Update: Newsletter, Hessian messaging, and Terracotta
Thursday, April 17th, 2008Just 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.
