My creative juices aren’t flowing today hence the unimaginative title for this posting (and if I couldn’t come up with a good title today, there was no chance I would be able to be inventive by day 5). Sadly, as an internal conference with significant IBM confidential content I can’t cover everything here but I’ll cover what I can. As Andy has already blogged, someone had the good sense to realise that we are a technical audience and the keynote speech was given by Jerry Cuomo, CTO for WebSphere. I particularly liked his demo around Real Time Java which showed garbage collection leading to breaks in a piece of music played with with a Sun JVM compared to the flawless playback when using Metronome GC in an IBM J9 JVM.
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Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category
WSTC Day 1
Tuesday, April 24th, 2007OpenStreetMap lecture
Monday, April 23rd, 2007I’ve mentioned OpenStreetMap before on this site so I’d thought I’d plug a BCS Hants lecture this Thursday on the subject. It’s a shame I won’t be able to make it.
Transactional simplicity
Tuesday, April 10th, 2007It’s good to read articles like this once in a while to remind oneself how much simpler J2EE made transactions.
WebSphere Application Server trace
Tuesday, April 10th, 2007Daniel Julin is also co-author of another developerWorks article looking at WebSphere Application Server trace. The article describes what trace is, how to turn it on (including the appropriate wsadmin incantations) and how to interpret it. Note that, as the article demonstrates, trace can be very useful in diagnosing some issues, it is really intended for use by IBM service personnel who also have access to the corresponding source code, so don’t expect the trace messages always to be self explanatory. The article also has a plug for Trace Analyzer for WebSphere Application Server, a great tool for viewing and analyzing trace logs (and large ones at that) written by two of my one-time colleagues in the transactions team.
Co-locating applications
Tuesday, April 10th, 2007There was a time when customers would only ever have a single application running on any given application server instance. In the drive to cut costs, this level of application isolation isn’t one that many customers can still afford. Daniel Julin and Stacy Joines have written a developerWorks article that covers some best practices and techniques for troubleshooting co-located applications.
Lack of lenses
Thursday, April 5th, 2007Warning: the following tail of woe involves some serious spleen venting!
Having finally made up my mind up that I would go for the Canon 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS USM, I placed an order with Warehouse Express on Tuesday evening hoping that, with next day delivery, I would have it in time for the Easter weekend. I also added the appropriate lens hood and threw in the Canon 50mm f1.8 whilst I was at it as there seems to be a general consensus that this is well worth the little money that you have to pay for it. It then wasn’t until late Wednesday afternoon that I checked my e-mail and discovered a message saying that part of the order wasn’t in stock. I phoned Warehouse Express and was told that the lenses were currently on order from Canon. When I asked when were expecting a delivery I was told: “Err, maybe sometime in May?”. Why oh why don’t online retailers advertise stock levels on their sites? Is it incompetence or is it because they would lose business that way? Somehow I’d taken the fact that the “We’re having trouble getting hold of this lens” message had disappeared might mean they actually had them.
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Service interface design
Monday, April 2nd, 2007My ISSW colleague Mikhail Genkin has just started what promises to be an interesting developerWorks series on Best practices for service interface design in SOA. In the first article, Mikhail begins by recommending a top-down or meet in the middle-approach to WSDL creation, rather then relying on generation from generation from existing Java interfaces. He the continues by considering what operations should be grouped on a single interface and what shape those operations should take. In future articles, Mikhail is promising to cover best practices for structuring WSDL documents and fault handling.
Emacs tutorial
Monday, April 2nd, 2007Back before the days of Eclipse, all of my software development was done using Emacs (in particular with the addition of the JDE) and it is still my desktop editor of choice when making even moderately complex changes to other types of file. It’s therefore nice to see that this editor hasn’t been forgotten with a new tutorial series launching on developerWorks. (Note: I’m not a complete Emacs bigot – I’ll use vi when forced to!)
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