TSSJS 2008 Day Two - Synopsis

Session I - Concurrency: Past and Present – Brian Goetz

I have heard Brian’s talks in the past in the No Fluff Just Stuff conferences, and they have always been enlightening.

Brian recommends these papers about concurrency:
coping with parallelism treiber 1986
why threads are a bad idea, osterhout 1995
the problem with threads, edward lee – 2006

The talk is a bit more targeted at junior developers than I had hoped. Brian dealt with deadlocks and deadlock avoiding mechanisms. Brian talked about STM (Software Transactional Memory) and why he thinks it is not the silver bullet. He does not mention the reasons. He says he is thinking of presenting them in a talk in JavaOne.

Session II- Performance Puzzlers: Kirk Pepperdine & Brian Goetz

What followed were general commandments of performance (at least at this day and age). Release memory variables soon. Perofrm benchmarks on a dedicated machine.

One interesting point that was made was that in a benchmark with a system using OR mapper and a similar one that didn’t the one with the OR mapper performed better. The reason was that the concurrent garbage collector was essentially stealing processor cycles to clean up all the objects created by the OR mapper and ended up throttling the system against flooding the database with requests. When the OR mapper was missing, the database was thrashing leading to worser performance. So, even though both the direct JDBC implementation and the ORM implementation hit the database with similar number of requests, the ORM implementation is not flooding the database and is providing throttling for the requests. Interesting, but this is one of the things that happens by accident.

Session III- Implementing an ESB solution using Mule – Ross Mason

Services can be categorized as being in one of three layers.
Task based – represents a business task – example: buy a product – little reuse
Entity Based – represents a sub task – example: bill a customer – some reuse
Utility based – represents an atomic independent service – example: credit card processing – most reuse

Reusability of a service usually depends on which layer the service is classified into. With most reuse coming form the lowest. (as expected)

Mule provides support for creating functional test cases which, I think are more useful than testing one single class in isolation. More about unit testing vs functional testing in a later post.

Mule Expression framework is a way to evaluate expressions on a mule message. This makes content based routing easier. The expressions can be in xpath, groovy and a whole lot of other types.

Lunch Keynote: Why the Next Five Years will be about languages – Ted Neward

Ted built a case of language oriented programming. Object oriented programming is not the pinnacle in the evolution of languages. I seriously doubt if we will ever reach the pinnacle :-). One of the required features of a language will be tool support. These days it is a lot easier to get tool support for new languages. And, many of these languages can be made to run on the same platform that we currently run on. In the near future, we will see a lot more languages prop up into our mainstream development. Overall, the keynote was great.

Session IV: You got Your Ruby in my Java – Chris Nelson

Chris gave an introduction of Ruby. This talk is basically a Ruby introduction to the Java developer. I am not going to list the content of the talk as you can google it up and read about Ruby. It is nice that we as an industry are finally breaking the language stalemate that we hit and are willing to look at other languages to improve productivity.


Fire Side Chat: Concurrent Programming with Java and Erlang:

This was the first fireside chat that I’ve been to. The closest I’ve been to a fire side chat is viewing a chat on Google video :-). This free form of discussion with the right participants can really touch on various topics. Something like the discussion on TSS without the flame wars :-).

Fire Side Chat: Mission Critical deployment at Leap Frog Systems - Eugene Ciruana

I have to admit that I don't exactly remember the name of the presentation. But, this is by far the best one I've attended at TSSJS. The crown jewel if you will. To give an analogy, if you've read Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture - Martin Fowler, it is the embodiment of years (if not decades) of rich software development expertise condensed in a book. This talk was the embodiment of years of practical, i repeat, practical software development experience condensed in a 1 hr talk. This was a fire side chat and not a typical presentation. We the audience, got to ask all sorts of questions about Leap Frog's infrastructure and more importantly, the design decisions that went into selecting the software solutions. It was like discussing the battle plans and reviewing the war with a war general.

No matter how many subject matter experts you talk to, it is the experience in the field and in the trenches that really teaches you and really counts.