Raible Designs

[OSCON 2008] The Keynote

This morning, I woke up awful early to polish my presentation, walked to the train station and rode Amtrak from Salem to Portland. The commute was great: there's nothing better than traveling with power and an EVDO card + the option to get a cup of coffee. After getting off the train, riding The Max and walking to the Oregon Convention Center, I'm now sitting in the Keynote at OSCON. Here's my notes from this session.

10 years ago, leaders of the free software movement got together and tried to figure out a way to help people understand how to get access to software freedom. As they talked, there was a gradual meeting of minds. Finally, one person suggested "Open Source". A few weeks later, there was a larger meeting of people and they heard about this term. It was an idea that changed the idea of software freedom and what free software was. We've come along way since then. Last year, we heard about open source and and it trying to find identity in corporations. This year, we're hearing about corporations trying to find their identity in open source.

The official tag for this conference is: oscon08.

Tim O'Reilly
While this is the 10th Anniversary of OSCON, it's also the 12th Anniversary of the O'Reilly Perl Conference (where it all started). Tim began his activism with Perl when it got on the web. He was thinking about the internet and the online world, from the beginning (when many others were coming from Linux). Open Source was almost named "SourceWare". Tim believes his biggest contribution is bringing Open Source and the Internet together.

"Keep your History" - make the things you put online accessible for years to come.

When OSCON first started, it was all about the OS Wars. Tim is showing a shirt with the famous Ghandi quote on it about "First they laugh at you..." and it has a Linux logo on the bottom. It's seems ironic that Microsoft is now one of the major sponsors of this conference (my thoughts, not Tim's).

Open Source Technology in the Enterprise. IT jobs are 2.3% of all jobs posted, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Technology oriented companies (e.g., Google, Yahoo, Sun) make heavy use of Open Source (40% of all jobs posted by Y!). Open source is growing faster in non-tech companies. Of the open source technologies in the enterprise, the highest share of jobs is Linux (19%), followed by Perl, JavaScript and PHP. As far as the fastest growing, Django and Alfresco are at the top.

Three Big Challenges and Opportunities:

1. Cloud Computing
2. The (Open) Programmable Web
3. Open Mobile

Cloud Computing: Amazon Web Services, Google App Engine, The Engine Yard, etc.

Jesse Vincent: "Web 2.0 is Sharecropping"

Danny O'Brien: "If we want people to have the same degree of user autonomy as we’ve come to expect from the world, we may have to sit down and code alternatives to Google Docs, Twitter, and EC3 that can live with us oon the edge, not be run by third parties."

Basically, Tim is saying the that cloud computing is great, but it doesn't fit well with open source. This is primarily because if you build on a cloud, you have to be careful not to get locked into that platform.

Data is the "Intel Inside".

The Web is the Internet Operating System - the subsystems will be data subsystems.

Locking in data: iTunes and Amazon's Kindle. On the other hand you have Yahoo's BOSS, which is doing the opposite.

We Need the Open Web Platform! Tomorrow's Keynote, "Supporting the Open Web" will talk much more about this.

The Mobile Web has caused the "browser wars" to resurface. However, big companies like Google are putting a stake in the ground and saying "We believe in open". Net Neutrality and The Open Handset Alliance are two of Google's smartest strategic decisions. They understand how much they depend on the open ecosystem.

When we look at our success in the last 10 years, we can be really excited. But what's really impressive is how much we (as an open source community) is how we've risen to new challenges and challenged the openness of new platforms and industries.

Christine Peterson
Christine is the President of the the Foresight Institute. Christine was the person who suggested the term "open source" at the meeting referenced above. Unfortunately, my first battery died as Christine was coming on stage, so I missed writing down the first 10 minutes of her 15 minute talk. She's talking about the openness vs. privacy of keeping US citizens safe. She started her talk apologizing for the ethnocentricity of her talk and moved to quickly note that the e-voting controversy wouldn't have happened if open source software was used.

"Who would have guessed that the folks with the pocket protectors would turn out to be the ones with the right stuff?" -- LA Times

Founding Geeks: Thomas Jefferson (mechanical geek) and Thomas Edison (electricity geek).

You can't just complain about things. The fear is real. We can't just complain about how DC is solving problems, we have to step up and solve them ourselves.

"No Secret Software for Public Sensing Data."

Dirk Hohndel
Dirk is the Chief Linux and Open Source Technologist at Intel. He's talking about Moblin: Linux for Next Generation Mobile Internet. This sounds like something that has been talked about a million times before. Why is it interesting today? Because we're at an open source conference and open source is what makes it interesting.

When people look at Intel, they don't think of open source. However, Intel is very involved in open source and uses an open source methodology internally for their development process. They also have one of the largest grids powered by open source (~100K Linux servers).

Moblin is about the internet, about mobility, about flexibility and extensibility. What's happening today is the ideas of 10 years ago have become affordable to produce (for manufacturers) and purchase (for consumers). There's lots of proprietary ways to develop the mobile web, but it needs to be open in order to prevent lock-in (to a platform) and encourage innovation.

A year ago, Intel started Moblin. Initially, there wasn't a lot of interest from open source developers. The majority of interest came from companies, particularly hardware vendors. To Dirk, this was disappointing as he really wanted a community to guide the project and make choices about the platform. There's lots of Open Mobile/Linux efforts out there, but there aren't any that are truly open - with access to the source code and everything else you'd expect from an open source project. Intel was hoping to announce a cutting-edge infrastructure for Moblin here at OSCON, but they're a few weeks behind. They hope to be ready for soon.

"The hope that I have is the community takes this from us. Show us where to go. Show us where not to go. Help us get this right."

Tim O'Reilly interviews Monty Widenius and Brian Aker
Tim asks how it's going 6 months in. Monty responds that he's very happy they didn't have to go public and that Sun is still trying to figure out what they bought. One of the things difficulties they've seen about encouraging Sun's engineers to be involved in open source is some are hesitant about open sourcing their code. The biggest problem is engineers are afraid of the feedback/scrutiny that their code will receive.

MySQL was very unique as a company in that it was a virtual company, with most engineers working out of their homes. MySQL has become an enabling force for moving Sun to a similar model.

Monty is working on Maria (new storage engine) and Brian is working on Drizzle (a slimmer version of MySQL). Drizzle was inspired by a conversation when Brian was talking to Rackspace's CTO.

"Do less and then create extensibility mechanisms." -- Tim O'Reilly

LinkedIn Tech Talk: Kevin Brown on Shindig

Last Thursday, Kevin Brown visited LinkedIn's Mountain View office to do a presentation on Shindig, an OpenSocial Reference Implementation. Below are my notes from his talk.

In September 2007, Google started thinking about Social APIs. Google Gadgets would be better with access to Social Data ... but that's just Google. It was recognized that this is something that many others would like access to. OpenSocial was announced in November 2007. It's an open standard for developer platforms that has a strong emphasis on "social" data. It's based on gadgets which is now covered by The Open Social Foundation.

In November, many Googlers started working on a Google Code project based on Java and iGoogle. However, there was too much proprietary code. In December, Brian McCallister of Ning created an ASF Proposal for Shindig. It was a rough port of iGoogle but with Ning's PHP code. This turned out to be a great starting point. It immediately got interest from Google, Hi5, MySpace and others. While most committers are still from Google, there are 12 developers that work on it full time and they're adding 2 committers each month. Shindig is a Java/PHP implementation of OpenSocial. Open Campfire is an Apache-licensed .NET implementation that hopes to eventually merge into Shindig.

Read more on the LinkedIn Blog »

Deer Creek Canyon Trail

This evening I enjoyed an awesome ride up Deer Creek Canyon Trail in the foothills. Click on the image below for proof.

Up next: White Ranch on Wednesday.

JavaOne Parties Update

In an effort to keep one of the top spots for "javaone parties", here's the updated list for JavaOne parties this week:

• Tuesday: CodeGear: Thirsty Bear @ 5:30, Open Source UnBOF: Thirsty Bear @ 8, TangoSolarMetric: Zebulon @ 9
• Wednesday: Adobe: Jillian's @ 6:30, Eclipse: Thirsty Bear @ 7, Tiki Bar Party: The Bamboo Hut @ 8
• Thursday: JBoss: Jillian's @ 5:30, QCon: Zebulon @ 6:30

Thanks to Atlassian for the free beer last night at Thirsty Bear. I'll likely be at Thirsty Bear tonight, followed by Zebulon. Let the networking begin!

Related: JavaOne: Where are the good parties at?

JavaOne: Where are the good parties at?

In a week from today, I'll begin the annual trek to one of the best conferences on the planet: JavaOne. By "best conferences", I don't mean it has the best technical content - that award goes to NFJS, The Colorado Software Summit and The Spring Experience.

JavaOne has the best networking opportunities. Of all the conference-goers I know, most of them will be at JavaOne.

I'm flying into San Francisco on Monday, driving to Mountain View to work for a few hours, playing in the company's weekly softball game, then heading back to downtown San Francisco for the networking. Tuesday through Thursday, I plan on doing the same thing: commuting to Mountain View during the day, returning to JavaOne for the parties. I have a free blogger pass, so I could attend sessions, but networking seems more important. If there's any good BOFs at night, I may attend those.

So where and where are the good parties at JavaOne 2008? Here's what I know about so far - I'll add to this list as comments start flowing in:

• Sunday: GlassFish: Thirsty Bear @ 7
• Monday: IONA: Zebulon @ 6, JavaBloggers: Thirsty Bear @ 7:30
• Tuesday: CodeGear: Thirsty Bear @ 5:30, TangoSolarMetric: Zebulon @ 9
• Wednesday: Adobe: Jillian's @ 6:30, Eclipse: Thirsty Bear @ 7, Tiki Bar Party: The Bamboo Hut @ 8
• Thursday: JBoss: Jillian's @ 5:30, QCon: Zebulon @ 6:30

I don't have details on the JBoss party, but I did receive an e-mail about it. Since my flight leaves before the party starts, I must've deleted it.

When and where is the Java Bloggers Meetup? What about the Solarmetric/Tangosol party? Is it now the SpringSource/BEA/Oracle party?

See y'all next week - I hope the networking opportunities are better than ever.

Related: JavaOne 2004, JavaOne 2005 and JavaOne 2006.

The Thin Server Architecture Working Group

From The Wisdom of Ganesh:

Peter Svensson has set up a website where like-minded people can discuss the brave new world of applications whose common characteristic is that no aspect of presentation logic resides on the server side. I admit that's an overly broad-brush generalisation, and it will be necessary to read what the various authors of this camp have to say.

I thought about doing something similar when I first read about SOFEA. I'm glad to see that someone has taken on this challenge. However, doesn't it seem ironic that this site doesn't use SOFEA/SOUI for its own architecture?

IMO, if this site isn't written with some sort of SOFEA-based framework like it advocates, it's pretty much worthless.

Grails vs. Rails - My Thoughts

In a comment, Jared Peterson asked:

I'm curious if you have any thoughts on folks that might be trying to make a decision between Rails and Grails. I like the concept of "Allow Both", but what if you "have neither"?

If you were starting a new project, could choose either one, needed to interact with a lot of existing Java code (JRuby on Rails I guess), what would you pick?

A friend recently asked me "Can I solicit your honest, unadulterated opinion on Grails?" I think the e-mail I sent him may help Jared's question.

I think it's awesome. IMO, it's the same thing as AppFuse, but it has a DSL that's much simpler to learn and remember. Less code -> faster productivity. There does seem to be some maturity issues, but I think it'll get there. The question is - how fast can Groovy become. It's similar to Rails and Ruby in that you start using Grails and you think "This Groovy thing is kinda cool, I'd like to learn more." One of the reasons I really like it is the learning curve for experienced open source Java Developers is virtually flat. You can learn enough to be productive in a single day.

That being said, I think there's also a lot of cool stuff going on with RIA. IMO, Flex or GWT + Grails would be a really fun set of tools to develop with. Here's a excerpt from a write-up I recently did when analyzing Rails and Grails at LinkedIn (in January):

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Comparing Rails and Grails
They're both excellent frameworks. Rails is definitely more mature, but the environment is a pain to setup (esp. on Windows). Grails is very easy to setup for Java Developers. Grails needs a lot of improvement as far as hot deploy and stack traces. It's probably Groovy's fault, but its stack traces are hideous - rarely pointing to the class and line number in the first few lines.

As for hot deploy, it doesn't work nearly as well as it does with Rails. Rails' "script/server" starts WEBrick in a few seconds, while "grails run-app" can take up to 10 seconds (even on a brand new application). Even with its warts, Grails is simply awesome. I really, really enjoy writing Groovy code in IDEA and seeing immediate changes. I don't like "test-app" as much as I like Rails' "test:units" (or even better, "test:uncommitted"). It seems to be widely realized that Rails has a better testing story.

Rails is immediate, Grails is immediate 70% of the time.

Groovy is extremely easy to learn for Java Developers. Ruby is easy too learn, and possibly too powerful for OO rookies. Both are fun to program in and very capable of allowing greater developer productivity. If you know Hibernate, Spring, SiteMesh and JSP, you owe it to yourself to look at Grails. If you know these technologies well, you can learn Grails in less than an hour. You can be productive in the next hour and have an application running by the end of the day. That's not to take anything away from Ruby. I believe that Rails is an excellent platform as well. It's pretty cool that profiling and benchmarking are built into the framework and you can easily judge how many servers you'll need to scale.

I used IDEA while developing with both frameworks. IDEA has Rails and Groovy support available via plugins and they both worked quite well. The support for Grails was much better than Rails. Grails offers code completion, Ctrl+click on classes/methods, debugging and starting/ stopping the webapp from your IDE. Rails doesn't offer much in the way of Ctrl+clicking on class names/methods or debugging.
--------

Is there anything that Rails can do that Grails can't? Not as far as I can tell. I think it really comes down to developer passion and team preference. If you have experienced Java Developers that like the ecosystem and its tools, Grails makes a lot of sense. If you have experienced PHP developers or frustrated J2EE developers, they might enjoy Rails more. One thing that's very cool about both frameworks - learning one actually teaches you things about the other. They're so similar in many respects that knowledge is transferable between the two.

Of course, this is all just my opinion after working with both frameworks for a few weeks. For anyone who has tried both, what do you think?

In closing, here's an excerpt from a recent comment I left on Javalobby:

Of course, the hard part now is deciding between Django, Rails, Grails and GWT for your web framework. Then again, that's like having to choose between a Ferrari, Porsche, Lamborghini and a Maserati. No matter which one you choose, it's unlikely you'll be disappointed.

WebORB: Have you ever heard of it?

A colleague sent me an e-mail today and asked me if I'd ever heard of WebORB today. Since I hadn't, I figured I'd write this post and see if any of you have heard of it? If so, what is it and what does it do? It it similar to Appcelerator, but server-side only? Or is it more like Granite DS?

[Read More]

Web Application Frameworks based on Real-World Popularity

I received an interesting (spam?) comment on my What Web Application framework should you use? entry today:

A useful resource to compare Java web frameworks (Spring, Tapestry, Struts, OpenLaszlo,...) and also PHP, Python, Ruby web frameworks:

http://www.therightsoft.com/softwaretechnologies/webframeworks

If you go to the site, you'll see they have a hierarchical list of web application frameworks based on real-word popularity. First of all, I'm unsure of what "real-word" popularity is.

Let's assume this is a typo and it should be "real-world" popularity. Where is the credible source for this data? Where is the link to this credible source? I like the list, its sortability and filterability, but there's no evidence that it's true. Care to elaborate on your sources [email protected]?

All Java web frameworks should support hot deploy of a single class

In Anyone else using Groovy?, Tim Fennell (inventor of Stripes) raves at how much he likes Groovy now that it supports Java 5 features. He writes that Groovy might offer a solution to make development with Stripes faster:

The other thing I've been wondering about is that if there were enough demand for it we could try adding "improved" groovy support. E.g. throw your groovy actions under WEB-INF and we'll use groovy's built in stuff to do auto-reloading etc.

Gregg Bolinger responds with an excellent idea:

It would be really cool if Stripes could automatically discover and load changes to action beans (including new ones) without the entire app restarting, regardless of what the action bean is written in. But I realize that is a pretty tall order. :)

I agree that it might be a tall order, but I don't think it's impossible. In fact, I think all Java-based web frameworks should support hot deploy of a single class. We shouldn't have to buy JavaRebel to do this. It should be mandatory.

When an application reaches a certain size, the startup time can get pretty lengthy. This is lost development time. Furthermore, if any part of the development cycle takes longer than 15 seconds, there's a good chance developers will do something else (check their e-mail, move onto another task, etc.). Multi-tasking may be a good skill to have, but it's a horrible way to be productive.

Of the frameworks I'm familiar with, only Tapestry 5 and Seam support reloading single classes without restarting the whole application. Why can't the other frameworks "borrow" Tapestry 5's code? Maybe someone should just buy ZeroTurnaround and give away JavaRebel for free.

If I had one wish for 2008, it would be for all Java web frameworks to support this feature. Pretty Please?