0, due out in about 2-3 weeks. I put up a wiki page that describes how to do the installation. It’s a bit long right now, but hopefully we’ll soon be getting a Debian install that reduces the steps by half.

The last two weeks have been pretty engineering heavy for me, thus the slow pace of updates. What I’ve been working on are several BAM-related technologies. First, the Sudoku demo has been simplified and clarified. I’ll be writing a tutorial based on it soon which I’m also hoping to publish in the Flash & Flex Developers’ Magazine. Next, I’ve been working on building a PHP/BAM bridge. This is pretty exciting and shows the real power of Quercus: you can write true event-based programs in PHP. This is not something that is done easily or cleanly in the C implementation of PHP. The first example of this will be an XMPP chat server. Basically we’re moving PHP beyond the realm of simple HTTP web applications to have the full power of the Java platform.

I’ve got a couple of articles in the latest Flash & Flex Magazine about Hessian. You can even download one of them!

I’m submitting another article on using BAM with a Flash client that should hopefully be out later in the summer.

Thanks to Frank Greco and everyone who came out to see my presentation at the NY JavaSIG. I got some great questions and it looked like a lot of people were starting to understand the problems with interactive applications using HTTP. BAM is the way to go! Anyway, here are the slides from my presentation: NY JavaSIG slides on BAM/HMTP

And, a correction: During my presentation, I stated that there is no standard intereface for Comet on the server. While technically true, the new Servlet 3.0 draft spec has an API. Someone mentioned this during the Q&A and I said that while I had looked at the spec, I didn’t actually see the Comet references in there. Well, they are there in Section 2.3.3.3. I haven’t had a chance to review the spec thoroughly, but it looks like a nice compromise. Webtide’s Greg Wilkins has a nice intro here that features Comet use cases in Servlet 3.0. There were a lot of attempts to create Comet APIs from us, Jetty, Tomcat, and Glassfish, so if we can standardize on something reasonable, that will help everyone. It still doesn’t change the fact that HTTP was not designed for this kind of interaction though.

Just a quick note: I’m sitting in the Brooklyn Bagel & Coffee Company on 8th Ave (Free Wifi!) with about 2.5 hours until my presentation at the NY JUG on BAM/HMTP. There’s a demo up here that I’ll be presenting during the meeting. It’s good enough to see what’s happening at the moment, but it will get even better in the coming weeks and might even be posted as a Facebook application.

See you at the JUG!