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| | | A Developer's Perspective | |
 | Rick Ross is the founder of Javalobby. He is a frequent speaker at Java-related events and a well-known advocate for Java developer interests.. |
 Happy Birthday, Javalobby - 10 years this week
Earlier today I was on the phone with someone asking about the history of Javalobby and DZone when I realized something I had overlooked. It was 10 years ago this week (August 2, 1997) that I sent out a couple of Usenet messages and set up a little website in hopes of giving Java developers a place to rally and discuss their opinions from a developer's perspective. Little did I know how much that day would change my life, and the decade since then has been rich and fascinating. Ten years of Javalobby, and I guess things have come a long way from that little ISDN router in my Manhattan apartment. We thought it would literally burn up from traffic when we started to understand how many other developers shared a passionate view of Java and cared deeply about its evolution. So, on this tenth birthday of Javalobby, I find myself humbled and overwhelmed with gratitude to all of you who have contributed so much to the health and growth of this community over these many years. Without you, this idea for a gathering place for supporters of Java technology would have amounted to nothing, but over the years you have helped affect more positive changes in the Java community and ecosystem than you probably know. It is quite trendy for today's news to focus on "user generated media" but the men and women who have given so much to Javalobby all these years know it is not a recent invention. Even those of you who have done nothing more than read the site or newsletters over the years have contributed a lot, since you have helped inspire those who had something to say and share. Thank you all for making this the greatest ten years of my life. I am so grateful! Until next time,
Rick Ross
rick@javalobby.org
AIM or Yahoo Messenger: RickRossJL | | |
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| | | Matthew Schmidt
is the man behind the scenes at Javalobby. If you have questions
or concerns, feel free to email him at matt@javalobby.org. |
 Embed Your Own Servlet Container - Jetty Style
Over the weekend, I sat down to re-design and re-code one of our core utilities into Java. We had spent the better part of several days trying to make this particular utility work properly on some newer hardware, and after much frustration, I went back to my old friend Java.
During this redesign, I knew that I wanted to migrate this tool from being a standalone command line application to a powerful self-contained server that could run anywhere and run with load balancing, be able to power up multiple instances. This is where Jetty came to the rescue. Before this weekend, I had never used Jetty and never tried to embed it into any of my applications. I had seen it used very successfully in products like Jive's OpenFire for their administration console, so I decided to take a look and see whether it was going to be much work. Fortunately, it couldn't have been any easier. With 3 (maybe 4) lines of code, I had a Jetty server bound to an IP and port running a Hessian servlet on an endpoint of my choosing. Once started, it sat in maybe 10M of memory total, a welcome find in the days where I struggle to understand why my other application servers are using gigs of memory. All in all, it was a mostly pleasant experience. My Hessian classes operated as expected, and I now had a stable, low footprint server that I could use as a base for my rewrite. On top of that, I was even able to use servlets and jsps if I wanted. I recommend you give Jetty a shot if you've got something you want to expose via a servlet and don't want all the weight and configuration of something even as minimal as Tomcat. Check out their Wiki for more information on embedding this slick server. Sometimes It's Ok To Restart Your JVM
Now, I'm sure I'll catch a flack for saying this, but I'm definitely not the first. Sometimes, it is ok to just restart your JVM. Now, I'm not just talking about restarting it because you've deployed some new code, no, I'm talking about just restarting it for good measure. Maybe you're restarting it when it reaches a certain error condition or even a certain amount of memory. Some of us value our sleep at night, and when things start to go awry with software that you didn't write and you can't seem to fix it, we start to think about solutions that we don't normally speak of. It's these solutions that many of you will scoff at, but sometimes a simple little monitoring hack can save a lot of headaches. These hacks can re-introduce a modicum of stability in a system that was previously not stale and can return some sanity to your developers who do occasionally need to sleep. So, the moral of the story is that you don't always need to have the super clean solution; sometimes a hack works just a well. But remember, you have to go back to that problem and actually solve it. A hack is just that, a hack, and it won't hold forever. Even duct table breaks eventually :) Until Next Time,
Matthew Schmidt
matt@javalobby.org
Yahoo IM: mattschmidtjl | | |
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| | | most clicked this week from dzone.com |
Most-clicked links this week |
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| | | A recap of
some of the most popular and active Javalobby.org
discussions this week. |
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Is Grails More Productive than Rails?
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Has Rails already lost its title as most productive (supposedly) Web framework? It has if one company's studies are correct. They claim Grails is even more productive.
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Full Discussion |
Posted By: Michael Urban - (10 Replies)
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Bugzilla 3.0 coming to a website near you ...
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You may notice a change when you next raise or comment on a bug; Bugzilla 3.0 has been installed, and the pages have a fresh new look. This should also add some notable improvements or enable them in the future; in particular, we wave goodbye to MacOS,having now settled on Mac OS X as the OS keyword. MacOS is dead, long live Mac OS X!
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Full Discussion |
Posted By: Alex Blewitt - (9 Replies)
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| | | Product and
service announcements for Java developers. |
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GratePic 0.8 released
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GratePic - a cross platform tool for posting, commenting and rating photos on flickr. It features a nice, task oriented user interface; based on the NetBeans platform.
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Full Announcement & Discussion |
Posted By: Leon Chiver - (0 Replies)
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soapUI 1.7.5 final
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eviware is happy to announce soapUI 1.7.5, which includes a large number of community requests/improvements and more power and productivity enhancements for soapUI Pro users.
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Full Announcement & Discussion |
Posted By: Ole Matzura - (0 Replies)
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Glean v1.2
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Glean is a framework of Ant scripts for generating feedback on a team's source code. Glean's goal is to make it possible to add feedback to your build cycle with as little pain as possible.
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Full Announcement & Discussion |
Posted By: John Brugge - (2 Replies)
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