JavaOne wrapped up last week and I think it was very successful for Caucho. We had a few hundred people drop by the booth to learn about Resin, Quercus, and Hessian. A number of users of all of these technologies dropped by as well to let us know how we’re doing. Thanks to everyone who stopped in!

If you’re using Resin, Quercus, or Hessian in a project, let us know! We’re really interested in how you’re using the products, even if you haven’t purchased a professional license or support. All of our products have an open source component and for a lot of projects, that’s all you need.

I also did a couple of interviews during the show, one for Java Posse, which will hopefully show up in a podcast soon and one with Tony Baer of onStrategies, who blogged about Quercus. Look for Caucho to show up in the news more and more over the coming weeks. We’ve got a lot going on…

Last week I was working on our demo for JavaOne. It’s pretty much done, except for one small feature and I’m pretty excited about it. It uses our new HMTP (Hessian Messaging Transfer Protocol) to send messages back and forth between client and server. The demo itself is a Sudoku game where you play against another player on the same board. It requires both RPC style communication and messaging, both of which are natively supported by HMTP. Anyway, I’ll give a much more coherent explanation soon as I’m writing up a fact sheet and animation to show message flow today. We might be able to bring up the game live this week, so stay tuned for a link…

The demo is implemented in Flex 3 (open source :-)) using the AS3 implementation of Hessian and HMTP. I want to send a shout out to Riccardo Cohen who has been working with Hessian Flash. He was nice enough to write up a few tutorials to show how to use it with entity beans. Check it out here: Riccardo Cohen’s tutorials. Thanks, Riccardo!

Just a quick update to let everyone what’s going on this week. I’ve got three big projects that I’ve been working on this week. First up is the newsletter. We trying to get a monthly newsletter going to let people know about success stories, new features in Resin, upcoming events, and general Caucho news. That’s cool and I like letting everyone know what’s going on, but the fun part has been writing the newsletter sending app. I’ve been writing it in Quercus and using some of Resin’s lesser known facilities like scheduled tasks and the authenticator framework. It’s pretty cool how these two features come together and make PHP apps so much easier to write. When some time comes around (i.e. after May and JavaOne), I’ll try to write up a description of how I put all these things together.

Hessian messaging (codenamed HMPP/Hemp) is getting pretty exciting. It’s inspired by XMPP and basically allows creating truly rich client side applications. Actually, it’s even more than that. It combines RPC and messaging into one elegant protocol which lets you do pub/sub and a bunch of other cool things. It’s still preliminary now, but I’m writing what should be a really cool demo for JavaOne. Make sure you stop by the booth to check it out!

A couple of months ago, I talked with the guys from Terracotta at the Silicon Valley JUG. Since then, we’ve been working out how to make sure Resin and Terracotta work together. The basic distributed shared objects work fine, pretty much out of the box. Earlier this week, I was also able to get Terracotta’s distributed sessions going, but then tried it again and it stopped working. Don’t you hate it when that happens? It seems there’s an issue with classloader naming. Anyway, we expect to get it worked out soon so Terracotta and Caucho customers will hopefully get to use the full features of both companies’ software.

I’m working on fixing some standing bugs on the Flash and Flex versions of Hessian this week. I’m pleasantly surprised at how many people are interested in this project and happy to get bug reports. People are comparing this project to BlazeDS, which I frankly haven’t had time to look at, but it seems that some people prefer Hessian.

Here’s a quote from user Koen Serry:

Since Hessian/Burlap are really a better alternative (on a flex client) for connecting to the backend than BlazeDS (which includes IMHO way too much dependencies as well as being not very developer friendly (eg. config file over convention)). Furthermore, hessian already proved itself on the numerous java fat clients.

If you’re using Hessian Flash or Flex, please let me know! I’m interested in seeing your applications, getting bug reports, or requests for certain kinds of documentation. Koen suggested a mail application example and I’d be eager to hear any other ideas people have.

Whoops… I didn’t get a chance to post my promised posts on the new features in 3.1.5 because I was working on fixing the formatting of the blog to look more like our new website. Although, that was only part of it — I’ve spent the last few days working on a couple of magazine articles about our Hessian and Comet offering for Flash and Flex. Now that that’s done (until they send back the edits… :-)), I’m working out the presentation for AjaxWorld…