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 there’s no Friday meeting update from me because last week, I was teaching our Resin Administration training course, which went quite well I think. We averaged more than 4 out of 5 in the survey results, so I think at least some of the students agreed.

Now the next course we have planned is developer focused, but we need your input to make it sure it’s targeted correctly and features the material you’d like to see. We’ll be publishing a draft outline for the course soon, but there’s still plenty of time to suggest topics you’d like to see covered. Even if you don’t think you’ll be able to attend the course right away (or ever), as a Resin developer or potential Resin developer, we’d like to hear what you want to learn.

To get the ball rolling, let me suggest some topics we’re thinking about. Would you like to learn about…

• Basic JavaEE topics such as Servlet/Filter/Listeners? JSP? JSF?
• JavaEE 6 topics such as Java CanDI and EJB 3.1 Lite?
• Resin specific features like scheduled tasks, embedding, BAM?
• Our profiling and debugging tools?
• Resin plugins for Eclipse, ant, maven, and other tools?
• How to integrate specific external frameworks like Hibernate?
• Resin 4.0 or 3.1?

Please feel free to comment below or to contact me directly with your responses. If I missed something, please let me know! If you’d like to be informed about upcoming Resin development courses or talk about your company’s specific needs, I’d be happy to talk to you about that too.

Thanks!

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.

(more…)

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…

We’ve got a full schedule here at Caucho, with a huge number of events coming up for 2009. I’ll announce everything as it comes along, but just to mention a couple that are coming up soon:

• Devoxx - Devoxx is less than a week away! I’ll be presenting Quercus and we’ll have a booth on the expo floor where I and other Caucho team members will be available to answer your questions about Resin, Quercus, BAM, Hessian, and even sales/business questions. If you’re at Devoxx, stop on by the booth for info and the chance to win some prizes!
• Caucho Admin Training - We had a great time in October with the first training session. So good, that we decided to book a full schedule for 2009! The next session is exactly two months from now on February 4, so start making plans to attend. During the last session we had several students from all around the US and one from Denmark, so even if you’re not based in the SF Bay area, we hope you’ll make it.

We finally held the first Resin administration course last week at Marakana and, not to toot my own horn, but I think it went pretty well. Thanks to everyone who attended! I think it might have been a self-selecting group, but everyone who was interested in doing Resin administration was pretty smart and we had a lot of useful discussions based on their experience. A kind comment from one of the course surveys:

This class really helped me understand how to install Resin and deploy web applications. I would recommend this course to anyone who is looking at how to implement or upgrade Resin in their environment.

If you missed the course, there will be plenty of chances coming up in 2009. Marakana has put up a schedule here with all the dates.

You might have noticed that posts slowed down here after my talk at JavaZone, which is because I took some time off to see Scandinavia. But I’m back now and getting ready for even more upcoming events! Just a quick review:

1. San Francisco Java Meetup - I’ll be speaking here again, this time about Resin’s OSGi container implementation, as well as general OSGi issues along with fellow Java Meetup regular, Andrew Headrick. This is just one week away on Monday, Oct 6 at 6:30. The signups are full right now, but keep an eye on the page in case anyone drops out…
2. Resin Administration Training - There are still a couple of spots left for this course, so sign up ASAP to guarantee your seat. I’ll be teaching this at Marakana’s facility in San Francisco on October 22-24. It should be an action packed 3 days!
3. Silicon Valley Code Camp - This informal, but highly technical conference is growing by leaps and bounds. With already over 500 signups, I expect the Code Camp to be a ton of fun and very successful. I’ll be speaking on Quercus and BAM, so stop by for those and the other speakers’ talks on Nov 8 & 9 at Foothill College.
4. Devoxx - You might know this as JavaPolis or briefly JaVoxx, but the newly renamed Devoxx is still the same great conference that attracts developers from all over the world. It will be held Dec 8-12 in Antwerp, Belgium. I’ll be giving a talk there and Caucho is a plugin partner, so look for us on the convention floor as well.

I’ve been working on finishing up the Resin administration training course and one of the subjects is “When and why to use PHP on a Java server”. Of course, I’m referring to Quercus and as I wrote this section, I realized some things about the PHP and Java open source communities.

Java’s open source community is most well known for producing great libraries and frameworks, while PHP’s is most well known for producing great applications. In Java, it’s often assumed that you’re paying someone to produce the application while in PHP it’s often that you’re not paying anyone or you simply don’t have time to write a custom application. With these things in mind, Java and PHP really can be viewed as complementary technologies. So when would you use them together?

• When you need to get an application ready right away and there’s a popular PHP application available, but you’re a Java shop
• You want to unify existing but separate PHP and Java deployments into one
• Moving a PHP-only site to Resin for improved performance, reliability, and monitoring
• You need PHP for the frontend and and Java libraries on the backend and you want them to be able to talk to each other easily

These are just a few of the examples that I came up with, but I’m sure there are more. What has your experience been?

I’m pleased to announce that we’ve teamed up with Marakana to do a training course on the administration of Resin. I’ll be teaching the course on October 22-24 at Marakana’s San Francisco offices and writing the course materials with the guidance of other Caucho engineers and the Marakana guys, who really know their stuff when it comes to training. If you sign up for the course this week, you get a significant discount. I’d jump on it sooner than later since we’re limited to 10 students (we wanted a really good student:teacher ratio). Here’s the link: Caucho Resin Administration sign up