David S. Read

My last two days at JavaOne 2010 included some interesting sessions as well as spending some time in the pavilion.  I’ll mention a few of the session topics that I found interesting as well as some of the products that I intend to check out.

I attended a session on creating a web architecture focused on high-performance with low-bandwidth.  The speaker was tasked with designing a web-based framework for the government of Ethiopia.  He discussed the challenges that are presented by that country’s infrastructure – consider network speed on the order of 5Kbps between sites.  He also had to work with an IT group that, although educated and intelligent, did not have a lot of depth beyond working with an Oracle database’s features.

His solution allows developers to create fully functional web applications that keep exchanged payloads under 10K.  Although I understand the logic of the approach in this case, I’m not sure the technique would be practical in situations without such severe bandwidth and skill set limitations.

A basic theme during his talk was to keep the data and logic tightly co-located.  In his case it is all located in the database (PL/SQL) but he agreed that it could all be in the application tier (e.g. NoSQL).  I’m not convinced that this is a good approach to creating maintainable high-volume applications.  It could be that the domain of business applications and business verticals in which I often find myself differ from the use cases that are common to developers promoting the removal of tiers from the stack (whether removing the DB server or the mid-tier logic server).

One part of his approach with which I absolutely concur is to push processing onto the client. The use of the client’s CPU seems common sense to me.  The work is around balancing that with security and bandwidth.  However, it can be done and I believe we will continue to find more effective ways to leverage all that computer power.

I also enjoyed a presentation on moving data between a data center and the cloud to perform heavy and intermittent processing.  The presenters did a great job of describing their trials and successes with leveraging the cloud to perform computationally expensive processing on transient data (e.g. they copy the data up each time they run the process rather than pay to store their data).  They also provided a lot of interesting information regarding options, advantages and challenges when leveraging the cloud (Amazon EC2 in this case).

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I’ve been at Oracle’s combined JavaOne and OpenWorld events for two days.  I am here as both an attendee, learning from a variety of experts, and as a speaker.  Of course this is the first JavaOne since Oracle acquired Sun.  I have been to several JavaOne conferences over the years so I was curious how the event might be different.

One of the first changes that I’ve noticed is that due to the co-location of these two large conferences the venue is very different than when Sun ran JavaOne as a standalone event.  The time between sessions is a full half hour, probably due to the fact that you may find yourself going between venues that are several blocks apart.  I used to think that having getting from Moscone North the Moscone South took a while.   Now I’m walking from the Moscone center to a variety of hotels and back again.  Perhaps this is actually a health regime for programmers!

The new session pre-registration system is interesting. I don’t know if this system has been routine with Oracle’s other conferences but it is new to JavaOne.  Attendees go on-line and pre-register for the sessions they want to attend.  When you show up at the session your badge is scanned.  If you had registered you are allowed in.  If you didn’t preregister and the session is full you have to wait outside the room to see if anyone who registered fails to show up.

I think I like the system, with the assumption that they would stop people from entering when the room was full.  At previous conferences it seemed like popular sessions would just be standing room only, but that was probably a violation of fire codes.  The big advantage of this approach is that it reduces the likelihood of your investing the time to walk to the venue only to find out you can’t get in.  As long as you arranged your schedule on-line and you show up on-time, you’re guaranteed a seat.

Enough about new processes.  After all, I came here to co-present a session and to learn from a variety of others.

Paul Evans and I spoke on the topic of web services and their use with a rules engine. Specifically we were using JAX-WS and Drools.  We also threw in jUDDI to show the value of service location decoupling.  The session was well attended (essentially the room was full) and seemed to keep the attendees’ attention.  We had some good follow-up conversations regarding aspects of the presentation that caught people’s interest, which is always rewarding. The source code for the demonstration program is located at http://bit.ly/blueslate-javaone2010.

Since I am a speaker I have access to both JavaOne and OpenWorld sessions.  I took advantage of that by attending several OpenWorld sessions in addition to a bunch of JavaOne talks.

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I received a helpful push from Paul Evans this evening.  He reminded me that the Semantic Workbench SourceForge project (semanticwb.sourceforge.net) is just sitting idle, waiting to be kicked-off.  We talked about the vision around the project, which needs to be clearly and concisely articulated as a mission.  At that point we’ll have a direction to take.

This conversation coincided with my attendance at two semantic-web presentations at Oracle OpenWorld, which I am able to attend since it is co-located with JavaOne.  I’ll write more about my experiences at this year’s JavaOne conference soon.

These semantic -web presentations validated the value of semantic technologies and the need to make them more visible to the IT community.  For my part, this means I need to do more writing and presenting about semantic technologies while creating a renewed vigor around the Semantic Workbench project.

As Paul and I spoke and I tried to define my vision around the project, I realized that I was being too wordy for a mission statement.  The fundamentals of my depiction were also different from the current project overview on SourceForge.  The overview does not describe the truly useful application that I would like to see come out of the project.

Recognizing this disconnect reinforced the need to come up with a more useful and actionable mission.  In the hopes that the project can be of value, I present this mission statement:

The Semantic Workbench strives to provide a complete Java-based GUI and tool set for exploring, testing, and validating common semantic web-based operations.

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For years we’ve been hearing about the importance of Enterprise Architecture (EA) frameworks.  The messages from a variety of sources such as Zachman, TOGAF, HL7 and others is that businesses have to do an incredible amount of planning, documenting, discussing, benchmarking, evaluation, (feel free to insert more up-front work here) before they will have a good basis to implement their IT infrastructure. Once implemented all the documentation must be maintained, updated, verified, expanded, improved, (once again, insert more ongoing documentation management work here).  Oh, by the way, your company may want some actual IT work aligned with its core operations to be accomplished as part of all this investment. I don’t believe such a dependency is covered well in any of the EA material.

I have always struggled with these EA frameworks.  Their overhead seems completely unreasonable. I agree that planning the IT infrastructure is necessary.  This is no different than planning any sort of infrastructure.  Where I get uncomfortable is in the incredible depth and precision these frameworks want to utilize.  IT infrastructures do not have the complete inflexibility of buildings or roads.  Computer systems have a malleability that allows them to be adapted over time, particularly if the adjustments are in line with the core design.

Before anyone concludes that I do not believe in having a defined IT architecture let me assure you that I consistently advocate having a well-planned and documented IT architecture to support the enterprise.  A happenstance of randomly chosen and deployed technologies and integrations is inefficient and expensive.  I just believe that such planning and documentation do not need to be anywhere near as heavyweight as the classical EA frameworks suggest.

So you can imagine, based on this brief background, that I was not particularly surprised when the Zachman lawsuit and subsequent response from Stan Locke (Metadata Systems Software) failed to stop EA progress within Blue Slate or any of our clients.  I’m not interested in rehashing what a variety of blogs have already discussed regarding the lawsuit.  My interest is simply that there may be more vapor in the value of these large frameworks than their purveyors would suggest.

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It was an unusual start to our vacation in York Beach, Maine this year.  We arrived on Saturday afternoon, earlier than usual.  Our efficient start had paid off and we found that there was ample time after unpacking to go to the beach.  As night settled in we noticed a strange absence…the Cape Neddick Lighthouse (Nubble Light) was dark!

I’ve been coming up to York Beach almost every summer for over 40 years.  This was the first time I had ever seen, or rather not seen, the light operating.  I did what anyone in 2010 does when something strange happens, I checked Google.  However after searching for news related to this “outage” I came up empty.  The Town of York website was silent on the issue as was a local news website.

The blackout continued on through Sunday and Monday.  On Tuesday morning we noticed that the light was back in operation.  Whether there was an electrical issue or a burned out light bulb, it was apparently resolved early Tuesday.  I sit here writing this particular paragraph on Tuesday evening with the light operating in its typical and (usually) reliable manner.  Maybe someday I’ll learn what happened.

Beyond the mystery of the lighthouse, it was an unusually warm week in York.  Upper 80s and lower 90s prevailed each day.  For several days there wasn’t much wind, at least not a cool wind, at the beach.  This is the first year in recent memory where Lisa hasn’t been on the beach wrapped in sweatshirts and towels to keep warm.  Complementing the hot weather, the water was about 63 degrees and provided a very refreshing respite from the heat!

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