Tech Presentations

By Tim Bray at International PHP Conference 2006 on November 5-8 (PDF).

By Tim Bray at Ruby conference 2006 on October 20-22, 2006 (PDF).

Google TechTalk by Ari Zilka of Terracotta on November 21, 2006

Video, slides (available for related presentation on Terracotta at JavaOne).

Quite fascinating clustering technology that allows for Java applications to share part of their data over the cluster and synchronize changes. All of that without modifications to actual applications but on JVM level, clustering behavior of which is configured through configuration files.

I’m not proficient in this field and can’t really extract most important parts of the presentation so you’ll have to watch it by yourself but demos that show two Swing applications running synchronously on two different machines are pretty cool.

Unfortunately I was unable to find slides for this presentation and video demos quality is not very good, but was enough for me to follow the logic.

Enjoy.

Ron Bodkin talks about automated Java web application troubleshooting using Glassbox at Google TechTalk (video) on September 25, 2006.

Interesting quotes:

• No need to change or recompile the code
• Low performance overhead about 1% when running (about 50% on code load)
• Configurable thresholds
• AJAX-based web interface
• Monitoring multiple sources
• Uses AspectJ, 10-year old stable technology
• Extendable trackers through configuration or simple code
• Preconfigured tracked actions:
  • Database connections
  • Database calls
  • Thread synchronization issues
  • Failures/slowness in web services, EJBs, other remote calls
  • Things that use too much CPI
  • Error pages and exceptions in Java processing
  • Time spent at a dispatch layer
• Future features / plans:
  • Integration with existing monitoring infrastructures companies have built
  • Monitoring by specific user/session
  • Component owner-focused monitoring, e.g. Developer, Assembler, Admin (DBA/Sysadmin)
  • System training (by monitoring the process)
  • Historical views, comparison
  • Baseline comparison (system upgrades, new releases, test/production)
  • Configurable SLA (Service Level Agreement) reporting
  • Preconfigured monitors for different frameworks - more AJAX, more web frameworks, JNDI, cache, O/R mapping tools
  • System health
  • Clustering (autodiscovery, aggregation
  • Advanced analisys
• Originally closed source. Now Open Source (LGPL). Contributors wanted.

Definitely interesting technology and quite logical extension to Virtual Machine kind of environment.