In case you want to learn more about RIFE, ask questions, chat a bit about what you've done, share experiences, etc., feel free to come the the BOF tonight that I'm organizing during the QCon conference in San Francisco. You can find all the details here:

http://qcon.infoq.com/sanfrancisco/conference/

The address is:
Westin San Francisco Market Street
50 Third Street
San Francisco
California 94103

The BOF will be from 8:30pm - 9:30pm in the 'City' room.

We are also organizing a Terracotta BOF right before it, so if you're interested in that, you can come from 7:30pm - 8:30pm to the 'Stanford' room.

See you there!

This blog entry is just to speak up about the ongoing blogosphere effort to show the need for Java 1.6 on MacOSX.

If you are a Java developer that uses MacOSX, please create a blog post with this string:

13949712720901ForOSX

Also, file a bug with Apple and explain why you think that Java 1.6 support is important.

I personally am still confident that Apple will release it in the coming months since they need Java support for their server products. Not keeping up with this would significantly cut their customer-base there. The fact that there have been several pre-releases is also encouraging. It's a shame though that none of those are available anymore.

It would be very frustrating to have to move to another operating system just due to the lack of Java 1.6 on MacOSX. None of the other operating systems give me as much joy and productivity both with work and personal use of the computer.

Apple, please don't disappoint the large Java community that adopted MacOSX ... and release JDK 1.6 soon.

While tracking down some performance characteristics of the ConcurrentHashMap class with Terracotta, I decided to run it through the YourKit profiler.

I remember that a while ago, someone on the Terracotta mailing list was having difficulties profiling client applications since we instrument the JDK classes through a bootjar. I thus expected to run into problems with YourKit. To my surprise I didn't experience a single one. Following the instructions on the YourKit website to manually enable profiling, did exactly what was expected and I was thus able to get all the information I wanted.

As an example, this is similar to the command line that I executed:

java -agentlib:yjpagent=sampling,onexit=snapshot
    -cp /path/to/project/classes
    -Dtc.install-root=$TC_INSTALL_DIR
    -Xbootclasspath/p:$TC_INSTALL_DIR/lib/dso-boot/dso-boot-hotspot_linux_160_02.jar
    -Dtc.config=tc-config.xml
    com.MyMainClass

Just thought that this might be helpful to know

I'm speaking at NFJS in London at the end of this month about RIFE and Terracotta. You can find the abstract of my session quoted below. The schedule looks very interesting and I'm excited that NFJS is finally taking place in Europe too.

If you're interested in going, you might want to click on the banner to the right or to use the promotion code NFJS-RIF660. This will give you a free Nintendo Wii with your registration (woohooo, I love my Wii!).

See you at NFJS Europe.

I also have another session about Terracotta in the real-world.

Cutting-edge productivity with RIFE and Web Continuations

RIFE is a full-stack, open-source Java web application framework, offering fast results with the promise of maintainability and code clarity. This session will review the novel ideas in Java web application development that RIFE has introduced to the development community.

Through a real-world demonstration of the development process with RIFE, learn how RIFE makes developing easier with features such as: instant reloads and centralized declarations, meta programming through constraints and meta data merging, run-time POJO-driven CRUD generation, bi-directional logic-less templates, automatic context-aware components, and the integration of a content management framework.

The second part will focus on state management, which has always been a complex and tricky part of web application development. Native Java web continuations simplify this and automatically allow you to create a one-to-one conversation between users and a web application. State preservation and flow control no longer need to be handled manually, bringing you back to the simplicity of single user console applications. Remember 'scanf()'?

Continuations will be introduced from general principles, followed by practical examples that explain how they benefit web application development and their frequent usage patterns. Finally, automatic and non-intrusive fail-over and scalability will be demonstrated through the integration with Terracotta.

I'm speaking at NFJS in London at the end of this month about Terracotta. You can find the abstract of my session quoted below. The schedule looks very interesting and I'm excited that NFJS is finally taking place in Europe too.

If you're interested in going, you might want to click on the banner to the right or to use the promotion code NFJS-RIF660. This will give you a free Nintendo Wii with your registration (woohooo, I love my Wii!).

See you at NFJS Europe.

I also have another session continuations, RIFE and Terracotta.

Exploring Terracotta : JVM clustering in the real world

Terracotta provides open-source clustering for Java and removes the burden from the developer. Instead of having to design and code against a specific API, the characteristics of the Java Memory Model (wait, lock, notify) are automatically translated towards a multiple node architecture. This clustering solution guarantees proper handling of concurrency, fail-over, distributed method invocation and efficient state propagation by simply instrumenting your Java bytecode and providing you with Network Attached Memory. This is however so generic that it's sometimes difficult realize which use-cases can benefit from it.

This presentation introduces the basic principles of Terracotta and explains how to configure and integrate it into your application. Afterwards, we'll go through a collection of real-world examples that all benefit from JVM-level clustering. These include: serialization-less HTTP session clustering, fine-grained distributed caches, workload distribution through master-worker, shared state and events between server and desktop tiers, clustered Spring and other OSS frameworks ... and more.

Garbage collection made the JVM responsible for memory management. Take the plunge and experience how Terracotta does the same for clustering.