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MainMay 3, 2008
Vince Bonfanti hosted a Birds of a Feather session this evening where he officially unveiled the
Open BlueDragon project.
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April 30, 2008
The latest software update for Mac OS X 10.5.2 adds Java 1.6.0_05 but does not change your default setup. See
this tech note for more details.
I haven't yet switched to Java 6 as my default JRE but I will shortly. Happy to hear any early feedback from folks.
April 14, 2008
If you use Mark Mandel's awesome
Transfer ORM in a cluster, you've probably wondered what to do about keeping the cache in sync across servers in the cluster. I've had to solve this problem a couple of times now and I figured I should publish an example of how to do this.
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March 31, 2008
Andrew Powell -
Enterprise Class MVC with ColdFusion and Java - Saturday 11:25am
We hear a lot of talk about using individual Java objects within ColdFusion but the reality of enterprise development is that entire subsystems tend to built entirely in Java. Software teams that serve the enterprise often build large, complex systems using Spring and Hibernate. How do you go about using ColdFusion with such systems? I haven't seen any presentations on this subject so I was pleasantly surprised when I started reviewing Andrew Powell's slide deck to find that he was focusing on how ColdFusion can provide the web front end to enterprise class Java systems.
He introduces Spring (the Java version) with a demo and then introduces Hibernate (the industry standard ORM for Java), again with a demo. After that, he will walk you through solutions to the problem of connecting ColdFusion on the front end to Spring on the backend and, using Mach-II as an example, he then shows how to create an MVC web application that allows you to leverage the entire Spring-powered, Hibernate-persisted Java backend.
If you work along a Java team - or you are considering using more Java for your backend systems - this talk will provide you with a lot of good information about how well ColdFusion plays in this space.
December 5, 2007
Some people have been noticing dramatically slower application startup times on ColdFusion 8 compared to ColdFusion MX 7. I've seen a lot of complaints about shared hosting systems where applications timeout. Since CF8 is so much faster than CFMX7, you might wonder why application startup times can be so much worse.
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October 19, 2007
So I was gave a design patterns presentation at both MAXs... I figured I'd Google to see if I could find any coverage of it (no, I couldn't) and what turned up was
my own blog post from four years ago! Along with the observation that CF lets you implement certain patterns more easily I said "The bottom line is that it's useful to be aware of the J2EE patterns but beware of slavishly applying them to ColdFusion - some of them were designed to solve problems that are specific to the Java technology and you can often find a more elegant form of the solution in ColdFusion."
As folks who attended my session in Chicago and/or Barcelona heard, I'm still offering that caveat today and people still think it's news...
August 6, 2007
These days, ColdFusion developers generally understand the benefits gained in the rewrite from C++ to Java that happened with the shift from ColdFusion 5 to ColdFusion MX and we're continuing to see an uptick in interest for running scripting languages on top of Java (hence my
Scripting for ColdFusion 8 project).
Given that one of the scripting languages I showed working on Java inside a ColdFusion page was Java, I was pleased to see this article - Java: One Platform To Rule Them All? - which discusses the Quercus PHP engine being used to improve the scalability of Drupal, by leveraging the underlying Java platform.
A quote jumped out at me from that article, however:
"It's possible now to run ... .NET applications under Java. And ... the applications generally perform better running under the JVM than they do in their own native environment."
The first comment on the article reaffirms this assertion:
"There is a cross compiler that converts CLR bytecode into Java bytecode, and reportedly this makes applications run faster than of .NET (where they are developed)."
A quick Google search did not turn up any articles that back up these comments but it's an intriguing thought...
July 31, 2007
I'd never really given much thought to running Java on a shared environment (because I'd never write a web app in JSP when there are more productive options). Turns out that
most Java frameworks won't run on most shared hosts!
Given the discussions in our own community about the security of shared hosting (or lack thereof, for the most part), I thought it was interesting that most Java frameworks require a security policy that Sun's own documentation says is a security vulnerability.
Anyone have any experience of trying to run Struts or Velocity or something similar on a shared host?
May 2, 2006
The JRun team asked me to post an invitation to join the beta program for the next version of JRun:
The beta release of the next version of the JRun appserver, code named Cheetah, is available. The Adobe JRun Team is inviting serious evaluators to give feedback on this beta release. Contact Vijayan Reddy - vrreddy (at) adobe (dot) com - to be included in the beta program.
We believe the beta of JRun Cheetah is reasonably stable and reliable, and we plan to reward those who prove otherwise. We intend to give away fully functional JRun licenses to the users who report highest quality issues during the beta.
And there's more...
We are throwing open a JRun Sample Apps Challenge. We invite the beta users to develop sample applications exploiting the new JRun Cheetah feature sets. The best apps developed by you will be rewarded, and on qualification, will be featured as part JRun releases in samples section.
Write code, find bugs! Help us serve you better.
Regards,
Vijayan Reddy,
Adobe JRun Team.
So there you have it - contact Vijayan and get your hands on JRun Cheetah!
October 10, 2005
TheServerSide notes that
the JRun team are running a survey for information about your current usage and what you'd like to see in the next release. If you're using JRun for Java development / deployment, it'll only take five minutes to complete the survey!
October 1, 2005
Ben Forta has
posted some documentation about CFCProxy that should get you up and running.
August 21, 2005
A C|net story a couple of weeks back covers
BEA's evaluation of scripting languages and the possibility of adding support directly into their tools and application server frameworks.
Bill Roth, VP Product Marketing is quoted:
Roth said that BEA has already incorporated support for the Jython language in its WebLogic application server in a limited way. The Cold Fusion Markup Language is also under review, he said.
June 4, 2005
Regular readers know I'm a fan of the very irreverant
BileBlog. The Server Side just published a
video interview with Hani, creator of the BileBlog, that gives a lot of background on this great ranter. Some of it is rather surprising, especially the fact that he is a CTO and his company produces application server and portal software!
April 26, 2005
As someone who does not know either UI toolkit in depth but has dipped into Eclipse occasionally, I found this Hacknot piece
comparing SWT and Swing from a development point of view quite fascinating.
March 24, 2005
JRun 4 Updater 5 is now available. Read the
Release Notes to see what's new / changed. Fixes cover EJBs, clustering, web server connectors, database drivers and other miscellaneous issues.
March 7, 2005
After my post at the weekend, bemoaning the lack of stability in Java, it was very interesting to read John Reynolds
reflections on The Server Side's Java Symposium. He acknowledges some of Java's failings (actual and perceived):
"Complexity and dissention have harmed Java's reputation. Corporate confidence in Java has fallen if you believe articles like the Burton Group's recently released "J2EE: A Standard in Jeopardy" and Debu Panda's "Why J2EE is so complex!". I know that some of my senior manager's are less sure that their Java investment was worthwhile, and I imagine that's true at many companies. Witness the recent speculation that IBM is fed up with Java and switching to PHP."
(Some of those phrases are links in his article - go read them!)
Maybe the lessons have been learned and Mustang (Java 6) will be a quiet little release, almost a non-event, and we'll start to see the stability Java so desperately needs. Or maybe we need to get past the glut of current JCP decisions first before stability sets in. Time will tell.
March 5, 2005
Java 5 is only just out the door and they are
already looking for "experts" to shape Java 6! What happened to stability? They made enough of a mess of Java 5 that you'd hope they'd leave the language alone for a while but no...
Languages that are standardized by ISO / ANSI are required to have their standards revised five years after publication of the standard. That provides a lot of stability. Standards are supposed to "aid commerce" and that means that companies need to be able to rely on a common platform for a couple of cycles.
What is the rush to change Java again so soon? What horrors will they inflict on us next time around?
February 11, 2005
Ted Neward's blog is always good reading and, although I haven't read his recent book "Effective Enterprise Java", I was pleased to see his post about
how he feels when he gets a bad review. When his book got a one star review, he takes it well and admits "Well, I can't really deny his implied criticism that the book is too basic for his taste: much like its predecessors, the book is designed to cater to people who've not seen many of these ideas before". He then goes on to note that according to OWASP, the top ten security vulnerabilities come from people simply not validating user input (his book recommends this - the reviewer thinks everyone is already doing this... apparently not!).
If you've read Ted's book, I'd be interested to hear your thoughts about it and maybe I'll add it to my bookshelf.
December 23, 2004
I saw the announcement on TheServerSide yesterday about the relaxed interview with Klaus Wüsterfeld, creator of Prevayler so I started waiting in anticipation...
Anticipation for Hani (Bile Blog) to write a scathing stream of vitriol about how Prevayler represents everything that is wrong with the Java open source movement. I love reading Hani's rants but he seems to have been on holiday for the last two weeks, which is very disappointing.
In the end, I wasn't disappointed: Mike Spille stepped up to the plate to rip into Prevayler. Mike also seems to have been on holiday for a while with no posts to his Pyrasun Blog since early December.
Hani's message is sometimes lost in his (very humorous) ranting but Mike tends to stay much more focused and really pulls out some key issues when he has something to rant about.
Reading Mike's blog entry - and the Prevayler material itself - really does make you wonder about some of these Java projects. It is open source itself or is it just Java? What causes these cult-like, fringe projects to get such high-profile coverage? And why so many of them?
November 18, 2004
Eitan Suez has a nicely balanced post about
what it is like to switch to Mac for Java development. He makes some good points about the (often subtle) differences between the platforms and overall you get a positive buzz that explains why so many developers are switching to Mac OS X these days - even with the projected long lag before Java 5 becomes available on the Mac.
October 4, 2004
Sam Pullara looks at what Java Generics can do to your code and I tend to agree with him. The syntax chosen has borrowed from C++ and actually made it worse with the variable constraints (e.g.,
? extends T to specify a wildcard type that must extend some parameter type
T). I spent many years working with C++ and while templates (C++'s name for generics) are incredibly powerful, there are a lot of complex issues to trip up developers. The syntax, with all its angle brackets is just plain ugly but there's really very few choices given the plethora of operators and punctuation already used in C++. Java doesn't have that excuse and could have invented more elegant syntax. There are syntactic ambiguities introduced by the template syntax in C++ (e.g.,
>> is the shift operator - if you write a nested template parameter you must remember to put a space between the angle brackets). As Sam points out, there's a lot of code out there that won't benefit from the touted benefits of Generics so they won't really remove all those casts.
I'm not very convinced about Generics in Java...
October 2, 2004
If you're a CF developer, you might wonder why several people seem so keen for you to learn Java. Matt Woodward has a great write-up on his blog inspired by Hal Helms'
CFUN-04 presentation "Java for CFers". Read why
Matt is so passionate about OO and why he is another person who believes you should learn Java.
Yeah, I'm another one but Matt's post is so eloquent I'm just going to ask you to read it for yourself!
September 30, 2004
I'm not quite sure why Java now has the "5.0" label but you can now
download Java 2 Platform, Standard Edition 5.0 as Java 1.5 is officially known.
Confusingly called Tiger (just like Apple's forthcoming OS X release), this version of Java brings generics and a variety of other new language features.
If you're on OS X, you'll have to wait for Tiger (Apple's Tiger, that is)...
September 23, 2004
Brett McLaughlin thinks
the excitement has gone out of the Java world. Java has gone from the cool new kid on the block to a mature workhorse of a language. It happens to most every language. No one thinks C++ is exciting these days but it was back in the 80's. It was very exciting when the STL library extension was proposed. Generic programming was cool. Then it became commonplace and mundane. It. Just. Worked. Boring. Java's gone the same way. Of course it has - it's very successful. Very few really successful technologies are exciting, at least not after they become successful.
September 21, 2004
If you're on Mac OS X, you might not realize that there's an important updater available for JRun 4:
Macromedia - JRun Support Center : Updaters. You need the "Unix Updater" (English 31.1Mb, also available in French and Japanese). Make sure you save the file to disk and don't like StuffIt Expander or anything else 'helpfully' try to handle the
.bin extension!
Once you've downloaded it, open up a Terminal window and run this command (assuming you picked the English version):
sh jrun-unix-en-updater.bin
It'll ask you where JRun 4 is installed (mine was in
/home/jrun but most folks install to the default
/Applications/JRun4 location). It churns away for a while and then it's done!
Before you start JRun, you probably need to edit the jvm.config file to add -Djava.awt.headless=true to the java.args= definition. If you don't have that, ColdFusion MX will not start!
Now you should be able to startup any of your server instances, using the standard jrun command and it will use the default 1.4.2 JVM instead of the 1.3.1 JVM. That means you no longer need to use the (unsupported) method of starting jrun.jar explicitly, previously mentioned on my blog and Christian's blog!
August 30, 2004
Java IDE comparison: a re-posting of the session of the same name from JavaOne 2004. It's quite interesting to learn more about the comparative (and subjective!) feature sets of various IDEs. For CFers, seeing Eclipse (the basis of He3 and the host for CFEclipse) compared to other Java IDEs may be instructive (especially since it does comment on Eclipse's somewhat daunting feature set / UI).
August 13, 2004
For those of you who are anally obsessed with "performance", you'll probably enjoy this
Servlet Performance Report. JRun gets a pretty favorable review in this analysis. Thanx to Micha Schopman for posting this link on cf-talk (Micha is
very concerned with performance!).
August 15, 2003
Segue have just announced
SilkPerformer 6, the latest release of their comprehensive load testing tool, which now provides the ability to load test Web Services, J2EE components and Oracle OCI applications as they are built, without needing a client application. This allows you to perform load tests as you build your applications rather than having to wait until near the end of the development cycle!
July 21, 2003
Macromedia has
renewed its J2EE license, showing its continuing commitment to JRun and J2EE technology. Macromedia has already been a licensee for more than three years.
July 11, 2003
Came across a somewhat strange
article by Chris Preimesberger and Charlie Arehart which purports to advocate ColdFusion over JSP - in an apparent attempt to persuade CFers not to switch to JSP. The article has drawn
quite a bit of flak on TheServerSide forums. Some of the criticism is deserved (for the vague swipes at JSP as a technology) and some is just noise (the usual uninformed criticisms of CFML). Read the article, read the comments on TheServerSide and make up your own mind.
My position is that CFML has a much easier learning curve than either JSP or Java while not preventing well-designed software from being written. The abilities of the language need to be discussed separately from the abilities of the developers - bad code and poorly performing applications can be built in any language!
July 1, 2003
J2SE 1.4.2 is now available. There are a lot of bug fixes in this release as well as various performance and security enhancements. Definitely worth upgrading to!
