Wednesday, April 29, 2009

JBoss Cache getting a makeover?

JBoss Cache getting a makeover or spawning a cool new product? Check out - Infinispan.

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

100G JVM heap?

Wow! - this is absolutely cool. I remember reading about a 3 Terabyte heap using JRockit a few years ago. Of course the GC delays were long and the number of objects/bytes allocated and de-allocated were less. But this story is a real life scenario. Nice.

Monday, April 27, 2009

Hiking in Sanborn-Skyline County Park

This is what the title would've been if I hadn't missed the turn completely because I was enjoying the drive a little too much, while listening to Prairie Home Companion on NPR and drove off instead to Big Basin. So, I did the Sempervirens Falls/Sequioa trail - a total of 3.4 miles and then did a shorter hike on Dool trail. Love the Redwoods.

Friday, April 24, 2009

In-Memory databases are not dead

A nice coincidence - Marco talking about In-mem DBs and their relevance in Complex Event Processing almost at the same time I reported about Derby's In-mem backend.

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Java JAVA Java

Oracle and Sun. Well, I had to write about it. Another voice in the crowd, but still - having worked on Java for almost 10 years now, I felt that I had to say something.

I guess we all saw this coming. It had to happen eventually. Sun was just running aground with year after year of loss making.

That apart, what almost all of us are really interested in is really what direction Java will go under the captaincy of Oracle. Just 2 weeks ago, we were all warming up to the idea of IBM taking over Sun/Java and now almost overnight we see a complete turn of events.

I guess the thought of IBM owning Java would not have troubled us as much as Oracle owning Java. IBM is not new to working in/with the Community, no matter how half-hearted their attempts were/are. See Eclipse. And then Derby. Perhaps Eclipse alone redeems them. But Oracle? Will they still play nice with IBM and WebSphere? How about the little guys like Apache, JBoss, Spring and the rest of us mortals? Will the vibrant and thriving Java community still live?

Questions..and more questions. Only time will tell. There is no doubt that Java platform itself will grow stronger, but will it remain freely available and accessible to everyone without having to shell out $$$ to Oracle?

All we can hope is that Oracle will embrace Java and the Community rather than constrict it like a boa.

And of course we all know what will become of MySQL. All the startups, Web 2.0 and Cloud companies that relied so heavily on this will begin to wonder why they did not use PostGRES.

Sunday, April 19, 2009

Hiking in Monte Bello Open Space Preserve

My first hike this season and it was wonderful. I started late in the day and it was already quite warm - in the 80s. The meadows smelled wonderful, so much so that I was tempted to just lie in the shade of some tree and doze off. Something about the warm and sweet smell of a Spring day. Resisting the urge to lie down, I went on down Canyon Trail. I completed the loop by coming back via White Oak trail. Roughly 4 miles or so. I could've done the longer trail but I didn't want to stress myself, this being the first hike after almost 3 months :)

Friday, April 17, 2009

In-memory Derby DB

Heard from David Van Couvering that Derby 10.5 will support In-memory databases. I was looking for this feature some 3 years ago in Derby - old mailing list archive. There was a prototype of some sort, but was kinda flaky. I'm very excited that 10.5 will have this built-in.

Hopefully this will ship with a future version of JDK6. Imagine what amazing things you'll be able to do then. This along with Map-Reduce in JDK7...ahh..shweet. (Geek alert!)