Part of the acceleration was the Devoxx conference for the first time in Paris after 10 yearly occurrences in Antwerp. It was my first time attending such a major developer conference in my home town and I took pride in having had the same shitty weather as in Belgium in November ;)

Joking aside, this 1200-participant event was a success by many metrics, not only was it sold out, but I believe it had the right level of content with labs, university sessions, inspiring keynotes (ok, not all of them), regular sessions, and of course socializing.

I’ve spent most of my time at the conference catching up with friends, meeting many new faces (quick, someone, give me glasses with face recognition!) and explaining my responsibilities in the new job.

Kudos to my colleague Martin Görner who had driven the project on the Google side for many weeks now. Speaking of Martin, you can look at his G+ page to see how active the Google booth was with PAUG and Paris GTUG-selected developer demos. Developers talking to developers!

On a somewhat more personal note, it felt great to see Ludo again (now working on AppEngine) as well as Romain Guy, Android Diva (in a good sense!). Meeting new colleagues (Petra, Nicolas, and others) was another highlight.

Devoxx is turning out to be a wild success across Europe. Can’t wait to spread more Google Developer love in future events!

Here are the highlights :
• It’s 5 GB of free space (and up to 16 TB)
• Client integration is available on Mac OS, Android and Windows (for now)
• It’s search-capable (supporting dozen’s of file formats) and thus much more than an online bunch of disks (OBOD)
• It has integration with Docs, Gmail, G+, Goggles, and more
• Maybe most importantly, it has an SDK

I feel very proud looking back at what we’ve achieved as a team with GlassFish in the past few years, including those past two years at Oracle. If you know anything about the history of application servers at Sun, you’ll recognize that building such a community around GlassFish and its amazing number of downloads is nothing short of a small miracle. The Java EE platform has also seen a strong resurgence, bringing it back to the forefront of effective enterprise Java development in many ways.

Having been hired by Sun some 13 years ago to sell NetDynamics I certainly feel that I leave the company’s application server in *much* better shape. Oracle has ambitious plans for GlassFish and has been in my opinion a good steward for this community. I see no reason for this to change and I do expect the community to keep on pushing Oracle to get even better with time.

This ride has been intense and the people I’ve met and worked with, both inside and outside Sun/Oracle, have made the experience the best one of my career.

My journey now continues here: alexismp.wordpress.com. See you there!

Rendez-vous ce mardi 13 mars 2012 pour une session intitulée Java.next() pour parler du futur de Java et plus précisément de Java SE 8, de Jigsaw et de Lambda (par Rémi Forax).

Ca fait un bail que je n’ai pas été au ParisJUG, ce sera un bon galop d’essai avant Devoxx France!

This is an Oracle event around Java where I’ll be a speaker together with my colleague Mike Keith.

Here are the details if you are interested in attending this free event :
• Oracle Canadian Java Briefing (English)
• Séance d’information sur Java (French)

The best (the only?) way to test both of these features without installing the JRockit JVM itself is to install Mission Control as an Eclipse (3.7) plugin using its update center.

Once you switch to the Mission Control perspective, locally running JVMs (Apple’s latest 1.6 JVM, the JDK 7 Developer Preview or OpenJDK) are all detected with “General”, “MBeans” and “Runtime” sections very much functional. It’s still early days with the Flight Recorder and Memory Leak Detector features not yet available.

Looking at a JVM running GlassFish 3.1.1, the application server AMX’s are available once you initiate a bootAMX operation.

Several folks asked me when my Java EE 6 session with Antonio Goncalves was scheduled (we’ve been covering this for the past two years in University sessions, hands-on labs and regular sessions). It turns out we didn’t team up this year (Antonio was crazy busy preparing for Devoxx France) and I had a regular GlassFish session. Instead, this year, Bert Ertman and Paul Bakker covered the 3-hour Java EE 6 University session (“Duke’s Duct Tape Adventures”) on the very first day (using GlassFish) with great success it seems. The Java EE 6 lab was also a hit with a full room of folks covering a lot of technical ground in 2.5 hours (with GlassFish of course).

GlassFish was also mentioned during Cameron Purdy’s keynote (pretty natural even if that surprised a number of folks that had not been closely following GlassFish) but also in Stephan Janssen‘s Keynote as the engine powering Parleys.com.

In fact Stephan was a speaker in the GlassFish session describing how they went from a single-instance Tomcat setup to a clustered GlassFish + MQ environment. Also in the session was Johan Vos (of Mollom fame, along other things). Both of these customer testimonials were made possible because GlassFish has been delivering full Java EE 6 implementations for almost two years now which is plenty of time to see serious production deployments on it.

The Java EE Gathering (BOF) was very well attended and very lively with many spec leads participating and discussing progress and also pain points with folks in the room. Thanks to all those attending this session, a good number of RFE’s, and priority points came out of this. While this wasn’t a GlassFish session by any means, it’s great to have the current RESTful Admin and upcoming Java EE 7 planned features be a satisfactory answer to some of the requests from the attendance.

Last but certainly not least, the GlassFish team is busy with Java EE 7 and version 4 of the product. This was discussed and shown during the Java EE keynote and in greater details in Jerome Dochez’ session. If any indication, the tweets on his demo (virtualization, provisioning, etc…) were very encouraging.

Java EE 6 adoption is doing great and GlassFish, being a production-quality reference implementation, is one of the first to benefit from this. And with GlassFish 4.0, we’re looking at increasing the product and community adoption by offering a pragmatic technical solution to Java EE PaaS deployments. Stay tuned ! (the impatient in you is encouraged to grab a 4.0 build and provide feedback).

GlassFish – Serveur Java EE Open Source et Opérationnel
Jeudi 3 novembre 2011
15h00 à Paris
10h00 à Montréal
S’enregister

jeudi 3 novembre 2010 de 9h30 à 16h30.
Oracle France – 15, boulevard du Général de Gaule 92715 Colombes

Au programme: présentation et labs (venir avec son portable).
Inscriptions en ligne (places limitées).

En parlant de GlassFish, voici un nouvel ouvrage en préparation.

Before I start I probably should say that while I don’t have hard data to back this up, I’ve seen a large number of JUG’s be created in the past 2-3 years, more than 10 years after Java was first introduced, accounting for maybe as much as half of today’s active JUGs. In France alone, there is more than a dozen active JUGs that were created, all in the last 3-4 years. There doesn’t seem to be a shortage of interest for Java, quite the opposite.

I don’t run a JUG nor am I really active in one but I’ve been visiting many of them in the past few years (they tend to be the format that I like best), I’ve seen a good number of them take off, some crash, and I interact with several JUG leaders on a regular basis, so I thought I’d share the ingredients that I believe are key to a successful JUG.

First, you need to have a venue. It may sound obvious but the lack of a regular (hopefully free-of-charge) room for your meetings is often the reason for JUG activity going down or simply disappearing. Universities seems to be the best solution after company meeting rooms.

Second, you need sponsors. While this can cover for Pizza & Beer (or Wine & Cheese, you decide), maybe more importantly this should help you cover for your speakers expenses (travel + hotel). While those speakers employed by large companies should be able to expense their entire travel, you don’t want to miss out on the independent consultants. Another option is to have formal JUG members paying a yearly fee. This works well once you have a well established set of events, including maybe a yearly (international) conference.

Third, last, and not least – you need good content. This is content that addresses your JUG’s interests and it doesn’t have to be always about bleeding edge technology of the latest and greatest JVM language. Some folks take JUG’s as a training, others mostly as a get-together, and probably also a good chunk as a way to stay on top of what’s new in the Java ecosystem. You need to balance different topics but my recommendation would be to have a small set of folks decide on the agenda. Voting or large groups of folks deciding don’t usually work too well.

While all of the above probably applies for any technology user group, JUG’s are a bit special because they are loosely federated by mailing lists and interactions are facilitated by Sun initially and now by Oracle. If you are starting a JUG, you probably want to read about it on this all-in-one page, be listed on java-user-groups and start chatting with fellow JUG leaders, they are a great bunch and will most certainly have tips for you.

I should of course not forget to mention that you’ll need energy and passion to keep a JUG running. Lot’s of it!

I’m just back from a very well-attended inaugural session at the Lava JUG (in Clermont Ferrand, France) covering Java 7 (together with Julien) and some JavaOne 2011 news. The event had 120+ participants. So pictures here. It’s always great to hear about new JUGs popping up close to 15 years after the creation of Java (more on JUGs in a future entry).

This coming week, I’ll be in Romania:
• Cluj Napoca on Wednesday 19th, 2011 in the Golden Tulip Hotel. Send email to register.
• Bucharest on the next day: Thursday 20th, 2011 in the Intercontinental. See event page for details.

The week after (October 27th), I’m participating in fOSSa in Lyon, France. This is, as the name implies, an Free/Libre open source software conference and I’m happy to see that Serli’s Jerome Petit is also listed as a speaker to discuss the benefits he see for his company in their numerous open source contributions (GlassFish and others). Let this talk enlighten many others!

Septembre 2007 :

Septembre 2011 :

Ca représente une augmentation de x7,5 du nombre de discussions (contre x2.5-3 pour les autres) et de x6 du nombre de message (contre x2,0-3 pour la compétition).

• JUG Summer Camp le 16 septembre, déjà une tradition (La Rochelle)
• Soirée CDI au Mars JUG le 20 septembre (Marseille)
• Programme NormandyJUG, début le 20 septembre (Rouen)
• Open World Forum fait la Java, le 23 septembre (Paris)

Le tout donc sur une semaine et toutes ces conférences/réunions sont gratuites.

The first Project Coin feature shown (Java 7 refactorings start at 7:37 into the screencast) is Strings in switch statements. This is rather straightforward (a number of folks thought this was already supported) and if probably a good candidate to use with web frameworks which take user input as Strings.


String name = request.getParameter("name");
if ("duke".equals(name)) {
    vip = true;
    name = name.toUpperCase(); // let's visually recognize DUKE
} else if ("sparky".equals(name)) {
    vip = true;         // another VIP
}


becomes :


String name = request.getParameter("name");
switch (name) {
    case "duke":
        vip = true;
        name = name.toUpperCase(); // let's visually recognize DUKE
        break;
    case "sparky":
        vip = true;         // another VIP
        break;
}


Of course you can also have a default: section equivalent to an else statement.

The second feature is try-with-resources and is shown here in the initializing sequence of a stateless EJB. It uses JDBC to ping a well-known system table. The code specifically relies on the fact that multiple classes in JDBC 4.1 (Connection, Statement and ResultSet) now implement the new Java 7 java.lang.AutoCloseable interface. This is what allows for the following code requiring proper closing of resources :


@PostConstruct
public void pingDB(){
    try {
        Connection c = ds.getConnection();
        Statement stmt = c.createStatement();
        ResultSet rs = stmt.executeQuery("SELECT * from SYS.SYSTABLES");
        while (rs.next()) {
            System.out.println("***** SYSTEM TABLES" + rs.getString("TABLENAME"));
        }
        stmt.close();
        c.close();
    } catch (SQLException ex) {
        ex.printStackTrace();
    }
}


… to be rewritten as follows (resources initialized in a single statement, no closing required as the compiler takes care of it when they go out of scope) :


@PostConstruct
public void pingDB() {
    try (Connection c = ds.getConnection(); Statement stmt = c.createStatement()) {
        ResultSet rs = stmt.executeQuery("SELECT * from SYS.SYSTABLES");
        while (rs.next()) {
            System.out.println("***** SYSTEM TABLES" + rs.getString("TABLENAME"));
        }
    } catch (SQLException ex) {
        ex.printStackTrace();
    }
}


As you can see in the source code, the DataSource is actually created using a @DataSourceDefinition annotation which is a new feature in Java EE 6.

The third and final part of the demonstration uses a somewhat convoluted piece of JPA code to illustrate the multi-catch feature. For the purpose of the demo, the JPA query (also in the above EJB) uses a LockModeType.PESSIMISTIC_WRITE (new in JPA 2.0) when building the JP-QL query and adds two catch blocs for PessimisticLockException and LockTimeoutException :


try {
    List customers = em.createNamedQuery("findAllCustomersWithName")
        .setParameter("custName", name)
        .setLockMode(LockModeType.PESSIMISTIC_WRITE)
        .getResultList();
    if (customers.isEmpty()) {
        doesExist = false;
        Customer c = new Customer();
        c.setName(name);
        em.persist(c);
    } else {
        doesExist = true;
    } catch (final PessimisticLockException ple) {
        System.out.println("Something lock-related went wrong: " + ple.getMessage());
    } catch (final LockTimeoutException lte) {
        System.out.println("Something lock-related went wrong: " + lte.getMessage());
    }

}


Which can be refactored to this equivalent code using multi-catch :


try {
    List customers = em.createNamedQuery("findAllCustomersWithName")
        .setParameter("custName", name)
        .setLockMode(LockModeType.PESSIMISTIC_WRITE)
        .getResultList();
    if (customers.isEmpty()) {
        doesExist = false;
        Customer c = new Customer();
        c.setName(name);
        em.persist(c);
    } else {
        doesExist = true;
    } catch (final PessimisticLockException | LockTimeoutException ple) {
        System.out.println("Something lock-related went wrong: " + ple.getMessage());
    }


}


This new language feature is *very* useful for reflection or java.io File manipulation, not quite the most common Java EE code out there.

Of course all of the above only works with JDK 7 at runtime and if running NetBeans 7.0.1 you’ll also need to set the source level to Java 7 for the quick fixes to light up. I’ve also successfully executed this under Mac OS X using the OpenJDK Mac OS binary port.

Some resources :

• Full Source code.
• Screencast showing this “in action”.
• String in switch statements.
• try-with-resources.
• Multi-catch and precise rethrow.

New Java versions can sometimes take a bit of time before they’re adopted because:
a/ your IDE doesn’t support the new version and associated language constructs
b/ you’re a server-side developer and it’ll be a while before your application server supports that new version of the JDK
Well, with Java 7, things are different with the quasi-simultaneous releases of JDK 7, NetBeans 7.0.1 (coming up very soon) and GlassFish 3.1.1! Here’s a new screencast on the GlassFish Youtube Channel showing Java EE 6 development taking advantage of the project Coin features and running on GlassFish 3.1.1 and Java 7 :

Julien Ponge et moi-même serons à Lyon pour la soirée Java 7 du LyonJUG. En attendant, voici un entretient croisé réalisé par Agnès Crépet et Cédric Exbrayat sur Java 7 et autres sujets connexes et posté sur le site Duchess France.

Rendez-vous Jeudi 19h, à l’INSA de Lyon!

Here’s a short (5-minute) screencast showing GlassFish 3.1.1 (due out real soon now) and its EclipseLink 2.3 JPA provider showing multitenancy in action. In short, it adds EclipseLink annotations to a JPA entity and deploys two identical applications with different tenant-id properties defined in the persistence.xml descriptor. Each application only sees its own data, yet everything is stored in the same table which was augmented with a discriminator column.

For more advanced (or more realistic) uses such as tenant property being set on the @PersistenceContext, XML configuration of multitenant JPA entities, and more check out the nicely written wiki page.

Dalibor Topic fought the ash cloud and managed to reach Brno to kick off the day with a Java keynote with updates on Java 7 and current thinking about Java 8 and beyond. Doug Clarke, Java Persistence Director of Product Management at Oracle was here to cover advanced JPA features as well as recent evolution in EclipseLink with a nice multi-tenancy demo (I understand there’s a screencast coming soon). I took this opportunity to interview Doug on EclipseLink. The recording will soon be up on the GlassFish Podcast.

And of course, last but not least, the Prague web services engineering team was strongly represented and covering JAX-RS and Jersey. Given how the last session overran by more than half an hour I’d say this was a successful and engaging presentation. Both Marek (JAX-RS co-spec lead) and Jakub (Jersey lead) blogged about the event and shared code demo.

That’s a pretty poor photo there that I have but I’m hoping to see better ones given the presence of a profesional photographer (doing a keynote and three sessions I sure felt like a rockstar with photos of me taken at each of them…).

GlassFish Lifecycle modules

The first one has been around for a little while and is called Lifecycle modules. These are specific to GlassFish and thus not portable to other application servers but they offer a simple and effective way to implement behavior that applies to the entire application server instance (or to an entire cluster), independently of any deployed application.

A single class implementing com.sun.appserv.server.LifecycleListener (available from as-install/glassfish/modules/glassfish-api.jar) can intercept five different events: Initialization, Startup, Ready, Shutdown, and Termination (check the documentation for more details). Here’s a canonical example :


public class GlassFishEvents
         implements com.sun.appserv.server.LifecycleListener {

    @Override
    public void handleEvent(LifecycleEvent le)
             throws ServerLifecycleException {
       switch (le.getEventType()) {
          case LifecycleEvent.INIT_EVENT:
             logger.severe("INIT_EVENT");
             break;
          case LifecycleEvent.READY_EVENT:
             logger.severe("READY_EVENT");
             break;
          case LifecycleEvent.SHUTDOWN_EVENT:
             logger.severe("SHUTDOWN_EVENT");
             break;
          case LifecycleEvent.STARTUP_EVENT:
             logger.severe("STARTUP_EVENT");
             break;
          case LifecycleEvent.TERMINATION_EVENT:
             logger.severe("TERMINATION_EVENT");
             break;
          default:
             logger.severe("UNKNOWN event");
       }
    }
}


Registering the lifecycle module can be done via the admin console or the CLI (asadmin create-lifecycle-module) with optional ordering (relative to other modules, similar to servlets), an enabled/disabled state (default is enabled) and the ability to prevent the server from starting if the module fails to load.

Startup and singleton EJB

An alternate way is to use EJB 3.1 (part of Java EE 6) and in particular a bean combining the @Startup and @Singleton annotations. Its lifecycle methods marked with JSR 250 common annotations will contain the event callback logic. Here’s a simple example simulation the creation of database tables :


@javax.ejb.Singleton
@javax.ejb.Startup
public class CreateTables {
    @PostConstruct
    public void init() {
       logger.warning("Creating tables");
    }

    @PreDestroy
    public void cleanup() {
       logger.warning("Dropping table...");
    }
}


While this offers a more portable solution, it has some notable differences with GlassFish lifecycle modules.

First of all there are only two events that can be intercepted: @PostConstruct, @PreDestroy which are application events, not runtime system events. Undeploying the application is also the only way to disable the behavior and since this is an application-level event interception, there cannot be action taken on other parts of the runtime on failure (arguably you can do a lot more in the rest of you application).

Finally there is no notion of ordering but rather you can express explicit dependencies using @DependsOn as shown here to simulate populating tables that need to be previously created :


@javax.ejb.Singleton
@javax.ejb.Startup
@javax.ejb.DependsOn("CreateTables")
public class PopulateTables {
    @PostConstruct
    public void init() {
       logger.warning("Populating tables");
    }

    @PreDestroy
    public void cleanup() {
       logger.warning("archiving table data");
    }
}


Also note that a Singleton approach only applies to a single instance (not a cluster-wide singleton). If you’re wondering which approach to chose, it really boils down to whether you want to implement system-level or application-level events.

Of course you can combine the two approaches which would trigger a log similar to this one on a startup/shutdown cycle :


SEVERE: INIT_EVENT
WARNING: Creating tables
WARNING: Populating tables
SEVERE: STARTUP_EVENT
SEVERE: READY_EVENT
...
SEVERE: SHUTDOWN_EVENT
WARNING: archiving table data
WARNING: Dropping table...
SEVERE: TERMINATION_EVENT


After almost 7 years and almost 1000 entries, this blog was moved to the new blogs.oracle.com infrastructure (based on the very fine Apache Roller). Whether you’re reading this in a feed aggregator or on the webpage, redirects should make everything transparent for you.

Clearly with the rise of twitter and the time spent on TheAquarium I have little time left for this blog, but do expect some activity on a weekly (or so) basis.

I resisted doing so for all those years, but with the move to pre-defined templates I felt it was time to put a photo up on the blog to differentiate the page a bit.

I’m taking off tomorrow for Moscow to attend and present at JavaOne Russia. It’ll certainly be fun to see snow after a 26deg week-end in Paris.

I’ll probably record another Java Spotlight Podcast with the rest of the crew and we’ll see how much Russian cuisine and walking around I’ll get to do in the little time I’ll stay there…

This is the first time JavaOne goes to Russia and I’m curious to see how different it’ll be from the several Sun Tech Days I’ve attended in the past in St. Petersburg. It’ll probably be one of my busiest conferences with multiple talks and hands-on labs. See you there!

In fact GlassFish is pursuing what it’s been doing since version 2.x: hit a middle ground between the requirements from developers (latest APIs, lightweight runtime) and those from operations (manageable, stable, centralized admin). Here are some features which I believe to be relevant to developers, operations and QA :

• Fast startup: whether you’re developing, testing or deploying an application, the time it takes to bring a service online is critical. GlassFish has had this for a while (even before 3.0) but the full modular architecture offers yet greater flexibility.

• Embedded API: while the new standard EJBContainer API is a great step forward, it mostly addresses the unit testing use-case while this feature offers an API to drive the entire set of GlassFish services and features.

• Maven plugin: easily integratable into your favorite continuous integration server. In a continuous deployment scenario and generally for automation, Maven and CI’s are key tools to rely on.

• Domain-driven administration: the concept of a domain has been around for a while in GlassFish and with 3.1 the entire admin tools (CLI, Web and REST) scale from a single instance development or production config to a full multi-cluster environment. This makes for easy transfer of work from development to QA and/or to production and back.

• More questionable features (wrt Devops) are active redeployment and application versioning. While the former is recommended only in development the versioning feature can be used in many different ways for testing and potentially in production (with the caveat that only one application version can be active at a given point in time).

Of course there’s much more to devops than just a product or technology. Is your application server devops-friendly?

The Java EE 6 platform APIs are now in Maven central : javaee-api:6.0 and javaee-web-api:6.0. These should be used with a provided scope and your POM should contain dependencies for the actual implementation (check this 3.1 download page for how to work with GlassFish).

Consider using that simple platform dependency rather than replying on archetypes introducing a long list of dependencies mixing APIs and implementations.

Un nouveau livre sur Java EE et sur GlassFish, ça commence à devenir une habitude! J’ai participé à la relecture de plusieurs livres autour de Java et je dois dire que je trouve que les auteurs sont fous de consacrer autant d’énergie à rédiger le contenu et à le refaire plusieurs fois avant la sortie finale de l’ouvrage. Celui-ci n’échappe pas à la règle.

Au delà d’être écrit en français, ce livre est différent dans la mesure ou il ne se consacre pas exclusivement aux nouveautés de Java EE 6 mais s’adresse plutôt aux personnes qui souhaitent une couverture exhaustive de Java EE et n’ayant que des connaissances minimales sur le sujet. Par “exhaustif” j’entends qu’il couvre des technologies récentes comme CDI, Bean Validation, JAX-RS, comme des plus “traditionnelles” comme Servlet, EJB ou JSF mais aussi toutes les étapes de mises en oeuvre, y compris versioning d’applications, clustering GlassFish. Jérôme a suivi de près les développements de GlassFish 3.1 pour pouvoir proposer son livre seulement quelques jours après la sortie de GlassFish 3.1.

Le livre est imposant avec ses 900 pages (!) mais il couvre le développement complet d’une application ainsi que l’installation et l’utilisation de GlassFish, Hudson, NetBeans, Subversion, ANT, Eclipse, JUnit, et Selenium. Et pour ne rien gâcher l’éditeur propose la version numérique pour toute personne achetant le livre (c’est fou que ça ne soit pas une pratique plus répandue).

JavaOne Keynote speakers are none other than Steve Harris (Senior VP of Application Server Development) and Henrik Stahl (Senior Director of Product Management).

The preliminary schedule is here (expect a few minor changes). As you can see there is plenty of Java EE and GlassFish content.

Встречаемся на JavaOne !

Vu d’avion l’objectif de cette version majeure (à mon gout c’est presque une 4.0) c’est de réintroduire le clustering et l’administration centralisée sur un socle modulaire (OSGi) et complètement certifié Java EE 6. Dans les faits, il y a eu beaucoup d’améliorations autour du provisioning SSH (à la Hudson/Jenkins ou autres Hadoop), de la scalabilité du domaine multi-cluster, multi-instances, mais aussi des nouveautés comme le versioning d’applications contribué par Serli, les “scoped-resources”, ou l’intégration de Coherence\*Web (sous le nom de ActiveCache for GlassFish).

Toutes ces fonctionnalités sont ou seront traités dans des blogs et énumérés sur TheAquarium. Il y aura également un nombre de videos égrainés au rythme d’une par jour. Bien entendu il y a également la documentation complète pour le produit (versions open source et Oracle): glassfish.org/docs.

Ah oui, j’oubliais, si vous insistez il y a même une version en français (dite “multilingual”).