Raible Designs

Weather.com: WebSphere to Tomcat and Oracle to MySQL

At my current client we're going to migrate our application from Tomcat to WebSphere 5 in May. I'm dreading the move and really don't see the point, but alas - the client is always right. However, since my client reads this website, I thought maybe they'd be interested to see that Weather.com recently migrated from WebSphere to Tomcat.

"It was hard to run WebSphere and an IDE [integrated development environment] because of all the resources WebSphere took," recalls Jeff Cunningham, who leads the Internet application development team at Weather.com. "You had to run an instance of DB2 on your machine because WebSphere stored its configurations in DB2, so you had to have all that overhead. It was just really slow. I just started using Tomcat for development because it was so much faster."

The article goes on to say that they evaluated other app servers as well, but chose Tomcat because of the team's preference. They also discovered that Tomcat served up pages significantly faster than WebSphere.

Weather.com is also working on swapping out its Oracle database for the open-source MySQL.
...
"Now when I talk to senior management about moving from Oracle to MySQL they don't ask me, 'Are you sure?'" he says. "They ask me, 'When?'"

It's a great time to be an Open Source Consultant. ;-)

[House Project] First Wall

Bob the Builder told us they'd have all the framing done this week. Now we're starting to believe him!

Why Hibernate Rocks - easy database switching

The app I've been developing over the last 6 months is going live next week. As part of that process, my client decided they wanted to put the production database on their AS400, rather than their JDE/WebSphere/DB2 Server. Hibernate and AppFuse made this super-easy. Add the JDBC Driver, specify a new dialect/jdbc url/driver name, and voila - we're talking to DB2400! After creating the initial tables using Ant we noticed that the table names were too long since the 400 has a limit of 10 characters. To fix this, I simply modified my XDoclet @hibernate.class table="..." to have shorter table names. After that, I simply had to re-arrange a few tables in my sample-data.xml file (for DBUnit) to avoid referential integrity issues. All-in-all, we migrated from MySQL to DB2 on an AS400 in a little under an hour this morning. Hibernate makes my development life soooo much easier.

What should we do with Tiles?

There's some discussions taking place on the Struts Developer Mailing List about what to do with Tiles. Tiles is gaining popularity in frameworks other than Struts - i.e. Spring and JSF. Personally, I don't mind that Tiles is buried deep inside struts.jar b/c it's basically the difference between a 500 KB JAR and a 100 KB JAR - and disc space is cheap! However, an advantage of extracting Tiles from Struts is that it then has the opportunity to become friendlier to other web frameworks. I'd even like to see a Sitemesh-like Filter so you could do Sitemesh stuff with Tiles. Or maybe just bundle Sitemesh with Tiles as a kick-ass templating engine.

So the question is: What should we do with it? Should it become a Jakarta Commons project or a Jakarta Project? Or even a java.net project? Tiles Users - we need your feedback!

Setting the heap size on your JVM

Cameron has posted a comment on my Performance Tuning MySQL article. The reason I'm highlighting this because it's something I wasn't are of:

From the article:

    -Xms128m -Xmx256m

The Sun JVM will run significantly faster with the following config instead:

    -Xms256m -Xmx256m

That's because the Sun implementation acquires and releases memory from / to the OS way too aggresively if the "ms != mx". Furthermore, either your server has the 256MB available or it doesn't. If you don't have it available, don't set the max that high. If you do have it available, you gain nothing from setting the min lower. This isn't a desktop system, it's a server -- make sure you have the necessary resources and if you do then use them!

Time to change all my heap size setting since I've been using the first setting (128/256) for quite some time. Thanks Cameron! The real question is: will changing "-Xms256m -Xmx512m" to "-Xms512m -Xmx512m" speed up my slow-ass PowerBook? ;-)

Cherry Creek Trail

80 degrees in Denver today made it perfect for a nice ride up Cherry Creek Trail. If you've never done it, I highly recommend it. It's an easy but technical dirt trail right in the heart of Denver. Of course, there's also a paved trail along the same route - so you get the best of both worlds.

[House Project] Foundation done, interior walls almost gone

This past week, they construction guys did a lot to get the floor on our new addition - as well as tear down the walls of the existing interior. Can you believe they discovered the walls had no insulation?! Bob told us yesterday that he expects them to have all the framing done by the end of this week. If he really means all the framing, I'll be pretty damn impressed. Below are some pics I snapped over the weekend - click on them to more.

[ANN] Fire 1.0 Released

Download · Release Notes. Fire, the Trillian-like IM client for OS X, has released version 1.0. I use Fire everyday and think it's a great IM client - especially since I use so many IM accounts. I do think that iChat, Yahoo Messenger and MSN are great clients, but I prefer having one app open rather than 3.

It's so easy to use, it doesn't even feel like work

Today I spent the whole day at my client doing training on the app I've been writing since November. The app is for posting jobs, entering resumes and screening applicants. It was originally created using Struts Resume and is in synch with the latest AppFuse code. It's been a fun app to develop and now that development is winding down, user training is beginning. When the head of HR was leaving the room today, she said something that made my day.

"It's so easy to use, it doesn't even feel like work."

There's nothing quite like compliments from a client.

[ANN] Hibernate 2.1.3 Released

Download · Release Notes. It's been awhile since the last Hibernate release (approx 2.5 months) - most likely because the last one has been rock solid - at least it has been on my projects. All tests pass in AppFuse.