In my current organization Aftek Limited I have used Spring Framework in one of my projects (lets call it as SomeProject since I can't disclose the name of the project!). To smoothen the learning curve I have been asked to present a case study of Spring.
The following PPT is the slightly modified version of the presentation. As usual comments are welcome! :-)
In one of my projects I have got some time to play with JBoss to “tune” it. I will rather say to “slim” it!
The project was basically a JEE application involving EJB 3.0 and Flex with BlazeDS. Here are some of the things which I noticed / performed …
Just came across couple of real good articles on TSS on above subject. Here are the links ...
http://www.theserverside.com/tt/articles/article.tss?l=ScalingYourJavaEEApplications
and
http://www.theserverside.com/tt/articles/article.tss?l=ScalingYourJavaEEApplicationsPart2
Enjoy!
Day 2 was much simpler. Nahar got added to the crew and we had Afteks car ready to commute. We reached on time (though Amit was with us! hehe ... just kidding!)
First session was on Web 2.0 stuff from Ramesh Loganathan who is from Pramati. His talk on bridging the gap between desktop applications and internet application was impressive. He shared some of his good experiences with web 2.0 development. I liked that idea of “Send to Friend who is on gtalk/yahoo/msn” instead of “Send email to friend”. Rather than technology he talked on a new approach towards the product development, new perspective to user interaction (lets call it user interaction instead of user interface as we are in web 2.0! Hmm?)
Next session was from Debu again. He was going to talk on SOA chaos. He was very impressive yesterday so I was expecting the same this time. Though I don’t have any experience of SOA, I had heard about this buzzword many times when I was in CPI. Debu tried his best to keep things simple, but I guess because there was no internet available, he was unable to show any demo. Because of this I guess I was unable to get the real feeling of SOA. Debu was very patient in answering my questions here again. I liked this. I talked about my year old problem of CachedRowset with him. He assured me that he will look into this. I met Madhav Sathe who is working with Debu at Oracle. To be very frank I was very surprised when he talked with me in Marathi! He also said that he will try to help me out in Cached row set issue. Thanks people!
Chris came next to talk on offline
After lunch we were expecting some J2ME stuff. But again there is a change in schedule. J2ME session got dropped out and even Advanced Spring session was also not there. Harshad, this was very disappointing ;-)
But then I met Paulo Caroli from ThoughtWorks. He was also impressive in talking on Agile techniques. His sessions on Continuous Integration Technique and Refactoring (to patterns) were very good. Yesterday I missed his session on Unit testing with Dependency Injection and Mock Objects as this session was running parallel to Spring :( I was feeling bad about this. Anyways He said that next time when he will be in pune he will talk on this.
Agile techniques are truly impressive but I guess these will work only if we change our mindset. As per Paulo, they are actually using these techniques in their day to day life which sound encouraging to me. Worth mentioning here is I liked one of his statements “Peer pressure ensures that policies get followed” Very true right? And if we want to go by Agile way automation will be the key to success. So try to automate everything like unit testing, build, integration, use tools to refactor, find bugs etc etc. I have already started towards working out this in Aftek … let’s see how it goes :)
This ended up the conference and its now time for quiz winners. Yes Chris was the person who was picking up the lucky chits. Amit was lucky to win 2nd price for 2nd day. Good that Aftek is lucky! And we started our journey back to BM office. Overall it was a good experience hearing from industry experts. Time will tell how we implement this.
Oh no! I have to wake up very early tomorrow … When? … Before
Yes! I made it. I was there in BM office at around
Symbiosis campus is just amazing! Needless to say that I recalled my PICT days and of course InC days to mention explicitly. After registration we had a breakfast which was good. And now let’s go to the sessions!
Okay okay … before going into each and every sessions details let me tell you that there was a Java Quiz also. And I am proud to say that we attempted correct answers on day1 and day 2 as well. I will write about the prizes in my next write up.
Our first session was from Prayank Swaroop who was from Adobe. He talked on Rich Internet Applications and Flex. He was amazing in his presentation. He had shown us the demo of FlexBook which was truly jaw dropping! As a result of this once the session got over we started discussing can we use Flex in dhg-web? :)
As there was a change in schedule for some sessions we attended Spring tutorial by Peter Thomas from Satyam. I found Thomas a true lover of Spring. After every 10 mins he was asking to use Spring. Couple of his dialogs were too interesting: “Don’t create custom frameworks anymore use Spring”, “Don’t use singleton anymore, don’t use new() in your code … use Spring”, “Spring has ended up killing EJBs”, “Hibernate people say don’t use Spring” etc etc. Long back I heard about Spring from Chirag V. I did not know Spring but Peters session has given me good overview of Spring. Now I am planning of going through it.
Lunch Time! Worth mentioning … of course if Preetam will not talk about food then who will talk? ;-) Had (a little because have to attend next sessions also!) good food. Have I mentioned that I met some of my old Dhankawadi friends there? Oh yes, very surprisingly I met Nilesh Birajdar and Bharat. Nilesh was in BVP, one batch junior to me and we were living very nearby @ IIT-D (it’s not IIT Delhi but its IIT Dhankawadi … needles to say we call the campus of BVP+PICT as IIT-D. hahaha!). Bharat was junior to me in PICT. Also I met Ashish who was used to say in my next Apartment @ Nagar. Surprisingly all these people are from Reflexis. Good to see you guys there!
After lunch we were under impression that now we will be witnessing the traditional “M$ Vs Java” war! But the speaker (I forgot the name of the speaker who was from Microsoft) didn’t touch that aspect at all and talked about the interoperability! Very good. Instead of fighting if we join the hands then we can deliver more; hmm? He talked on Office Open XML format and told us, how Microsoft office technologies can be integrated in Java platform. He also had given a small demo on Web services which was very basic: a “Hello World” web service. Further he had shown some good demos of Silverlight. At the end (no need to say) we impressed by Silverlight!
Next session was amazing! A well-known personality from EJB3 world : Debu Panda talked on “Spring and EJB3”. Wow! This is the stuff for which I was waiting for! Debu had given a precise comparison of these two technologies and very satisfactory answers to some of my questions. One question I would like to mention here: “Debu, what you say what will be there after 5 years EJB / Spring / Something else” Controversial question. And Debu answered it safely: “EJB will be there as an average project has a lifetime of at least 5 years. So EJB will be there.” He didn’t talk about Spring but said technologies will keep coming. Anyways safe answer! But I guess DR will have some better some philosophical answer to this! Debu is not only a HiTek personality but does good marketing also. I end up purchasing his book “EJB3 in Action”. Debu signed on it for me. Debu what about starting a “Debu Panda Signature Book” series? (Just like Martin!) :)
Meanwhile Preeti and Smita attended session on Wicket. They said it’s a component based server side framework for UI. That’s it. Even I don’t know about it. Will find out more about this afterwards :)
Ha forgot to tell one sad thing. After lunch Meenal was not feeling well so we asked her to go home. Next day Amit attended instead of her.
Tea Break: Though it’s not possible to get 4minar style tea here but anyways I had it ;-)
Chris Schalk from Google talked next on JSF and
The 1st day ended here. But there was one more drama to go. What to do with Meenals Scooty? Smita comfortably said that she will drive to BM office though I was unsure about this. To add some more "tadaka" to the situation Ashwins bike got punctured. And now Meenals scooty refused to start! Now what? As usual do not panic ... we are at Hinjewadi and not in African Jungle :) Finally the scooty started and we also found out a garage. This drama ended successfully when Smita reached home safely. Her longest ride in her life: Hinjewadi to Gadital, Hadapsar !
Last week we attended a (probably) first independent java conference in pune organized by Rightrix. The conference was held at Symbiosis Infotech Campus at Hinjewadi, Pune.
DR sent 5 people from Aftek viz Me, Smita N, Preeti, Ashwin and Meenal. We all had good time over last 2 days, meeting famous personalities and learning techi stuff from them. I will write in brief about these two days of conference in my next blogs.
One more thing: As we went to Hinjewadi what’s the first thing that we did? Correct we went to see the Afteks proposed development centre! And the (breaking) good news for all of us is: Yes we have seen some giant bulldozers and cranes working over there! So be ready to get shifted to Hinjewadi within next two years! (Disclaimer: It’s my guess and there is nothing official about it ;-) )
So be tuned to cover the next two techi days!
Interfaces
Java Virtual Machine Tool Interface (JVMTI)
A native interface implemented by the VM. Defines the services a VM must provide for debugging. Includes requests for information (e.g. current stack frame), actions (e.g. set a breakpoint), and notification (e.g. when a breakpoint has been hit).
Java Debug Wire Protocol (JDWP)
Defines the format of information and requests transferred between the debuggee process and the debugger front-end. It does not define the transport mechanism (e.g. socket, serial line, shared memory etc). The specification of the protocol allows the debuggee and debugger front-end to run under separate VM implementations and/or on separate platforms.
Java Debug Interface (JDI)
A 100% Java interface implemented by the front-end. Defines information and requests at a user code level. While debugger implementers could directly use the Java Debug Wire Protocol (JDWP) or Java Virtual Machine Tool Interface (JVMTI), this interface greatly facilitates the integration of debugging capabilities into development environments.
How it works
Each interface provides are two types of activities: requests and events. Requests originate on the debugger side and include queries for information, setting of state changes in the remote VM/application, and setting of debugging state. Events originate on the debuggee side and denote change of state in the remote VM/application.
Example of request
This story has been told to me by Manish… I found this very helpful as a young programmer/designer
Scene1:
One day a dad gives a brand new camlin color box to his son as a gift. The small boy becomes very happy by seeing 12 fresh colors in the box and asks dad “Which picture shall I draw first?” Dad said, “Son, go ahead with my picture!” Without wasting a single minute the boy takes pencil and draws his dads picture and paints it. He was so excited that was willing to use all 12 brand new colors; so he made dads face red, one arm blue other black, shirt green, pant brown and so on…
Scene2:
Some other day some other dad gives a brand new camlin color box to his son as a gift. The small boy becomes very happy by seeing 12 fresh colors in the box and asks dad “Which picture shall I draw first?” Here again dad said, “Son, go ahead with my picture!” But this boy thinks for a while; takes pencil and draws his dads picture and paints it. He thinks on body color and create the body color shade by mixing red and some other color, paints all body parts with that color; paints blue shirt and black pant. Thus he uses only 3-4 colors from his new color box!
Moral of the story – As a programmer/designer we have a lot of technologies in front of us, but this does not mean that we have to use all these; lets think/study them, see which ones our application really demands and use those or combination of those only and be the second clever boy!
