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Orbitz Open Sources Tools To Manage Large Distributed Applications
mjasay writes "CNET is reporting that on Monday Orbitz will announce the creation and release of two open-source projects, Extremely Reusable Monitoring API (ERMA) and Graphite, both 'part of a Complex Event Processing system designed to monitor large distributed applications, analyze the data that is gathered and display that data in real-time graphs.' Though there were hints of these projects at JavaOne earlier this year, Monday's announcement adds significant context to the work Orbitz has done to create two highly compelling open-source projects, whose applicability extends far beyond the travel industry. In particular, it highlights Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst's vision that enterprise IT needs to open up and collaborate. However, as Orbitz's development team notes, it's easier said than done to participate in open source, especially when creating projects rather than simply contributing to existing projects."
Lots of stuff runs on jdk 1.4.7 since it was the stable and supported version for so long, especially when 1.5 was in flux. I have a ton of tools that ask for it and I know most of the Oracle stuff in 10g r2 uses it (and fails to include the TZ updates so every time we install a new client we have to TZ patch it). Basically Enterprise IT is often much slower moving than other areas of IT because we get bit by bleeding edge often enough to know it's often just not worth it if there's an alternative that has the same functionality and is more stable wrt change.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Orbitz is actively moving to 1.6 and our entire new technology platform is already on 1.5. However with some older apps dating back to 2000 sharing this same monitoring API, it takes time.
Meanwhile, ERMA does have a separate build within the same codebase for 1.5 code including support for Annotations, etc, and we make use of backport-util-concurrent.
I have an excuse. We use DB2 Connect (v8) on an HPUX platform (11i). Guess what? DB2 Connect v8 isn't certified to work with anything above JDK 1.4.x. In order to have support for JDK 1.5, you need to upgrade to DB2 Connect v9. But DB2 Connect v9 isn't certified to work on HPUX 11i. You need up upgrade the OS.
With a critical enterprise application, going down that upgrade path is costly and risky.
So there are actually lots of excuses especially when you are in a large enterprise environment.