Short version: I am leaving Posterous and moving to Tumblr at http://log.julien.ponge.info/.

It turns out that my usage of Posterous as a social media tool will have been a short one.

I had been running a blog for many years until the new social networks had me less and less writing to it. It turns out that many friends have the same problem. They write less, period. Ted Leung of Jython fame tends to express the same feelings in a recent post. Another thing that got me out of this blog is the accumulation of dust over the years. Also, I am less and less inclined in maintaining a Wordpress installation, although this is a first-class blogging software.

I initially came to Posterous because it promised an easier experience. Post by email. Autopost to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, whatever. Just link something from another site and it gets magically inserted into the post from FlickR, SlideShare, Youtube, Gist/GitHub, …

This is all cool, but I gradually got bored of the frictions with the tool. To name a few:

• Slideshare links get broken every once in a while, embedding the slides from a business guy instead of yours,
• there is no Disq.us integration, just an inferior Posterous-made comments system,
• you always have to reformat the posts sent by email,
• the web editor is a joke, and it breaks your formatting even more (inconsistent double paragraph jumps on a single paragraph break),
• you cannot insert pictures into markdown-formatted posts, even as galleries,
• the web editor does force you into “raw HTML” to enter markdown text between tags,
• you cannot tweak the post URLs if you leave the title empty and you hit “preview”,
• the themes set is so limited,
• having few themes is not much of an issue, but when only a handful look good then it is a serious one,
• (…)

In the end of the day I am spending too much time on issues with Posterous, hence I have to leave for my personal space. I just need a tool with no formatting woes that gets the stuff done.

Things are different for a community site such as the IzPack news where Posterous is a good fit. Indeed, posts are occasional, they mainly consist of text or a screenshot gallery, and autoposting makes things easier for the contributors.

I am a great fan of Martin Fowler’s notion of “bliki”. I am going to implement a similar system on my main website. I am already using a static files generator, so plugging it in will just be a breeze! I think that I will dig into my past (blog) posts and extract a few of them to make the first entries. Anything serious will have a fine and long-lasting place there. You don’t write such articles every day…

For all other things I am moving to Posterous nemesis Tumblr. The nice thing with Tumblr is not just that it has momentum. The entries can be of various types, including links with a short comment, a picture, a short thought… This makes Tumblr the perfect place for a flow of short, daily fast-paced entries on the go. A good example is the Tumblr of Fabien Penso where he frequently posts links with short comments. I like that. And of course, it has Twitter integration!

Please note the URL of my Tumblr: http://log.julien.ponge.info/

So long Posterous, and thanks for the fish!

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Oracle just published the top 20 of their technical articles for 2011.

This came as a surprise to me, but my article on Java SE 7 Fork/Join is number one! My other article on resources management in Java SE 7 is also part of the top 20.

Big thanks to Oracle for having me on board as a tech writer, and huge thanks to all of those reading them!

Stay tuned: more articles are waiting in the pipe and will be published in 2012.

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Jigsaw plays in the "static module" category just like Ruby gems, Python eggs, NodeJS packages and such. It will be part of Java 8 and will be the standard modules system for Java onwards.

I remember myself attending Mark Reinhold's talk on Jigsaw at Devoxx this year, and leaving the room with a weird feeling. I had already seen a few talks by Mark, but this one on Jigsaw wasn't clearly his best. He spent too much time on generalities about modularity and modules, only to present Jigsaw and the related tools on slides. Yes, on slides.

Other people in the room were concerned too: "what if all of this was just vaporware? PowerPointWare?". I have heard lots of harsh reactions after the talk. Another grief was when Mark said that "nobody needs to have 2 versions of the same module within the same application".

Come on Mark! :-)

I have decided to report here my adventures in building OpenJDK 8 with the current development version of Jigsaw. I have to say that what is inside is promising, although I have several concerns that I won't elaborate in this post. Nevertheless, the most critical one seems to be over the possible lack of side-by-side versioning support. Application servers anyone?

See the full gallery on Posterous

Preparing yourself a Linux distribution

At this stage the simplest route is to use a Linux box. In my case I opted for a virtual machine inside Oracle VirtualBox.

OpenJDK does not have weird dependencies bar Alsa. I am always amazed by the mess it is in the Linux world to support audio. There are dozen of Alsa variants, and finding the one with the good library is a true challenge. At one point I was playing the game of guessing which package would provide me with the correct library, only to find out that certain combinations would remove Mozilla Firefox, OpenJDK 7 and other useful tools. Nice!

I first had those problems in a Mint / Ubuntu distribution. I opted to play with Fedora 16, a clean distribution by the way. Despite my best efforts, the compilation failed miserably due to spaces / tabs in a Makefile. Fixing it was no solution, as make would have missing dependencies. A weird problem with make. I gave up.

I ended up back on an Ubuntu variant called XUbuntu that runs XFCE, a light and clean desktop environment.

Dependencies

To build OpenJDK 8, you will need:

• OpenJDK 7
• Apache Ant
• GNU make
• GCC with C++
• GNU AWK
• ALSA
• Mercurial

You will also need a bunch of libraries from CUPS, XOrg and more. There is a lifesaver tool call "apt-file" on Debian-based distributions, and that you can use like:

apt-file search X11/extensions/shape.h

This tool is a must have, because you will inevitably fight over missing headers and libraries.

Quality time with make

The following set of commands should serve as a basis for getting the source code and building it:

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hg clone http://hg.openjdk.java.net/jigsaw/jigsaw
cd jigsaw
bash get_sources.sh
export LANG=C
export ALT_BOOTDIR=/usr/lib/jvm/java-1.7.0-openjdk-i386
export ALLOW_DOWNLOADS=true
make sanity
make all

Who needs sound anyway?

You are very likely to encounter issues with Alsa. I did. I couldn't get the right libraries for some reason I can't explain, so I went to download the source code for Alsa and compiled it locally. And it failed.

Alsa is an aging project. It does not compile on a Linux 3 kernel due to missing headers like "linux/smp_lock.h".

You can safely disable the sound libraries as I ended up doing:

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diff -r 22ccf6e7a092 make/javax/sound/jsoundalsa/Makefile
--- a/make/javax/sound/jsoundalsa/Makefile	Fri Dec 02 12:44:03 2011 +0000
+++ b/make/javax/sound/jsoundalsa/Makefile	Fri Dec 09 15:11:02 2011 +0100
@@ -45,34 +45,37 @@
 # Files
 #
 
-FILES_c = \
-	Utilities.c \
-	$(DAUDIOFILES_c) \
-	$(MIDIFILES_c) \
-	$(PORTFILES_c)
+FILES_c=
+#FILES_c = \
+#	Utilities.c \
+#	$(DAUDIOFILES_c) \
+#	$(MIDIFILES_c) \
+#	$(PORTFILES_c)
 
 # platform dependent files
-FILES_c += \
-	PLATFORM_API_LinuxOS_ALSA_CommonUtils.c   \
-	PLATFORM_API_LinuxOS_ALSA_PCM.c     \
-	PLATFORM_API_LinuxOS_ALSA_PCMUtils.c   \
-	PLATFORM_API_LinuxOS_ALSA_MidiIn.c  \
-	PLATFORM_API_LinuxOS_ALSA_MidiOut.c \
-	PLATFORM_API_LinuxOS_ALSA_MidiUtils.c \
-	PLATFORM_API_LinuxOS_ALSA_Ports.c
+#FILES_c += \
+#	PLATFORM_API_LinuxOS_ALSA_CommonUtils.c   \
+#	PLATFORM_API_LinuxOS_ALSA_PCM.c     \
+#	PLATFORM_API_LinuxOS_ALSA_PCMUtils.c   \
+#	PLATFORM_API_LinuxOS_ALSA_MidiIn.c  \
+#	PLATFORM_API_LinuxOS_ALSA_MidiOut.c \
+#	PLATFORM_API_LinuxOS_ALSA_MidiUtils.c \
+#	PLATFORM_API_LinuxOS_ALSA_Ports.c
 
-FILES_export = \
-	$(DAUDIOFILES_export) \
-	$(MIDIFILES_export) \
-	$(PORTFILES_export)
 
-LDFLAGS += -lasound
+FILES_export=
+#FILES_export = \
+#	$(DAUDIOFILES_export) \
+#	$(MIDIFILES_export) \
+#	$(PORTFILES_export)
+
+#LDFLAGS += -lasound
 
 CPPFLAGS += \
-	-DUSE_DAUDIO=TRUE \
-	-DUSE_PORTS=TRUE  \
-	-DUSE_PLATFORM_MIDI_OUT=TRUE \
-	-DUSE_PLATFORM_MIDI_IN=TRUE \
+	-DUSE_DAUDIO=FALSE \
+	-DUSE_PORTS=FALSE  \
+	-DUSE_PLATFORM_MIDI_OUT=FALSE \
+	-DUSE_PLATFORM_MIDI_IN=FALSE \
 	-I$(SHARE_SRC)/native/com/sun/media/sound
 

Now the set of commands above should peacefully converge towards a successful build.

A modular JDK!

The fresh JDK image lies in "build/linux-i586/jdk-module-image".

Along the way you will notice new tools in "bin/" such as "jmod and jpkg".

The "lib/modules" folder contains a myriad of modules. The JDK is no longer this huge "rt.jar" with a gravity of JARs around: it is now a set of modules. Each module contains 3 files: an index, some metadata and the classes. I did not check but my understanding is that the "classes" file is using Pack200.

Backwards compatibility

You can still compile and run classes as you did before. The classpath flags are still there, so you don't have to worry too much.

Let's now play with Jigsaw modules.

My first module

We will start with a simple module to compute factorial numbers. What is new is the "module-info.java" file at the root of the module. It contains meta-data such as the name of the module, its version, its dependencies with optional version requirements, its exported services and more.

It is suggested to organize the sources folder into separate "modules". We now need to tell "javac" to:

• output the compiled classes to a "modules" folder using the usual -d flag, and
• look for dependent modules into "modules", and
• take "sources" as the source folder for our module(s) source code, and...
• ... pass those familiar Java source code files.

Here is the Gist to that module:

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mkdir -p sources/fact/fact
mkdir modules
# edit the files!
javac -d modules -modulepath modules \
      -sourcepath sources \
      sources/fact/module-info.java \
      sources/fact/fact/Factorial.java

A module that needs a module

We can easily create a "hello" module that depends on the previous "fact" module:

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package hello;

import static fact.Factorial.factorial;

public class Main {
  public static void main(String... args) {
    System.out.println(factorial(10));
  }
}

The compilation is straightforward from the one above. You don't have to mess with the classpath anymore, just tell "javac" where the modules are.

The "module-info.java" definition is straightforward. The "class" entry specifies a "main" method, aka an entry-point for your module, if any.

Making a repository and running a module

Until there what we called "modules" were actually just good old folders with ".class" files at the right place. A module was just another indirection layer in the form of a folder with the name of the module.

Repositories are being used by Jigsaw to deploy modules. They have support for delegation, just like those good old classloaders, and it will be possible to reference remote repositories, possibly from Maven. Cool!

Let's create a repository and deploy our modules to it. When this is done we can also run the "hello" module:

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jmod create -L repo
jmod install modules hello fact -L repo

find repo/
repo/
repo/fact
repo/fact/1.0
repo/fact/1.0/index
repo/fact/1.0/info
repo/fact/1.0/classes
repo/%jigsaw-library
repo/hello
repo/hello/1.0
repo/hello/1.0/config
repo/hello/1.0/index
repo/hello/1.0/info
repo/hello/1.0/classes

Distributing modules

Jigsaw offers a new format called "jmod" to distribute modules, which can in turn be installed into repositories. It is also possible to create native packages. In my case I can create ".deb" native packages using jmod, and they have the correct naming, versioning and dependencies metadata.

Here is how to use it to package and install modules:

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# Make jmod packages
jponge@xub:~/Code/java8$ jpkg -m modules/fact jmod fact
jponge@xub:~/Code/java8$ jpkg -m modules/hello jmod hello
jponge@xub:~/Code/java8$ ls *.jmod
fact@1.0.jmod  hello@1.0.jmod

# Make Debian packages
jponge@xub:~/Code/java8$ jpkg -m modules/ deb hello
jponge@xub:~/Code/java8$ jpkg -m modules/ deb fact
jponge@xub:~/Code/java8$ ls *.deb
fact_1.0_i386.deb  hello_1.0_i386.deb

# Remove a module and install it back from a jmod package
jponge@xub:~/Code/java8$ rm -rf repo/hello
jponge@xub:~/Code/java8$ jmod install -L repo hello@1.0.jmod 
jponge@xub:~/Code/java8$ java -L repo -m hello
3628800

Conclusion

I have only scratched the surface of Jigsaw and the project / specifications are still under development. I can already tell that it nicely matches the needs for a static modules system. That being said, large code bases already leverage some form of modules system such as OSGi, JBoss modules and ad-hoc systems.

Java 8 has yet to be released, and we are far from it. Nevertheless its adoption will depend on application servers, and a growing number of those rely on OSGi as a dynamic modules platform. The key for Jigsaw adoption will thus to provide a clean interoperability with OSGi and other forms of module system. Yet a better solution would probably be to provide equivalent dynamic mechanisms, although OSGi remains a pragmatic middle-term bet.

Disclaimer

I am also a contracted technical writer for Oracle, but I am not an agent, employee or principal of Oracle Corporation. The views here are thus solely mine, not those of past, present and future employers.

References

• Project Jigsaw
• Modules grammar
• Quickstart

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I had the chance to be a speaker at the previous edition of Devoxx for a "tools in action" session on IzPack.

The good news is that the recording is now available for free on Parleys.

Enjoy!

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J'ai eu le plaisir de participer à la deuxième édition du JUG SummerCamp qui a eu lieu le 16 septembre à La Rochelle.

J'ai présenté deux thèmes présents dans Java SE 7 :

1. Fork / Join : le framework facilitant l'écriture de programmes parallèles, et
2. Project Coin : l'ensemble des changements apportés au langage Java.

Cette édition fut une franche réussite, tant sur le fond que sur la forme, le tout dans une ambiance de grande convivialité propice aux échanges fructueux.

Un grand bravo à Orianne, Jérôme et les équipes de Serli qui n'ont pas ménagé leurs efforts ! Pensez à eux si vous cherchez des compétences aiguisées et un esprit qui sortent du cadre de la SSII traditionnelle...

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There are quite a few events coming in on my side.

• September 16th – JugSummerCamp, La Rochelle, France: I will give a talk on Java 7 fork/join and Project Coin.
• October 3rd/4th – Soft-Shake, Geneva, Switzerland: same Java 7 talk.
• October 13th – LavaJUG, Clermont-Ferrand, France: launch event for this new Java User Group. I will again talk about Java 7 with my friend Alexis Moussine-Pouchkine like we did in July at the LyonJUG. I am very excited since the JUG has been created by my closest friends, and I used to live in Clermont-Ferrand for 10 years before being constrained to leave it.
• October 26th-28th – fOSSa'11, Lyon, France: I am among the organizers of this year edition and we will have an impressive list of speakers. Come join us if you are interested by all things opensource. Oh… and it’s free!
• November 14th-18th – Devoxx, Antwerpen, Belgium: I should attend Devoxx, but not as a speaker though. I have a few issues getting properly registered, but there is a high probability that it gets sorted out quickly.

Let me know if we can meet at any of those events, that will be a great pleasure!

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We are organizing the fOSSa 2011 conference next October in Lyon, a free conference that is best summarized as:

Where Open Source meets Academia, Developpers, Insiders, Human Beings, Startups & Industrials. Lyon, France, 26-27-28th October 2011.

I am a steering and program committee member. I am also in charge of the DEV track and I am very delighted to announce the speakers list!

I would also like to mention that we have opened a call for demo proposal: a great chance to show your project live in action!

More details regarding the whole conference are being added to the fOSSa conference website so stay tuned for more!

Opensource Development Beyond the Code

Opensource development is more than often looked at through the prism of source code being put under an opensource license. While code indeed remains crucial, opensource has a wider impact on several aspects in the life of a project, including communities, quality processes, collaboration, business model and public exposure. Indeed, Open source development occurs in many forms: Some more structured than others. For the developer there are many issues to consider: development process, contribution management, issue tracking, license selection, release schedule, and more.

This session gathers speakers that will share those aspects with the audience.

Oracle: daemon or angel?

Alexis-Moussine Pouchkine, Oracle

Part of the answer to the title of this talk is easy – Oracle is no angel.

Departing from Sun Microsystem’s Jonathan Schwartz' “all software shall be free and open source”, the open source and in particular Java story since Oracle took over stewardship is already a rich one. What is Oracle’s strategy? Can we trust Oracle? To help you answer these questions, we’ll rollback the time machine to the acquisition date and walk through a number of important milestones. Hopefully this will put things in perspective and let you decide how evil Oracle really is.

Opensource and Business at Cloudbees

Nicolas de Loof, CloudBees

CloudBees offers a large set of services around continuous integration and integrated software factory from source code to production. Due to Jenkins history and strained relations with Oracle, and despite Kohsuke Kawaguchi (jenkins creator) being an employee, CloudBees is very careful to work hand in hand with the opensource Jenkins community and not to interfere with the project management board. During this session, I’ll explain how the Jenkins architecture allows CloudBees to create business value and proprietary products, and also is an active contributor to opensource jenkins that welcomes changes and improvements on its side.

ALERT Project

Clara Pezuela, ATOS Research

ALERT aims at developing methods and components to help in the resolution of bugs process. Every community of developers face every day with many of issues in code, and not always is easy to manage their resolution in the best manner and as faster as possible. ALERT is analyzing how these communities are used to manage the bug resolution workflow to improve the process: avoiding duplications, assigning the bug to the right person according to the required skills, relating bugs each other, etc. The ALERT system will be able to extract information from different sources in the communities (mails, SVN, chats, repository, etc), it will analyze it and it will throw the events to process the required actions. The system will also recommend the developers best practices in bug resolution process.

From a legacy proprietary application to a modern libre solution

Emmanuel Hugonnet, Silverpeas

Don’t forget when you develop an application that in 10 years there may be developers that will try to maintain and evolve YOUR code …. This is a first hand return from living experience, showing that nothing is lost and that there is always hope. This talk is not about the latest frameworks or technologies. There will be blood and sweat, and Chuck Norris is not going to come and save you … How can you work with such code ? How can you keep evolving your product 10 years later with only 4 developers ? Maybe just dump the code ? Entity EJBs were kings…. developers. This was the blessed time of Weblogic, Orion … when developers knew how to code with UltraEdit, tests were unknown and CMP Silverpeas is a collaborative portal, now free,developed as a J2EE application in 1999 by a start-up with at least 40

OpenDJ, life after Sunset

Ludovic Poitou, ForgeRock

Usually an open source project starts from the idea of one or few developers working in their spare time after sunset. Eventually the project gets mainstream and interested companies contribute resources and man power to accelerate development. But what about a project started by a large corporation, which abandons it after a re-organization or an acquisition ? In this presentation, we will be looking at the challenges and opportunities facing OpenDJ, an open source project that has survived the “Sun set”.

Involvement of software engineering companies in OSS

Contributions: a virtuous circle

Jérôme Petit, SERLI

SERLI is a French consulting & software engineering company that dedicates more than 1000 man-days each year to contribute to Open Source projects such as GlassFish, JBoss, JOnAS, Weld, Hibernate, Infinispan, Selenium, Sonar and more.

In this talk, Jérôme will explain how spending so much time & efforts contributing to Open Source projects creates a virtuous circle for the company.

The presentation will cover the different models of contribution, impact on organisation, business and humans beings.

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As vacations come to an end, I though I would share with you a few photos that I shot while playing racing in Gran Turismo 5. I love this simulation on the PlayStation and spend hours fine-tuning car setups.

Do you like those photos? Do you have any place for sharing yours?

See the full gallery on Posterous

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Just in case you would have missed the news through another channel, we released the 8th beta release of izPack 5.0.0 yesterday!

This is another milestone towards a stabilized version 5 after the huge refactorings that the code base has had. In the news along with this release:

• there is already a good track record of people using those beta releases in production,
• we launched a community news website and you are even welcome to submit your own,
• a Gradle IzPack plugin project has emerged on GitHub and it looks very promising.

I believe and I hope that we will drop the beta stage soon.

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We are very fortunate at the CITI Laboratory to have the possibility of playing with weird hardware and software combinations. I am absolutely no embedded systems expert at all, but I had the chance to play with an ARM board a few months back.

I managed to run the Glassfish Java EE 6 Application Server on it and due to strong demand for more details about it, here is a quick post relating this experiment.

See the full gallery on Posterous

The BeagleBoard xM

The BeagleBoard xM is a relatively inexpensive board featuring an ARM processor. The board is packed with some decent hardware:

BeagleBoard-xM delivers extra ARM (R) Cortex TM -A8 MHz now at 1 GHz and extra memory with 512MB of low-power DDR RAM, enabling hobbyists, innovators and engineers to go beyond their current imagination and be inspired by the BeagleBoard.org community. Designed with the community inputs in mind, this open hardware design improves upon the laptop-like performance and expandability, while keeping at hand-held power levels. Direct connectivity is supported by the on-board four-port hub with 10/100 Ethernet, while maintaining a tiny 3.25" x 3.25" footprint.

It does not consume much energy, you can put your finger on the processor without getting burned, and it has relatively good performance.

Operating System

You can install lots of different operating systems on the BeagleBoard, ranging from exotic L4 kernel based ones to good old Linux distributions.

The easiest way to get started is to go with Angstrom Linux.

Once you have prepared a SD Card with the operating system image, you should be able to boot into it. Just plug the SD Card in and power on the board.

You should also configure an OpenSSH server so that you can remotely log into the board.

Java SE 6 on an ARM board

A very common misconception regarding Java for embedded systems is that you have no choice but to resort to some alternative virtual machine implementations such as JamVM and GNU Classpath for the standard Java platform classes. While you may run lots of Java 5 applications with such a combo, there is a simpler alternative.

Contrarily to what many people think, you can run a genuine Java SE 6 for embedded systems! This is essentially the full equivalent of a regular Java SE 6 Runtime Environment.

Running Glassfish

Running Glassfish is equally easy. Download a ZIP distribution of Glassfish v3.1 and just place it anywhere you like.

You can now easily launch Glassfish and deploy some applications to it! It is not as snappy as what you may be used to, but it starts and runs flawlessly.

I was able to deploy and run the Apache Wicket examples. After a few requests, you wouldn't notice that you were actually talking to such as small board.

The Good, The Bad

Ok, that was fun, but where do we go from here? Could you really deploy Java EE 6 applications to such embedded systems?

The answer is of course somewhere in the middle. You are basically doomed if you take your average JPA / EJB / JTA / JSF business application and expect it to be fast here:

• it's a single CPU unit,
• SD Card are dead slow, hence any I/O work is costly,
• ...because Java SE 6 Embedded does not ship with a javac compiler, JSP/JSF such as in the Glassfish administration console do not work!

That being said Glassfish just works with no special tuning, so if you have those constraints in mind, you can actually build embedded applications with the familiar Java EE 6 programming model!

Especially:

• you can always plug a USB flash or hard drive for the I/O work, including relational databases on Java DB,
• you can certainly tweak the configuration to make it even lighter than by default,
• Servlets and JAX-RS work, so you have a wide range of possibilities for exposing web interfaces and web services,
• you can take advantage of hybrid Java EE + OSGi applications to plug with UPnP in an embedded context,
• you may use the BeagleBoard as a _DAS_ to centrally manage a Glassfish cluster made of SSH nodes running on server hardware,
• ...sky is the limit!

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