After a hiatus during a paper/presentation/training season, I’ve finally gone back and cleaned up the Flash/Flex versions of Hessian and BAM. The Hessian side is now updated to be compatible with the latest Hessian 2 changes. As Scott mentioned, the BAM API and protocol has undergone some changes since the last revision, so I’ve rewritten the Flash implementation of that as well. It was a surprisingly large amount of work, but I think everything is now up-to-date as well as a bit more stable.

For those that are interested, here’s a quick hello world with the new BAM API with a Flash client and a Java backend…
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This blog is now 1 year old! A year ago today, we made the first blog post. Thanks to everyone who’s read, subscribed, and commented!

A quick update on what’s going on this week: the Resin team is working on the big changes for Resin 4.0 including the dynamic server support that offers distributed sessions, distributed object caching, and remote application deployment. The JavaEE 6 compliance work for Resin 4.0 is also under way, with the team focusing on EJB 3.1 Lite this week. The Quercus folks are working on improving the already awesome performance and reducing the memory footprint. Dynamic languages can be rough on the allocation system..

I’ve been finishing up a whitepaper on Resin 4.0 and all its new features that should provide an in-depth introduction to what Resin 4.0 does and how it does it. We’ll be distributing it at TSSJS next month in Las Vegas and on the website soon. I’m also working on Hessian Flash/Flex this week, bringing it up to speed with the latest Hessian 2 protocol fixes. In addition to the rigorous regression test that we run, I’m planning on writing an application in Flex for the next training course that should find any problems that show up in real use.

2008 has been a great year for Caucho and we’d once again like to thank our customers, users, and community members for their support! This year we’ve seen

• Resin 3.1 become stable
• The introduction of BAM and Resin 3.2
• New large-scale deployments of Quercus
• A new streamlined Hessian
• Early snapshots of Resin 4.0 featuring cloud computing and OSGi

But we’ve made more than just technological strides over the past year — we’ve also been reaching out to the community:

• As Caucho’s evangelist, I had the chance to speak 8 times this year
• I’ve written 4 articles about Caucho products
• We created a Caucho Newsletter
• We launched a new training program
• We started this blog

Thanks again for a great 2008! See you in 2009…

I’ve been busy the last couple of weeks writing presentations and articles, but in between those, I’ve managed to slip in a few hours to work on Hessian Flash. You may have noticed that there were some changes to Hessian in the last release (3.2.1) which are not compatible with earlier versions. The good news is that the changes make common cases really compact and fast as I found out when I ported the changes to Hessian Flash. Within a couple of weeks, we should have a usable version of Hessian Flash that’s compatible with the version of Hessian in Resin 3.2.1 and later.

As a brief respite from the training preparation, I spent yesterday fixing a slew of Hessian Flash/Flex bugs. Check out the changelog for more detailed information. This is the last snapshot that uses the old Hessian 2.0 draft spec, so you’ll need to upgrade your Java implementation for the next release/snapshot. As you might have noticed from reading the hessian-interest list, Scott’s been busy streamlining the Hessian protocol. While these changes have resulted in a number of efficiency improvements, they also break compatibility with older versions of Hessian. The next version of Hessian Flash/Flex will support this new version of the Hessian draft and only this version.

BTW, the new Hessian Flash/Flex supports the [RemoteClass] metadata, which does the same thing as the old hessianTypeName field, only better. Turns out that the Flash VM has support specifically to allow aliases for remoting. You can check out the feature request for more info.

Today, I had a call about Quercus and I’ve been working on my presentation for JavaZone and these two things made me realize that we still have some confusion around the various Caucho products and licenses. We’ve got some people working on real literature explaining all of this, but in the meantime, I thought I’d try to clear up some of the confusion with a quick post.

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Tim Dawson, of International Decision Systems (IDS), was kind enough to write me a few weeks back about his use of Hessian in an equipment finance application. We collaborated to write a case study and it’s posted on our web site.

I’ve been cleaning up some Hessian bugs in preparation for the next release and I ran into a couple of doozies. During the week, I dealt with an issue reported by Riccardo wherein I rediscovered that ActionScript doesn’t actually have 64-bit longs, only IEEE 64-bit doubles. This screws up 2’s compliment arithmetic if you don’t recognize it, as I had done before. It’s now fixed…

Today I worked on (de)serializing Java enums with constant-specific methods. Don’t know what those are? Neither did I. Tim Dawson was kind enough to send me a couple of examples:

Kind of an interesting use case. Here’s the rub. Try running this code with it:

What do you think you get? The answer’s under the cut…
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Just a quick note: 3 new implementations of the Hessian protocol have recently come to our attention. An alternative Java implementation and 2 for Objective C. They’re now listed on http://hessian.caucho.com/. If anyone has any other implementations that are not listed on that page, please let us know!

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.