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20021014 Monday October 14, 2002

BEA, JAAS and JRockit. The BEA meeting tonight was good - I saw a couple old friends and enjoyed the good microbrews they had on tap during the meeting. The first presentation (PPT) was on JAAS, was presented by Rich Helton and gave a good overview of what JAAS is. I realized that I will probably never use it directly because I specialize in writing web applications, and the servlet API uses JAAS under the covers (via JDBCRealms, etc.). Not a very exciting presentation, but neither is the topic.

The second presentation was on JRockit, which is BEA's JVM. It's basically a BEA version of the JDK, but supposedly 4 times faster than Sun's Hotspot. The best part about it (to me) is that it has a "Management Console." This allows you to control the garbage collection algorithm, trace performance on methods, and setup notifications for events. You can find more documentation on this here. A very cool app to say the least. BEA's goal with JRockit is to fill the gap that Microsoft left when it quit creating the JVM for Intel platforms.

So to say the least, I was sold leaving the meeting - I could solve my JDK 1.4 problems, increase the speed of my applications by 4 times, and all would be groovy. I rushed home, installed JRockit and found the following (testing the current application I'm working on):

Activity on current application JDK 1.4.1 JRockit 7.0
Compiling index.jsp 16 seconds 9 seconds
Reloading index.jsp 1/2 second 1/2 second
Login and compile main menu 16 seconds 17 seconds
Logout and re-login 4 seconds 4.25 seconds
Tested on Windows XP SP1, Tomcat 4.0.5, 1Ghz RAM, 1.5 Ghz processor.

Needless to say, I wasn't too impressed. Will I use it - sure, it seemed to be faster and my benchmarks above are simply me counting "1 1-thousand, 2 1-thousand..." The one thing I found disappointing was I couldn't get the jrockit.managementserver to start--even by adding -Djrockit.managementserver=true when starting Tomcat. Posted in General at Oct 14 2002, 04:35:44 PM MDT Add a Comment

BEA User's Group Meeting tonight. Visit BEA I'm going to make an attempt to attend the BEA User's Group Meeting tonight. My reasons: 1) it's the first meeting; 2) it's a good primer for upgrading my WebLogic certification; and 3) it's at a brewery!

Time: Monday October 14th 2002, 5:30 PM to 8:00 PM
Location: Wynkoop Brewing Company

Agenda:
5:30 - 6:00 Registration and Networking (snacks)
6:00 - 6:15 Introductions and overview of the Group (Scott Ryan and Board)
6:15 - 6:45 BEA JRockit Presentation (John Funk , BEA)
6:45 - 7:45 Security, JAAS and BEA Application Server (Rich Helton, Richware)
7:45 - 8:00 Prize Drawing

Posted in General at Oct 14 2002, 03:28:08 AM MDT Add a Comment