We’ve been pretty busy around here, working on the new Resin 4 cloud features (PDF) and improving the performance of Quercus (PDF), so soon it’ll be time to talk about it! We just got some good news yesterday that I’ll be speaking at JavaOne about Quercus performance. Here’s the session info for that talk. Right now, I’m scheduled for Tuesday, June 2 at 4:40PM in Esplanade 301.

I’ll also be talking about Resin 4’s cloud features a little later in June at Jazoon in Zurich. Check out the session info here. I hope you can make it to see one or both of the talks!

This week, I’ve been prepping for a talk on Quercus in which I promised to show a demo of Spring MVC using a PHP view. So that means that I actually had to do it. Turns out it was quite easy and PHP makes for a very nice, compact view technology for Spring MVC. This is a bit of tease since the code for this won’t go out until at least next week, but since a number of people have been asking for this a while, I thought I’d give a preview…

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It’s the last day of TSSJS here in Las Vegas and it’s been a really successful and fun conference so far. The skill level of the attendees is great, meaning a lot of meaningful conversations on the industry and trends in development. On Wednesday, our CEO Steve Montal gave a quick 5 minute overview of our current and upcoming technologies like Resin 4 with Java CanDI and cloud support as well as Quercus. There was a lot to pack in, but even this short speech garnered us a lot of attention. We also handed out our Resin 4 whitepaper which I think was well-received.

Thursday was a particularly interesting day because of talks at the beginning and end. Rod Johnson started out with a talk on Spring, where he (once again) declared JavaEE unnecessary and overly complicated. He claimed that an acquisition of Sun by IBM would be meaningless to developers, because nobody cares what they do anyway. It was a bit controversial to say the least. The part that irked me the most was that he claimed that SpringSource is the only independent application server vendor left… Caucho has been around for 10 years and is going strong, even in this economy. We predate Tomcat and SpringSource, so I think Rod was mistaken on this point.

At the end of the day, Reza Rahman lead a discussion of the direction and progress of JavaEE 6. We’re targeting the Web Profile and we’re participating in the JSR-299 (Java CanDI) expert group, so naturally we were interested in the community’s opinion of the new standard. There was an interesting debate on the contents of the Web Profile, with a lot people arguing for a profile that does not include a view technology. Reza explained that the view of the committee was that a JavaEE certified project needs to be able to build a complete application out of the box without add-ons, yet not prevent add-ons. The Web Profile is targeted at the 80% of developers who don’t need the extra bells and whistles of the full profile.

It turns out that the only thing holding up JavaEE 6 is the debate over Java CanDI and whether it should be included. There are not a lot of complaints about the technology itself, but rather its scope. What I found interesting is that while this topic seemed to be very contentious within the JEE 6 EG, the attendees of this session just wanted Java CanDI in. Its utility was apparent to them and they didn’t care about the political debate, they just want it in. Of course, that’s just what I heard…

Update: If you want the Java EE 6 spec committee to include Java CanDI (aka JCDI, aka JSR-299), let them know at jsr-316-comments@jcp.org

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.

This week, I’m teaching the Resin administration course, so last week’s meeting dealt a lot with preparations for that and the focus of the training. We’ll be discussing Resin 3.1 in depth this time, as opposed to last time when we also include Resin 3.2. Now that 3.2 is turning into Resin 4.0 and the first release isn’t out yet, we wanted to show the students a nice stable version.

The other main topic of the meeting was technical whitepapers. Nam is working on finishing up with his paper on Quercus performance (preview: 400% over standard PHP with APC), so that should be available quite soon. The other whitepaper we have in the planning stages is for the new Resin 4.0 cloud functionality. We had a nice phone meeting with a customer on Thursday to give a roadmap of where Resin and Caucho are going and they were very interested in using the cloud features, so we got even more inspired. This particular customer was interested in doing an internal EC2-like deployment (I think they meant hot redeploys with virtualization), so Resin 4.0’s capabilities would fit that quite well. They wanted more in-depth details about how Resin will achieve 1) distributed caching/sessions 2) cluster-wide deployment and 3) dynamic start and stop of cluster members. So far we’ve discussed the clustering in high-level terms, but now that it’s becoming real, it seems people want to get technical to convince themselves it will actually work and to see if it will fit the purpose they have in mind.

We had a brainstorming session on the topics we want to make sure are in the cloud whitepaper. They’re listed below. Please take a look at them and if you see anything missing, we’d love to hear about it.

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We developed Resin Personal based on feedback from Resin Pro users who want to deploy hobby sites and take advantage of compiled PHP. Using Resin Personal, the incredibly fast PHP-to-Java compilation mode is now available to hobbyists, students and no budget startup sites running on one server. Previously this mode was only offered to enterprise customers with high performance demands. Resin Personal includes the reliable and high performance of Resin Open Source. Details at http://www.caucho.com/press/2009-01-29.xtp

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…

During my talk yesterday at Devoxx, my laptop died about halfway through. Fortunately for me, Toni Epple stepped in and loaned me his laptop to finish up the presentation and even had a demo ready for me! Toni and I met the day before at the speakers’ dinner where we talked about Quercus and the new NetBeans PHP support. I hadn’t had a chance to look at it yet, so at the dinner I couldn’t say whether they worked together or not. The day of the talk, Toni stopped by the Caucho booth to try to get Netbeans to deploy WordPress to Quercus and we got it working quite easily on his laptop. He let me use that same laptop and the deployed WordPress as a demo when my machine died. What luck!

This just in… in the middle of writing this blog entry, one of the audience members from yesterday came to talk to me at the booth and told me that the same thing happened to another presenter at a BOF later in the day! I was using my laptop with Windows, then I tried another Windows machine which didn’t work, and finally Toni’s Mac saved me. In the BOF, there were again two Windows laptops that failed then a Mac saved the day again. I’m pretty sure what my replacement machine should be now…

Watch this blog for my presentation and either a description or a screencast next week of the demo I was planning to do. It’s actually a nice little example of how to profile and optimize a PHP app with a Java profiler. It will use our built-in Resin profiler that I modified last week to have a special Quercus mode.

Thanks once again to Toni for his help and check out his blog post about getting the NetBeans PHP and Quercus to work together. Thanks also to all the other attendees for coming and for their patience!

Here in the US, we’ve got the Thanksgiving holiday tomorrow which is traditionally a day in which we give thanks for all the nice things in our lives and eat a big turkey dinner with family and friends. I don’t have any turkey to give out, but I do think thanks are in order to our Caucho community.

Thanks to all of our users and customers who are using Resin, Quercus, BAM, and/or Hessian. Thank you to all the people who participate in our blogs, mailing lists, and forums. We really appreciate those of you who take the time to file bugs on our bug tracker. I’d like to give a special thanks to those of you who attended the first Caucho training session in October — you’re brave souls who gave lots of great feedback to make the course even better. Finally, thanks to all the people who have attended talks I’ve given over the past year.

Speaking of which… my next talk is going to be at Devoxx about Quercus. I’ll be showing a demo of how to improve the performance of PHP applications by profiling the compiled Java code. If you’re going to be at Devoxx, please stop by the talk or the Caucho booth. We’ve also got a really nice announcement to make about the success of a customer using Quercus and Resin in a very big way. It’s a household name that we’re just waiting on clearance to talk about. With any luck, I’ll be able to discuss their case at Devoxx, but if not, I’ll be sure to post details here when we’re allowed.

Thanks again to our Caucho community and happy Thanksgiving!

I’ll be giving a talk on Quercus at Devoxx next month and I’d like to get some idea of who’s using Quercus and for what. If you’re using Quercus, please fill out the quick survey below. Feel free to respond
to this post or directly to me. If you’re not using Quercus, but you want to, please let me know what’s keeping you from using it.

1. What application or applications are you using on Quercus? What are you using them for?

2. Did you use this application before with the C version of PHP? If so, why did you switch? Have you seen a performance/stability improvement?

3. Have you integrated Java and PHP in any way? (e.g. calling Java libraries from PHP or calling PHP from Java using javax.script)

4. What was your experience in installing a PHP app on Quercus?

5. Has your company/team’s organization changed because of using Quercus? For example, have you been able to hire PHP talent for a previously Java-only site?

6. Are you using Quercus with Resin Pro? Resin Open Source? another app server/servlet engine?

Feel free to promote your Quercus-based site - I’d like to see it in action!