Needless to say, I was pretty impressed with the venue. Hosted at the Venetian in Las Vegas, it was great.

But Impact as a congress is awesome. It’s big, I mean REALLY big. 8500 attendants is a lot.
This is the main keynote hall for instance:

I would say it’s about 3 times bigger then Devoxx, since all 8500 registrants are mostly there for the entire week. Devoxx has about 160+ talks, while Impact has 500+ (although some are repeated, which is OK).

Impact has had a number of announcements. I’ll give a short heads-up.

IBM WorkLight

WorkLight was aquired by IBM in January of this year. Only 5 months later, they are releasing version 5 of WorkLight, now under the IBM umbrella.
It consists of 3 major parts: Mobile Development, Mobile Management and Mobile Middleware.

The Mobile Development really reminds me of Appcelerator, it allows you to write as much HTML5 as possible but lets you use native components as well. It creates hybrid applications of HTML5 and native code per target (Android, iOS, Blackberry, Adobe AIR, … and some more). The designer looks nice and is feature rich (drag & drop, emulation, …) and is eclipse based.
It allows you to embed other 3th party framework such as JQuery Mobile and Sencha Touch. It comes with PhoneGap preinstalled.

The Mobile Management is an Unique Selling Point at the moment. It allows you to apply MAM (Mobile Application Management) .

It allows you to control which version is allowed on which device. You can wipe the application data, without wiping the device (that would be MDM).
All WorkLight applications connect to your WorkLight Server, to check for updates, notifications, …
User statistics are gathered so you export this data to your business intelligence systems.

The Mobile Middleware  helps you connect backend systems to your mobile device in a secure way. It leverages existing resources.

Anyway, I think it’s a big deal. IBM didn’t have a mobile solution. WebSphere Application Server Mobile Feature Pack wasn’t packing any punch. They ware falling behind in this multi billion market. Wanna know how big IBM thinks it is?

During the Business Partner Keynote, they were dropping some statistics to get us warm:

• In 2015 –> ONE BILLION smartphones will be shipped in one year.
• In 2016 –> Windows Mobile OS will be on more devices then iOS (pretty risky statistic if you ask me :p, some hope for Nokia after all???)
• But Android will still be 3 times larger then anything else
• 91% of mobile application developers will only work in those 3 OS’s
• The other 9% which do build upon less common os, will be on professional services companies.
•  By 2015
• MDM will be a ONE BILLION market
• Mobile Security a 1.5 B market
• MEAP a 3 billion market
• A total of 1.3 BILLION mobile workers

WebSphere Application Server 8.5

Only 2 things worth mentioning

It’s lightweight!

The Liberty profile is a smaller runtime then the fully fledged AS. Not all features are enabled by default.
But it IS  fully JEE6 compliant , but is missing JMS (but you can enable it).
So EJB,JPA and WebServices are included.

It’s only 50 MB and has a startup time of less then 5 seconds.

This is the answer to JBoss 7 and tomcat flavors as TomEE. It comparable in startup times, but the difference is you are actually running one of the most complete, fully supported version. You can start small in development, but still use the same codebase in a large topology of 100′s of servers if you like.

It comes with Intelligent Management

Intelligent Management is the new name for WebSphere VE. It adds the notion of dynamic clusters. Clusters that can grow and shrink based on health policies.

For instance, you define a dynamic cluster of 10 servers, with a health policy of ‘average response < 2 seconds’.  The cluster will start with just 1 or 2 instances (configurable). As soon as the health policy is breached, additional servers will be started and vice versa ofcourse.

This allows a more efficient use of existing IT resources. You can prioritise between applications and act PROACTIVE and AUTOMATIC on a broad range of different health policies.

This is a game changer. No other vendor gives this for any reasonable price, and it’s now included with WAS 8.5 for free! You can even use the WAS 8.5 Deployment Manager to manage your old WAS 7 dynamic clusters.

I saw another presentation about a comparison between WAS, JBoss and Oracle. You can find some more information on their website and even ask them for the presentation.

IBM Business Process Manager 8.0

Biggest change in this domain since 7.5 is the notion of “Turbo-charged collaboration”.  It is a revamped IBM Business Process Manager Process Portal that lets people collaborate in real time. If you are assigned a task, which you are having difficulty with, you can ask another from the swimlane to help you with it. You invite them and you see what he is doing IN REAL TIME.

It’s like watching a remote desktop

Can’t find any pictures of it atm, but that will surely change in the near future. Releasedate 18th of May.

IBM PureSystems

This one is probably the hardest for me.

In essence, it’s a new mainframe, an integrated system. Next to the obvious super duper hardware and such, it has an intresting feature: Patterns.

A Pattern is a topological construction, on which you can run your application. For instance 1 loadbalancer, 2 apache front-end, 4 servers, 2 databases in HADR. This setup can be defined in a pattern. Applications can then be installed onto a pattern and voila, you have a full environment to run your application.

It works with pretty much any IBM product (BPM, WAS, DB2, …), but also with a lot of other software installations. A full list can be found here.

So this is for larger accounts, clearly. But adding a new server park, custom build for an application in a matter of minutes is just… WOW.

More information can be found on their rather attractive site.

I have some more thoughts which I’ll post in near future.

Regards,
Andries

I’ll be following the SOA, Connectivity & Integration mostly, mostly interested in IBM Business Manager solution and customer cases (reference architectures). But with over 500 sessions, I’ll need to pick carefully.

My goal is to write up all the things which stuck, so you can expect some follow up blogs with more concrete information.

Regards,
Andries

This is what I did:

Organized Google Reader

A read a lot of blogs. Started with pure Java centric, it has become an important central part of all my knowledge gather. Blogs such as LifeHacker, PM Hut, 5whys, and many more resulted in a large aggregation.

Since March 26, 2007 you have read a total of 171,897 items.

From your 157 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 5,232 items, clicked 94 items, starred 5 items, and emailed 0 items.

LifeHacker has an excellent blog about organizing your RSS feeds: which resulted into following:

Organized by Priority

Cleaned up Twitter

I was following some funny, but totally useless spammers which cluttered my tweetwall, such as @mbaeten .
Got rid of those and used the Find Friends tool and started following some new. Let’s see if they make the cut next year.

Cleaned up phone

Removed all games which I ended up playing in bed while being insomniac.

Flashed my HTC Desire with Cyangenmod, for a better exchange calender integration, auto-update everything while on wifi only and created a priority call filter which only allows incoming calls from very few people while sleeping…

Cleaned up GMail

Unsubscribed from every newsletter who mailed me in last 6 months. Subscribed to their RSS feeds instead, if they had any. I got about 50 mails a day I needed to archive on my personal mail.

With the saved time, I wrote this blog.

So it has payed off already

Postel’s Law

Be conservative in what you send, liberal in what you accept.

Parkinson’s Law

Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

Pareto Principle

For many phenomena, 80% of consequences stem from 20% of the causes

Sturgeon’s Revelation

Ninety percent of everything is crud.

The Peter Principle

In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.

Hofstadter’s Law

A task always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.

Murphy’s Law

If anything can go wrong, it will.

Brook’s Law

Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.

Conway’s Law

Any piece of software reflects the organizational structure that produced it

Kerchkhoff’s Principle

In cryptography, a system should be secure even if everything about the system, except for a small piece of information — the key — is public knowledge.

Linus’s Law

Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.

Reed’s Law

The utility of large networks, particularly social networks, scales exponentially with the size of the network.

Metcalfe’s Law

In network theory, the value of a system grows as approximately the square of the number of users of the system.

Moore’s Law

The number of transistors on an integrated circuit will double in about 18 months

Rock’s Law

The cost of a semiconductor chip fabrication plant doubles every four years.

Wirth’s law

Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster.

Zawinski’s Law

Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.

Fitt’s Law

The time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and the size of the target.

Hick’s Law

The time to make a decision is a function of the possible choices he or she has.

Lehman’s laws

 Continuing Change — E-type systems must be continually adapted or they become progressively less satisfactory.

 Increasing Complexity — As an E-type system evolves its complexity increases unless work is done to maintain or reduce it.

I’m probably missing some, any idea’s?

From the userguide:

You can also skip the tests via command line by executing the following command:

mvn install -DskipTests

If you absolutely must, you can also use the maven.test.skip property to skip compiling the tests. maven.test.skip is honored by Surefire, Failsafe and the Compiler Plugin.

Skiptests is a feature of surefire, while -Dmaven.test.skip is a feature of maven itself.

The Java Health center is

very low overhead monitoring tool. It runs alongside an IBM Java application with a very small impact on the application’s performance. Health Center monitors several application areas, using the information to provide recommendations and analysis that help you improve the performance and efficiency of your application. Health Center can save the data obtained from monitoring an application and load it again for analysis at a later date.¹

It’s also pretty easy to install ².

1. Add the healthcenter.jar to %JAVA_HOME%/jre/lib/ext folder
2. start whatever application with -Xhealthcenter
3. Default port is 1912

The openingscreen:

and for instance the profiling tab:

References:

1. Java Health Center- a low overhead monitoring tool - http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21413628
2. Installing the Health Center agent - http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/realtime/v2r0/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.rt.doc.20/healthcenter/com.ibm.java.diagnostics.healthcenter.gui/docs/installingagent.html
3. IBM Support Assistant -  http://www-01.ibm.com/software/support/isa/

Other:

1. Feature overview: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Tcktcl0qxs

Generating the metamodel turned out to be somewhat harder than I first thought. Since I’m a JBoss alcoholic, I’m using Hibernate as persistence provider with and the jpamodelgen subproject.

Generating the metamodel

According to the official documentation, all we need to do is add the hibernate-jpamodelgen to the classpath.

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.hibernate</groupId>
    <artifactId>hibernate-jpamodelgen</artifactId>
</dependency>

However, this resulted  in nothing. The only thing that did work for me was adding extra configuration with maven-annotation-plugin.

<plugin>
    <groupId>org.bsc.maven</groupId>
    <artifactId>maven-processor-plugin</artifactId>
    <executions>
        <execution>
            <id>process</id>
            <goals>
                <goal>process</goal>
            </goals>
            <phase>generate-sources</phase>
            <configuration>
                <!-- source output directory -->
                <outputDirectory>
target/metamodel
</outputDirectory>
            </configuration>
        </execution>
    </executions>
</plugin>
<plugin>
    <groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId>
    <artifactId>build-helper-maven-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>1.3</version>
    <executions>
        <execution>
            <id>add-source</id>
            <phase>generate-sources</phase>
            <goals>
                <goal>add-source</goal>
            </goals>
            <configuration>
                <sources>
                    <source>target/metamodel</source>
                </sources>
            </configuration>
        </execution>
    </executions>
</plugin>

Success! The User.java file

@Entity
public class User implements UserDetails {
 /** The Constant serialVersionUID. */
 private static final long serialVersionUID = 1L;
 /** The user name. */
 @Id
 @Column(name = "USER_ID")
 @Size(min = 3, max = 10)
 private String username;
 /** The password. */
 @NotNull
 @Size(min = 6, max = 40)
 @Column(name = "PASSWORD")
 private String password;
 /** The name. */
 @Column(name = "NAME")
 private String name;
 /** The first name. */
 @Column(name = "FIRSTNAME")
 private String firstName;

was transformed into User_.java

import javax.persistence.metamodel.SingularAttribute;
import javax.persistence.metamodel.StaticMetamodel;
@StaticMetamodel(User.class)
public abstract class User_ {
 public static volatile SingularAttribute<User, String> username;
 public static volatile SingularAttribute<User, String> name;
 public static volatile SingularAttribute<User, String> firstName;
 public static volatile SingularAttribute<User, String> password;
}

Now we can use the model to do typysafe queries:

public UserDetails loadUserByUsername(final String username) throws UsernameNotFoundException,
 DataAccessException {
 CriteriaBuilder criteriaBuilder = entityManager.getCriteriaBuilder();
 CriteriaQuery<User> criteriaQuery = criteriaBuilder.createQuery(User.class);
 Root<User> u = criteriaQuery.from(User.class);
 Predicate usernameCondition = criteriaBuilder.equal(u.get(User_.username), username);
 criteriaQuery.where(usernameCondition);
 TypedQuery<User> query = entityManager.createQuery(criteriaQuery);
 try {
 return (User) query.getSingleResult();
 } catch (NoResultException e) {
 throw new UsernameNotFoundException("User not found: " + username, e);
 }
 }

Speakers and Talks

Sébastien Stormacq

.

I’ll be there!

More information at http://www.brussels-jug.be/wiki/doku.php?id=events:2010_09_session1

About feedback

Feedback is an important tool as it gives invaluable information about you, the other person and the team. The goal is to improve his/her work as your own work as team lead.

Preparation

• Plan feedback rounds well in advance. Not only is it important to let the other party prepare, but also communicating the upcoming feedback rounds weeks in advance makes the team aware of the upcoming feedback rounds. It’s easier to create an impact with feedback where an example can be given of the behavior.
• Take enough time. I always plan 1h for each, although it’s not the plan to fill the entire hour. Typical feedback rounds take about 20min, but giving yourself the freedom to go into detail if necessary, makes the conversation open and not overhasty.
• Plan personal conversations. Sincere feedback is feedback done in small groups. For developers, I bring the project lead with me, since the project lead can give another perspective.
• Prepare yourself
• Ask the other to explicitly prepare themselves. Point the other party that a good preparation is necessary.
• It’s important to give both positive as negative feedback.

How to give efficient feedback

1. Describe behavior that can change
2. Use concrete examples that you have seen for yourself (preferred) or heard from.
3. Use the I-form. I noticed that…
4. Describe the effect the behavior had on yourself
5. Let the other respond
6. If relevant: ask for the desired behavior
7. Explore the background and/or solutions

Follow up

An important aspect of feedback is the follow up. Plan something a couple of weeks after the feedback and see how the feedback changed you or the one you gave feedback to.

Regards,
Andries

18:00 – 19:00: Kabir Khan - What’s Cooking in JBoss AS 6

Kabir will talk about the JBoss AS 6 roadmap, the new development model, ongoing optimizations since AS 6. He will also give a bird’s eye overview of the new projects that will be bundled in AS 6, such as Weld, HornetQ, RestEasy and several more. There will be a short demo at the end showing some of the new features in AS.

19:00 – 20:00: Kris Verlaenen – Looking forward to the future of (j)BPM

There’s much going on in the area of BPM. This presentation will offer you an overview of how the jBPM project will continue to offer you business processes support (in their entire life cycle), while also taking these new challenges into account, like more dynamic or adaptive processes, standardization using the BPMN2 process definition language, etc.

I think we can all agree on the fact that these talks will be very interesting (to say the least).
So… do not forget to register for this event! (Maximium capacity is set to 45 people)

See you soon on the 3rd of June at Xplore premises!