Saturday, May 10, 2008

JavaOne: AMD cites Java improvement efforts

The company promoted its Java support at the JavaOne conference in San Francisco during a keynote presentation. AMD is working on improvements in compilers, operating systems, middleware and development tools as well as Java Virtual Machine improvements. AMD is finding ways to improve Java performance across multi-core environments and has been researching improvements in garbage collection, according to AMD. Garbage collection involves the discarding of objects from memory after they are no longer needed or referenced.
"AMD understands that good software is critical to our product roadmap," said Leendert van Doorn, a senior AMD fellow. Without software, silicon just conducts energy, he said.
Multi-threaded programming "is inherently easier to do in Java," because of Java's built-in support for concurrent programming, van Doorn said.
But there are hurdles to overcome in application performance, said van Doorn. "This is an issue we're working on to help address," he said.
AMD has proposed its Light-Weight Profiling software parallelism specification to help managed code like Java run more efficiently by using continuous performance feedback. Also, AMD's Advanced Synchronization Facility proposal increases software concurrency.

Sunday, April 6, 2008

The Million Dollar SOA Question: Software ESBs or Hardware Appliances?


Service-oriented architectures have now become the norm for IT to deliver value to their respective businesses. A SOA-based approach promises an environment of agility, loosely coupled integration, and a composition-based approach, all of which results in faster adaptability to the demands of the business, lower operational costs, and the increased “pluggability” of standards-based applications. A service is nothing but an abstraction of something that does some business unit of work. This could be something like placing an order, retrieving customer information, or modifying personal information. Technically these services could be exposed with any binding/protocol/interface with request/response parameters being structured or ad-hoc data. Standards-based services have their payloads structured as XML.
In a traditional old school infrastructure, business functions were encompassed in packaged or customized applications with their predefined user interfaces. In a SOA, these traditionally "trapped" business functions tend to add more value when encompassed within a much larger scoped entity and then used by a more modern interaction mechanism. The true emancipation of these business functions required the transition of traditional IT infrastructure toward a new class of technology components. The two major roles of this new services infrastructure are a service brokering role and a gatekeeping role. There are other auxiliary roles, including that of a repository, endpoint management, and some higher-level roles such as orchestration in this new services infrastructure. However, the remainder of this article discusses the primary roles of service brokering and gatekeeping in detail and addresses the different technology components that can fulfill the roles.

Sunday, March 23, 2008

Dream java: HashSet from Sun, but likely BitSet from GNU

As the majority knows we now have two FOSS implementations of java runtime library: OpenJDK from Sun Microsystems and the parallel GNU Classpath project. There are various opinions on how this situation will be resolved in the future. Hence there is a natural interest to compare these two implementations.

GNU Classpath usually runs with the different java virtual machine than the Sun's code and is used as a whole, without trying to separate any part apart. In that way, no honest comparison is possible between any units that are smaller than all jre + all rtl together. However many packages in GNU Classpath are written entirely in java and are relatively weakly dependent from each other. This opens opportunity to test (and, if wanted, to use) them separately from the main project.



For Sun, we used the classes and jre of the 1.6.0_04 release (not to give opportunity to argue later that results of this research do not apply to the “original” java). GNU Classpath java.util. package was taked from CVS repository and modified to run on the same 1.6.0_04 Sun's jre (simply moving classes into another package). That way we have got the two java.util.* implementations that were capable to coexist on the same virtual machine and to be directly compared with each other.

Monday, March 17, 2008

Eclipse launches super run-time project as alternative to Java and .NET

The Eclipse organization has amassed a huge installed base of developers using its Java-based open source development tools. Now the organization has set its sights on the run-time arena and will take on Sun’s Java and Microsoft’s .NET with what it says is an agnostic open source component model that runs across multiple operating systems and computing tiers.
At EclipseCon 2008 in Santa Clara, Calif on Monday, the project leaders announced the Eclipse Runtime project (Eclipse RT) an initiative to build an open source run-time technology based on its own Equinox, a lightweight OSGi compliant run-time. Equinox, the core run-time platform for Eclipse, is not new. The run-time is used by Actuate, BEA, Code 9, Iona, IBM and Oracle and is reportedly deployed on millions of developers’ desktops. (the announcement comes three days before the vernal Equinox
What is new is the overarching effort to unify the organization’s many run-time projects including Equinox, the Eclipse Communications Framework, EclipseLink, Rich Ajax Platform (RAP), Riena and Swordfish into a unified project and establish a consistent open source run-time and component model that runs across all operating systems and computing tiers.

Sunday, March 2, 2008

Tech to java: LeBlanc now tackles retail

JazzyBird Coffee isn’t Brian LeBlanc’s first business startup.
Bitten by the same bug that 23 years ago led his father Bob to create Bengal Products — the maker of Bengal Roach Spray and other insecticides — Brian LeBlanc worked for that multimillion-dollar family venture 15 years while starting his own technology businesses.
He operated Intersurf Online for five years before the Internet service provider merged eight years ago with Network Technology Group. It’s now a data storage firm that complements the Louisiana Technology Park in the former Bon Marché Mall on Florida Boulevard. PNHS of Dallas acquired NTG last year.
More than a decade ago, LeBlanc also launched Celestial Technologies — a company that proposed an online music jukebox using compressed music files. LeBlanc hit a near home run with the concept that licensed Lucent Technologies compression software to encode digital music and tilted at beating rival MP3’s format.

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Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Introducing JavaFX: Sun's new family of Java-based products

JavaFX Mobile is a complete mobile operating and application environment built around Java and Linux. JavaFX Script is a highly productive scripting language for content developers to create rich media and content for deployment on Java technology. JavaFX Script is the core of the JavaFX family, and it's the most interesting part of the product set. (Sun thinks that developers will shorten JavaFX Script to JavaFX in conversations, as long as JavaFX Script is the core in the JavaFX product family.)
JavaFX Script is intended to simplify the creation of rich UIs for Java clients. JavaFX Script is implemented in Java, and it uses Java APIs for 2D and 3D graphics as well as UI controls. JavaFX Script supports a declarative syntax for UI definition that is somewhat similar to the ones used by Microsoft in XAML and Adobe in MXML, yet it's not XML-based. In fact, it's a real programming language -- not just a markup tool -- so you can write an entire application in JavaFX Script.