For the past 5 months, Caucho has been producing a monthly email newsletter to keep our customers up-to-date on everything that’s happening with our products and upcoming events. Until now, we had only been sending this newsletter to our existing customers, but now you can sign up to see what we’re doing whether you’re considering Resin Professional, using Resin Open Source, or just interested in the company’s developments. There’s a new sign up page for the newsletter which also contains the archives of all the past newsletters so you can see what you’ve been missing. Please check it out!

Last Friday we discussed a number of topics, but the only technical subject that came up was the naming for the BAM API. I’ll discuss that first. As you may know, we’ve been working on BAM for sometime now and even given a few talks on it. We’re using it extensively for the internals of the dynamic clustering implementation, but originally we were planning on making it a public API for games, finance, and other messaging based applications. That’s still the goal, but the other work on Resin 4.0 has pushed back the time line for the release of BAM at the user level.

After attending this week’s SF Java Meetup on Scala, I started comparing Scala’s actors and BAM agents/services. There are a lot of similar concepts, but this started us thinking about whether we shouldn’t rename the A in BAM, which currently stands for agent, to actor. Well, BAM can handle the duties of an actor, but it actually makes more sense to think of the building blocks as services. So it may turn out that like many architectural/standard acronyms, the letters of BAM won’t actually stand for anything. Anyway, we decided that our interfaces will have the prefix Bam*, while abstract classes will not. And the word “agent” is going away…

As for the non-technical points we touched on, probably the most relevant is the reorganization of the documentation. We’ve got a lot of docs, but they’re a bit scattered, so we’re planning on refining them and putting them into a book-like structure. There’ll be three parts to the book: an administrator guide, a developer guide, and a cookbook. As you may have noticed, we’re moving to a completely WebBeans-based configuration model. If you saw my post from last week, you know that tooling for WebBeans should be extremely useful and straightforward. Because of this, we may decide to create a doclet that outputs documentation of our configuration directly from the code!

A couple of other small topics came up this week as well. Many of you may know that we’ve been sending out a Caucho monthly email newsletter since last September, but we never actually had a formal way to sign up for it. We’ll this week we’ll be changing that by allowing you to sign up on the site and to view the past newsletters. Just keep checking the front page of caucho.com and you’ll see it as a new tab. The last thing that came up was our training course. The second class will be here in just over a week! There’s still a couple spots left, so if you’ve been putting off signing up, now it the time to do it. This week I’ll be putting in a few updates and polishing the material, so it should be a good one.

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…

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 our new monthly newsletter which will have announcements, tips on using Resin, Quercus, and Hessian, case studies from real production users, and more. There are a few things going on behind the scenes of the newsletter:

1. Writing content (duh ;-))
2. Formatting
3. Figuring out how to send it out

Writing the content actually hasn’t been too difficult — there’s a lot going on with the release of 3.1.5 (seriously, it’s got tons of fixes and new features) and Caucho in general. Formatting is also a bit tedious, but I’m slogging it out.

The real issue is how to send the darned thing out. I looked around and found PHPList, a PHP newsletter manager. It sends out mail at a nice steady rate, does double opt-in, handles opt-out, and other nice features. I ran it on Quercus and… it worked! I’m pretty pleased. Quercus occasionally hickups on untested packages due to very odd PHP or reliance on undocumented PHP behavior, but not this time. I think we’re finally getting to the point where we mimic the other implementation of PHP quite precisely (except we have distributed sessions, are faster in compiled mode, etc. :-)).