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Domain: jboss.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to jboss.com.
Stories · 7
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IcedTea's OpenJDK Passes Java Test Compatibility Kit
emyar writes "At JavaOne in May, 2006, Sun Microsystems announced they were going to release Java as free software under the terms of the GPL. The size of the task (6.5 million lines of code) was only eclipsed by the size of the opportunity for Java as a free and open technology. [...] This week the IcedTea Project reached an important milestone — The latest OpenJDK binary included in Fedora 9 (x86 and x86_64) passes the rigorous Java Test Compatibility Kit (TCK). This means that it provides all the required Java APIs and behaves like any other Java SE 6 implementation — in keeping with the portability goal of the Java platform." -
Do You Like Your Workflow or BPM Software?
Dukhat asks: "I am really interested in firsthand experiences with these kinds of products and in unbiased reviews, since Google primarily gives me marketing information and vague overviews of how BPM is good for business. I have already looked at an earlier article on work-flow patterns, which gave me a few products to look at. I am trying to compile a short list of work-flow and BPM software to evaluate, but I am having a hard time determining which products are even worth evaluating. The situation is worsened by the fact that work-flow tools are often bundled with CRM or Business Intelligence packages. I am not dead set on using a big package, but I need to know more about their real world pros and cons before I can decide whether to build it myself instead. I am looking at both BPM and work-flow software, since some BPM software can also do work-flow, but it may be more worthwhile to just use a rules engine for automated processes and use a specialized work-flow tool." Dukhat has a fairly long list of software choices that he needs to whittle down. What packages would you recommend and why? "Here are some of the goals we have that we are trying to solve with work-flow/ BPM software:- To be able to understand the path of a process without perusing in and out of a lot of functions.
- To be able to report on how long each step in each process takes.
- To be able to see exactly where in the process software errors occur and be able to skip over failed steps so that we can come back and fix them later.
- To be able to integrate with our issue tracking system, billing system, and CRM software. We definitely will have to write some webservices here.
- To be able to give process managers in different departments the ability to tweak certain processes without giving them full access to all processes.
Here is a list of packages that I have assembled so far: Please help me narrow these down. Thanks!" -
Is Microsoft Still a Monopoly?
Microsoft Windows still dominates the desktop. But in many other areas, including Web servers and supercomputing, Microsoft is just one player among many, and often a weak player at that. On the gaming side, despite the latest xBox getting all kinds of media buzz as "the" console to buy, Sony's Playstation outsells the xBox at least two to one, and many analysts expect Sony to widen that gap even more when Playstation 3 comes out in the Spring of 2006. On the Internet, MSN and MSN Search are so far behind AOL and Google that it isn't funny. And even on the desktop, Linux keeps getting stronger, while Mac OS X is commonly accepted as more reliable, secure, and user-oriented than Windows. So why do we keep saying Microsoft is a monopoly? Microsoft (Slowly) Moves Away from Monopolistic Behavior
If a major IT user tells a Microsoft salesperson that he or she is thinking about switching to Linux, Microsoft will usually come back with a cut-price offer, something the company never used to do. Microsoft also now sells something called Windows Starter Edition in some parts of the world -- supposedly for as low as $37 or $38 (US) in Thailand, including a basic version of Microsoft Office. In other words, Microsoft is starting to compete on price, which is not monopoly-style behavior.
This does not mean Microsoft has suddenly adopted a "let's all love one another" attitude.I believe Microsoft is getting more concerned about interoperability not out of goodness, but because of market pressure. But in the long run, as long as Microsoft stops treating every other operating system and file format as some sort of devilspawn, life is a little easier for those of us who would rather not use their products, and that's what really matters.
Microsoft Explorer No Longer Rules the Online World
A majority of desktop computer users may still run Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser, but it no longer has 95% market share. In a 2002 book, and again last year in an online article, I warned Web designers not to make IE-only sites, just as in the (distant) past I'd warned them not to make Netscape-only sites. Some listened. Some didn't.
Firefox adoption may have slowed in 2005, but it certainly hasn't stopped. Opera has become enough of a force that we hear rumors about first Google, then Microsoft, buying it. In any case, whether MSIE is currently running on 90% of all desktops or on only 70% (as a few surveys indicate), it is becoming less popular every month. Now Microsoft has decided that Explorer is no longer fit for Mac users, so its market share will drop even more. Sure, there's a new version of Explorer coming out, but it isn't going to help the millions of "legacy" Windows users who don't want to buy XP. If they want modern browser functionality, they must switch to Firefox, Opera or another non-Microsoft browser.
'The Network is the Computer'
I don't think this is quite true today, if by "the network" we're talking about applications delivered over the Internet instead of over well-maintained LANs. Back in October I explained why I don't think Internet-delivered applications are quite "there" yet. More recently, Salesforce.com had an outage that angered many of its (claimed) 350,000 subscribers. Worse, ZDNet blogger Phil Wainewright pointed out that Salesforce.com compounded the problem, and possibly made users leery of all Internet-delivered applications' claims of "99.9% reliability," by poor communication with its users.
Most of the Web 2.0 (and even Web 3.0) stuff that's getting so much hype these days is not OS-dependent. You can run things like Google Maps on Linux, Mac OS, Unix, and even Windows, using any standards-compliant browser you choose.
Even Microsoft is trying to get into the Web 2.0 game. I got a press release from their PR people that included this sentence:"And if you enjoy taking a drive to check out your neighborhood’s Christmas lights visit this great Windows Live Local developer application at http://msnsearch101.com/searchmap."
I found this online utility's behavior strange and primitive, not nearly up to the standards of Google Maps and some of the mashups based on it. "Ah," I thought, "that's probably because I'm trying to use it with Linux and Mozilla." So I turned to my one Windows (XP) computer and checked the site with both Firefox and Explorer. For some reason the map background didn't load at all in Firefox, on Windows, and its behavior in Explorer, on Windows, was just as clunky as it was in Mozilla, on Linux.
If this is supposed to be a sample of what Windows Live Local can do, I don't think Microsoft is headed for any kind of monopoly -- or even much market share -- in the online map business. Not only that, it makes me wonder how good their promised Microsoft® Office Live is going to be. If even a quarter of the rumors we've heard about Google and Sun joining up to produce a Webified version of OpenOffice.org are true, I suspect Microsoft is going to be a distant also-ran in the (inevitable) Internet-delivered office software business, too.
Hundreds of Thousands of Competitors
It's fun to play the "Google is cooler than Microsoft" game and talk about how Google, not Microsoft, has become the hot place for top-end programmers to work if they want to make their mark on the world, but even Google can only hire a tiny fraction of the world's software development talent. There are over 100,000 Open Source projects on SourceForge.net (which is owned by the same company that owns Slashdot), and SourceForge.net is but one of many Open Source and Free Software hosting services out there. There are literally millions of programmers working on Free and Open Source Software, plus countless others working on personal proprietary projects.
We've all heard -- probably too many times -- the old saw, "If you have enough monkeys banging randomly on typewriters, they will eventually type the works of William Shakespeare." This may or may not be true. But it is certain that if you put millions of programmers in front of millions of computers and let them do whatever they want, some of them will turn out brilliant, world-changing work. Even if 999 out of 1000 of our putative programmers work on established projects or never finish what they start, that still gives us thousands of potential world-changing software projects, most of which won't be developed by Google (or Microsoft) employees.
I've been to India, and the smartest programmers I met there weren't working for outsourcing mills but worked for themselves. I'm sure there are plenty of self-employed programmers in China, Brazil, Kenya, and almost everywhere else on this planet, too, and there are certainly plenty of them here in the United States. And, all over the world, millions of programmers have day jobs doing routine work for corporate employers to put food on the table, and do their "real work" at home, at night.
Neither you nor I nor Google's management nor Microsoft's management know what might be going on right now in the mind of a brilliant Saudi woman with a computer science degree who can't work outside her home because her country's laws keep her from mixing with men who aren't related to her. There may be a poorly-dressed young man coding furiously in a Beijing Internet cafe, while you read this article, whose new operating system will make all current ones obsolete -- and you may not learn about his work until it shows up in a Chinese-made $100 laptop computer.
When Bill Gates and his friends started Microsoft, it was one of very few companies that sold nothing but personal computer software, and the others were so small that Microsoft managed to buy most of its competitors -- or at least license their best work or hire away their best programmers. Back then, programmers were scarce and expensive, as were the computers they programmed on. Now there are both programmers and computers all over the world, linked together by the Internet. The Internet not only helps programmers collaborate with each other across geographic boundaries, but allows them to distribute their work without shipping physical products.
The only reason to have a software company's employees work in an office these days is control, both of employees' schedules and of what they work on. Self-motivated geniuses have no need of offices and may even resent being asked to show up at one on a regular schedule, which means that many of the world's best programmers will never work for Google, Microsoft or any other company. Instead, they'll start their own software companies or, in many cases, Open Source-based consultancies.
So Microsoft doesn't face a few dozen competitors, as it did in the 1980s, but hundreds of thousands. And these competitors are spread all over the world. This kind of competition is a lot harder to co-opt, buy out or fend off than competition from a single company, a la Netscape, or even from a group of companies as substantial as IBM, Sun, Oracle, and their computing industry peers.
Competition has Forced Microsoft to Improve its Products
Microsoft may no longer be able to hire all the top programmers it wants, but there is already plenty of talent among its 60,000-plus employees, and they have done some excellent work in recent years. Windows XP is immeasurably better and more stable than Windows ME or Windows 98. The next generation of Explorer will have many of the modern browser features that those of us who use Firefox or Opera have gotten accustomed to. Microsoft Office may not have some of the features OpenOffice.org users take for granted, like a built-in graphics utility, the ability to act as a front end for industrial-strength free databases like MySQL, and the ability to save your work in 30+ different Open and proprietary formats, including PDF. But Microsoft Office today is a lot better than it was 10 years ago, and the next version may even use a sort-of free XML file format that may not be as open and standardized as the OASIS Open Document Format used by OpenOffice.org, but is less closed and less proprietary than previous Microsoft file formats.
A true monopoly would not need to make these improvements in its products. It would give you whatever it wanted, at whatever price it wanted to charge. It would not be selling cut-down versions of its products at cut-rate prices in developing countries -- many of which, you may note, are rapidly turning into "software developing" countries.
Without Linux, combined with Apple's move to BSD-based Mac OS X, I doubt that Microsoft would have put much development effort into Windows. They sure didn't do much with Explorer between the time they crushed Netscape and the time when Firefox started making a big splash, did they?
The U.S. antitrust case against Microsoft wasn't about the company being a monopoly (which courts agreed that it was at the time), but about illegal misuse of that monopoly. That case was settled in a way that left Microsoft essentially unharmed, but with a judge overseeing its actions for five years, a time period that is going to end before long.
The Age of the Software Monopoly is Over
IBM tried to create a monopoly in the business desktop computer business, but failed to hold onto its market-leading position as dozens, then hundreds, and later thousands of competitors made better/faster/cheaper PCs. Even today, while Dell is the world's largest personal computer vendor, if you add up all the market share reports from major computer vendors in this C|Net article, you'll see that they account for around 60% -- not 100% -- of total sales, with smaller companies getting the rest. (And some of those companies are *really* small, like the one-man Bradenton, Florida, shop where my sailing buddy Gene just bought his latest home computer.)
The personal computer hardware business has become totally demonopolized, decentralized, democratized, and internationalized. If you have enough mechanical ability to assemble components neatly (and enough sales ability to get people to buy what you make), you can get into it yourself with a very small investment, just as Michael Dell started out reselling computer components and assembling systems in his college dorm room.
Starting a software business takes even less investment. If you're a competent programmer -- or you have a friend who is a competent programmer and you are a whiz-bang marketing person -- you have everything you need to get going. You can either produce and sell proprietary software or customize (and probably install and maintain) Free or Open Source Software for corporate clients. If the Internet is your primary sales and distribution channel, you don't need to live and work in expensive IT business hotbeds like Silicon Valley or Boston, either: JBoss, for example, is based in Atlanta, Georgia; and Digium, the company behind Asterisk, is in Huntsville, Alabama.
There are software businesses springing up all over the place. Most of them are tiny, and few of them will ever get big enough that analyst firms like Gartner or IDC will track their market share (or even notice them). But there are so many of them being started that, in aggregate, they are becoming a more significant market force than any single big software company, even Microsoft.
This doesn't mean Microsoft will be replaced next year by 100,000 startups. The company will still be around, it will still get lots of press, and -- assuming it embraces (but does not keep trying to extend and extinguish) Open Standards -- it will still be a powerful force in the software world.
But no matter what Microsoft does, it will never have a software monopoly again. Nor will any other company. The barriers to entry in the software business have become too low for that to happen, and too many skilled software developers are learning that they can earn at least as much working for themselves as they would by working for big software companies.
Small is Beautiful was a fine book title in 1973. Today, it's a fine description of the software industry's future.
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Have something important to say to the Slashdot community? Email roblimo at slashdot period org the complete article (or an article proposal). -
JBoss Adds Full Transaction Support
thedude79 writes "JBoss adds full transaction support by buying Arjuna - as listed in their product definition and the buyout announcement." -
JBoss - A Developer's Notebook
Pankaj Kumar writes "Controversies aside, JBoss has emerged as a credible alternative to commercial J2EE App Servers for developing and deploying Java based server applications. Besides the usual advantages of open source and GPL licensing, what sets it apart is its JMX based microkernel, a light-weight framework to run independently developed Java programs within a single JVM. Together, these make it possible for one to pick and choose components and assemble a custom server anywhere between the two extremes (and beyond!) of a simple Servlet Container and a full-fledged J2EE Server. JBoss - A Developer's Notebook by Norman Richards, a JBoss developer at JBoss, Inc., and Sam Griffith, Jr., a software consultant and trainer, is a no-fluff How-To guide on doing stuff with JBoss in O'Reilly's new Developer Notebook format." Read on for Kumar's review of the book. JBoss - A Developer's Notebook author Norman Richards & Sam Griffith, Jr. pages 150 publisher O' Reilly rating 7 reviewer Pankaj Kumar ISBN 0596100078 summary A How To Guide on Working With JBoss
True to the format, this book doesn't waste pages on paeans to architectural elegance, internal design or conceptual deliberations, and limits itself to the basic needs of most professionals -- how do I do this or that with JBoss, where to start, what steps to carry out or what code to write, and what happens behind the curtains.
Books dealing with J2EE products tend to be fat and bulky, but this (note)book doesn't fall in that category. By covering only JBoss specific aspects and avoiding general J2EE topics, this rather thin book has managed to include a good deal of difficult-to-find information about JBoss. In fact, while going through its pages, I got a feeling that the authors have taken care to be different and complementary to the online documentation available in the JBoss Application Server Guide and JBoss Wiki.
In support of the above claim, let me compare the coverage of how to deploy applications under JBoss, an important activity with any J2EE container, in the JBoss Guide, JBoss Wiki, and the book under review. The JBoss Guide covers application deployment as part of the JMX based microkernel architecture and design, describing, in excruciating detail, the internal components responsible for the deployment and and how they interact. The JBoss Wiki takes a more externally focused approach, talking about hot deployment capability, relevant directories and configuration files in an installed system, and steps in a typical deployment process. In contrast, Developer's Notebook goes through the whole process of creating the deployable WAR file for a web application, deploying that to JBoss by copying the created file to JBoss's deploy directory, and verifying successful deployment or looking for errors. It even talks about how to modify a deployed application. Needless to say, the last one is most useful to someone who just wants to deploy his or her application.
True to its lab notebook style, the book makes important, though not integral, observations about specific topics in the page margins. For example, a note in the margin of deployment steps tells you that you can include a deployment package within another deployment package, up to an arbitrary level of nesting, a la Russian doll packaging. I found this informal way of communicating relevant stuff quite effective.
Another noteworthy aspect of this book is that it makes generous use of appropriate tools, such as Ant and XDoclet, to get things done. This can be either good or bad, depending upon your familiarity with these tools. For me, it turned out to be a mixed bag. I know Ant and am happy writing Ant scripts for packaging and deployment. It is different with XDoclet, which I haven't had a chance to use so far. But perhaps the authors know better and one should just get familiar with it before working on any project involving JBoss and Enterprise Java Beans.
It is difficult, if not impossible, to cover each and every aspect of software as feature rich and complex as JBoss in any single book. This leaves the somewhat unpleasant task of choosing topics to the the authors and editors, for the selection may or may not match the needs of a particular reader. At the same time, it increases the responsibility of a reviewer like me who must help a prospective buyer decide for or against making a purchase, based on her needs.
Let me attempt to do that by making two lists: first, what is included and then, what is not.
What is included (paraphrased Table of Contents):- How to install, start, examine (through JMX Console) and shutdown JBoss Server.
- How to package, deploy, observe and undeploy an application.
- How to create a web application with database access and user authentication.
- How to use MySQL as database for a JBoss application.
- How to setup user database, login modules and enable SSL.
- How to configure logging for various components of JBoss.
- How to map schema, objects and relations to database tables.
- How to monitor and manage a JBoss application with MBeans.
- How to create a custom JBoss with modules that your application needs.
A similar, comprehensive, list of what is not included is simply not possible. Still, I have gone ahead and created the following based on my experience with JBoss. Keep in mind that these reflect the kind of applications I have worked on and may not be representative of your needs.- How to use JBoss as a J2SE container.
- How to develop Web services with JBoss.
- How to create, package and deploy an application consisting of JBoss services, web applications and web services.
- How to troubleshoot class loading problems.
- How to isolate applications within a single JBoss server instance.
- How to profile for performance bottlenecks.
- How to run multiple instances of JBoss Server on a single machine.
I can only hope that the authors will take this as a reader feedback and include some of the above in a future edition.
So, what else is there not to like about this book? One thing that caught my attention was the relative absence of insight into why things worked the way they worked: What are the underlying patterns and how can the awareness about these patterns be applied to other similar situations? These are the things I look for in a new product or technology, and have found them to be much more helpful than just a compilation of step-by-step descriptions of doing things. Perhaps the Developer's Notebook format doesn't allow for such digressions, still I think inclusion of such insights would have improved the book.
Overall, I would say that JBoss - A Developer's Notebook is a good introductory book for those who are thinking of getting started or are just getting started with JBoss. If you have already worked on JBoss and are looking for more advanced or esoteric stuff, then this book is perhaps not for you.
You can purchase JBoss - A Developer's Notebook from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page. -
JBoss - A Developer's Notebook
Pankaj Kumar writes "Controversies aside, JBoss has emerged as a credible alternative to commercial J2EE App Servers for developing and deploying Java based server applications. Besides the usual advantages of open source and GPL licensing, what sets it apart is its JMX based microkernel, a light-weight framework to run independently developed Java programs within a single JVM. Together, these make it possible for one to pick and choose components and assemble a custom server anywhere between the two extremes (and beyond!) of a simple Servlet Container and a full-fledged J2EE Server. JBoss - A Developer's Notebook by Norman Richards, a JBoss developer at JBoss, Inc., and Sam Griffith, Jr., a software consultant and trainer, is a no-fluff How-To guide on doing stuff with JBoss in O'Reilly's new Developer Notebook format." Read on for Kumar's review of the book. JBoss - A Developer's Notebook author Norman Richards & Sam Griffith, Jr. pages 150 publisher O' Reilly rating 7 reviewer Pankaj Kumar ISBN 0596100078 summary A How To Guide on Working With JBoss
True to the format, this book doesn't waste pages on paeans to architectural elegance, internal design or conceptual deliberations, and limits itself to the basic needs of most professionals -- how do I do this or that with JBoss, where to start, what steps to carry out or what code to write, and what happens behind the curtains.
Books dealing with J2EE products tend to be fat and bulky, but this (note)book doesn't fall in that category. By covering only JBoss specific aspects and avoiding general J2EE topics, this rather thin book has managed to include a good deal of difficult-to-find information about JBoss. In fact, while going through its pages, I got a feeling that the authors have taken care to be different and complementary to the online documentation available in the JBoss Application Server Guide and JBoss Wiki.
In support of the above claim, let me compare the coverage of how to deploy applications under JBoss, an important activity with any J2EE container, in the JBoss Guide, JBoss Wiki, and the book under review. The JBoss Guide covers application deployment as part of the JMX based microkernel architecture and design, describing, in excruciating detail, the internal components responsible for the deployment and and how they interact. The JBoss Wiki takes a more externally focused approach, talking about hot deployment capability, relevant directories and configuration files in an installed system, and steps in a typical deployment process. In contrast, Developer's Notebook goes through the whole process of creating the deployable WAR file for a web application, deploying that to JBoss by copying the created file to JBoss's deploy directory, and verifying successful deployment or looking for errors. It even talks about how to modify a deployed application. Needless to say, the last one is most useful to someone who just wants to deploy his or her application.
True to its lab notebook style, the book makes important, though not integral, observations about specific topics in the page margins. For example, a note in the margin of deployment steps tells you that you can include a deployment package within another deployment package, up to an arbitrary level of nesting, a la Russian doll packaging. I found this informal way of communicating relevant stuff quite effective.
Another noteworthy aspect of this book is that it makes generous use of appropriate tools, such as Ant and XDoclet, to get things done. This can be either good or bad, depending upon your familiarity with these tools. For me, it turned out to be a mixed bag. I know Ant and am happy writing Ant scripts for packaging and deployment. It is different with XDoclet, which I haven't had a chance to use so far. But perhaps the authors know better and one should just get familiar with it before working on any project involving JBoss and Enterprise Java Beans.
It is difficult, if not impossible, to cover each and every aspect of software as feature rich and complex as JBoss in any single book. This leaves the somewhat unpleasant task of choosing topics to the the authors and editors, for the selection may or may not match the needs of a particular reader. At the same time, it increases the responsibility of a reviewer like me who must help a prospective buyer decide for or against making a purchase, based on her needs.
Let me attempt to do that by making two lists: first, what is included and then, what is not.
What is included (paraphrased Table of Contents):- How to install, start, examine (through JMX Console) and shutdown JBoss Server.
- How to package, deploy, observe and undeploy an application.
- How to create a web application with database access and user authentication.
- How to use MySQL as database for a JBoss application.
- How to setup user database, login modules and enable SSL.
- How to configure logging for various components of JBoss.
- How to map schema, objects and relations to database tables.
- How to monitor and manage a JBoss application with MBeans.
- How to create a custom JBoss with modules that your application needs.
A similar, comprehensive, list of what is not included is simply not possible. Still, I have gone ahead and created the following based on my experience with JBoss. Keep in mind that these reflect the kind of applications I have worked on and may not be representative of your needs.- How to use JBoss as a J2SE container.
- How to develop Web services with JBoss.
- How to create, package and deploy an application consisting of JBoss services, web applications and web services.
- How to troubleshoot class loading problems.
- How to isolate applications within a single JBoss server instance.
- How to profile for performance bottlenecks.
- How to run multiple instances of JBoss Server on a single machine.
I can only hope that the authors will take this as a reader feedback and include some of the above in a future edition.
So, what else is there not to like about this book? One thing that caught my attention was the relative absence of insight into why things worked the way they worked: What are the underlying patterns and how can the awareness about these patterns be applied to other similar situations? These are the things I look for in a new product or technology, and have found them to be much more helpful than just a compilation of step-by-step descriptions of doing things. Perhaps the Developer's Notebook format doesn't allow for such digressions, still I think inclusion of such insights would have improved the book.
Overall, I would say that JBoss - A Developer's Notebook is a good introductory book for those who are thinking of getting started or are just getting started with JBoss. If you have already worked on JBoss and are looking for more advanced or esoteric stuff, then this book is perhaps not for you.
You can purchase JBoss - A Developer's Notebook from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page. -
JBoss Caught in Anonymous Posting Scheme
Reader scubabear writes "For years rumors have run rampant about employees of JBoss Inc. being actively encouraged to post anonymously, drumming up business by flooding the net with fake posts and simultaneously attacking competitors, all from behind a safe veil of anonymity. With the advent of a new feature for tracking users by IP on TheServerSide.com, the floodgates have been opened and those rumors have apparently been confirmed. The Java blog space now erupted with posts from a variety of bloggers (here, here, and here for a start) exposing a variety of anonymous/pseudonymous accounts used by JBoss employees to put forth their Professional Open Source message and simultaneously slam anyone who gets in their way in online technical communities such as TheServerSide, JavaLobby, and various personal blogs. The evidence shows how a corporation can manipulate popular opinion via anonymous personalities, that open source companies can be just as ruthless as closed source when it comes to marketing their wares, and that you should never forget that your cookies and IP address can and will be tracked online. No official response has been heard yet from the JBoss crew. Disclosure: I'm one of those bloggers erupting on this issue (see my story here)."