Saturday, January 4, 2003

Relationship Manager Pattern An interesting take on a Relationship Manager pattern. Having done something like this a couple times I'd have to say that it leads to crufty APIs over a period of time. As the relationships grow and become more complicated, the number of interactions grows and the RM becomes a festering rats nest all by itself. If you do something like this, you need to refactor every time you make major architectural changes. Comments () 4:16:51 PM

Apple //c versus PCjr You probably need to be somewhat older to remember this time, but I still do. This is back when IBM kept running those crazy ads with Charlie Chaplin all the darned time to push the 'new litte machine'. I guess it worked, 19 years later and I still can't get the ads out of my head. My father in law, who retired from IBM many years ago, finally retired his PCjr about 6 years ago. I was rather stunned that it ran for as long as it did. Comments () 4:15:01 PM

Presidential humor A friend sent this to me tonight: The last four ex-U.S. Presidents are caught in a tornado, and off they whirled to OZ. They finally make it to the Emerald City and come before the Great Wizard. "WHAT BRINGS YOU BEFORE THE GREAT WIZARD OF OZ?" Jimmy Carter steps forward timidly:" I've come for some courage." "NO PROBLEM!" says the Wizard. "WHO IS NEXT?" Ronald Reagan steps forward, "Well... I... I think I need a brain." "DONE" says the Wizard. "WHO COMES NEXT BEFORE THE GREAT AND POWERFUL OZ?" Up steps George Bush sadly, "I'm told by the American people that I need a heart." "I'VE HEARD IT'S TRUE!" says the Wizard. "CONSIDER IT DONE." There is a great silence in the hall. Bill Clinton is just standing there, looking around, but doesn't say a word. Irritated, the Wizard finally asks, "WHAT DO YOU WANT?" "Is Dorothy here?" Comments () 1:26:25 AM

A goood series on JMX If you haven't been paying much attention to JMX (Java Management Extensions), it might be worth your time to do so. It's such a simple API that a lot of people ignore it. Bill de hÓra recently pointed to the first of a series on JMX by Sing Li on the developerWorks site. The three part series is called "From black boxes to enterprises". Add manageability to your Java-based systems today Coding your own standard and dynamic MBeans Connecting JMX Agent to a real-life network management system Part 3 delves into a complete solution and is quite a bit beyond what we have in place today, but we're pretty happy with what we've implemented thus far. Our biggest win has been the ease of exposing configuration settings via JSPs (rather than having people go directly to the somewhat complicated MBean pages) and in debugging. I hope to have more about how we're using JMX for debugging soon. I did note that Tomcat 4.1 has it's own JMX engine in place, which could make moving moving from JBoss with Tomcat 4.0.x somewhat dicey. I wasn't planning on that bump in the road. Comments () 12:22:48 AM

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