In the Spotlight - Patrick Peralta

Today’s presentations at COJUG went quite well. I had good feedback and great questions from both the lunchtime and evening meetings. The group is run by Christopher Judd, a well known Java consultant and author.

This morning on the way to breakfast I noticed lots of police cars and news vans which is usually a sign of bad things. Sure enough, I watched a bit of the local news and saw this story about some dude that tried to rob the 5/3rd bank that’s across the street from my hotel. Fortunately it appears that nobody was hurt (and the robber got nothing for his efforts.)

And for my final tangent of the evening, I recently subscribed to the Fake Steve Jobs blog and have been laughing ever since. Some of his stuff, this in particular, is positively hilarious. I’ll definitely keep this in the RSS reader.

Back in 2004 at the Server Side Symposium, I remember watching Linda DeMichiel present EJB 3 to the world for the first time. At the time I thought it was remarkably similar to the Spring/Hibernate project that I was developing, and I know that many others in the room had the same thought. Ever since that day we’ve had comparisons between Spring and EJB 3 as a reoccurring thread of discussion in the Java community. Thursday night was a continuation of said discussion, and it took place at the NEJUG. This is where Reza Rahman, one of the authors of EJB 3 in Action presented this topic. I was fortunate enough to have a seat next to Mark Fisher who scribbled copious notes and has written a great analysis on the i21 blog.

The presentation contained some outdated information about Spring which Mark details in his blog entry. To be fair, a good amount of the presentation was subjective (which makes it more interesting) and Reza obviously knows more about EJB 3 than about Spring. I’m sure that he will use Mark’s information to enhance this presentation which covers a topic that clearly is relevant and carries a lot of interest in the community. (The attendance and feedback at the user group are but one indication of this relevance.)

It isn’t my intent to add more fuel to the fire, but I did have a few thoughts on some of the subjective points of discussion:

EJB3: High degree of portability, Spring: Possible vendor lock-in.

The goal of Spring is to be a non-invasive framework, and the documentation emphasizes that end user code should not depend on Spring. This is an attainable goal for the most part, but I suspect that most real world projects of a significant size are importing org.springframework.*, in particular the DAO layer (especially when using the JDBC template.) Is this a problem? It depends on the kind of portability desired. Personally I like the ability to use older containers, newer containers, or no container at all. Applications should minimize coupling, but the application has to be coupled to something in order to do anything useful. An application coupled to Spring will have a much easier time adapting to other environments than an application coupled to EJB. I think it is quite ironic that it is easier to “port” a Spring application to EJB 3 than it is to port an EJB 2 application to EJB 3.

Aims to be a “defacto” standard and might make good on the promise.

This is just my opinion, but I have long considered it a defacto standard. I spend a good portion of my day looking at stack traces and thread dumps from customers, and most of them are using Spring.

Overall it was a good presentation, and I certainly enjoyed discussing the topic with the attendees. It will be interesting to see if Mark’s comments influence future revisions of the presentation.

Speaking of JUGs, this Tuesday I will be presenting Orchestrating Messaging, Data Grid and Database for Scalable Performance at the Central Ohio JUG near Columbus.

Reading through JavaLobby the other day I came across this article discussing JUG attendance. They discussed a poll that concluded that most Java developers don’t regularly attend JUGs. This wasn’t a big surprise to me; my observation is that many developers are interested in getting their jobs done and not much beyond that. Also, these meetings do occur after work and can take significant effort to attend, especially for those with families to take care of.

One of the complaints raised is that these meetings can become advertisements for vendors pushing their wares. As someone who has attended JUGs often in the past and who presents at many JUGs in the present (on behalf of a well known vendor), I can understand the balance that has to be struck. Developers that take the time to attend these meetings want to learn new and interesting things and generally don’t want to sit through a product pitch. At the same time, the vendors sending people to talk at these meetings are footing the bill to sponsor the meeting and would expect at least a mention of the product(s) in order to gain name recognition among the target demographic.

It is for this reason that we try to make our user group presentations not just about Oracle Coherence. We are happy to discuss a range of topics that help applications to scale, such as techniques to avoid XA using idempotent operations, or choosing the right data access strategy (ORM, JDBC, etc), or optimizing serialization. Creating an awareness of the scalability challenges that developers and architects face today is one of the key themes of our presentations. It is certainly my goal (and hope) that our user group presentations provide a valuable learning experience that is worthwhile for the developer community.

It has been a ridiculously long time since I’ve posted here, and lots of interesting things have happened. Obviously I no longer work for Tangosol since we have been acquired by Oracle. Soon we will be moving from our Somerville office over to the Oracle offices in Burlington, MA. It will certainly be a change going from a small company over to one of the largest software companies in the world, but this will be a great opportunity to bring emerging data grid technology to the masses.

Speaking of such opportunities, I had the pleasure of speaking at the Cleveland Java SIG last night about tools used for building scalable and high performing applications. We explored all layers of the application tier, including messaging, application servers, databases, and data grids. Since the latter technology is currently the least understood, most of the questions at the end of the presentation were about data grids, clustering, and Coherence. Overall it was a great group and I had a good time meeting Maciej, Scott, and many others.

It has been a month since we (me, my wife, and my son) moved from central Florida to metro Boston. It is certainly a big change (especially moving in the middle of winter) but so far things are going quite well. Having grown up in a dense urban area I missed being able to walk everywhere instead of having to depend on a car. We can certainly do that here; I can walk to work, the grocery store, and quite a few restaurants and shops. Maria’s dad was in the military so she’s lived in many different places; however she’s never lived in a city. So far she’s adjusting quite well. She was quite comfortable in Florida but she was willing to go through all these changes just so that I could have a cool job. Things should be a lot more fun when it isn’t below freezing outside; we’ll be able to explore more of Davis Square and Boston in general.

So here are my favorite and least favorite things about Boston. First the bad: everything seems to be decentralized. In New York 95% of anything that’s important happens in midtown or downtown Manhattan which is very easily accessible by public transit, including buses, subways and cabs. In New England it seems that there is a lot going on that isn’t in Boston proper. For instance, the next No Fluff Just Stuff advertises itself as coming to Boston, but the show is really in Danvers which is about 20 miles north of Boston. You certainly can’t take the T there unless you count the commuter rail which is nowhere near as convenient. Ditto for the New England JUG which is at the Sun campus in Burlington. I’ve noticed that most high tech companies are in the highway 128 corridor, which means you have to drive to get there.

Now the good: the law here is great when it comes to pedestrians in crosswalks. When you drive up to a marked crosswalk that has pedestrians you must stop and let them cross. The first time I visited Tangosol they took me out to lunch and we had to cross a few streets to get there. Even though there was oncoming traffic (albeit slow traffic) they stepped right out into the crosswalk as if nobody was there. If you try that sort of thing in New York you’ll get yourself into a fist fight (which I actually did witness a few weeks ago at the corner of Steinway and 31st in Astoria.)

Working at Tangosol has been a terrific experience. The software engineers here are top notch and they are solving some difficult and interesting problems in the realm of distributed and multi threaded programming. In the month that I’ve been here my work has been varied; I’ve worked on code samples for customers, testing, reproducing issues, answering support emails, and a little bit on Coherence itself. I’m looking forward to learning more about the product and the realm of high performance distributed computing in general.