Monday, December 9, 2002

Pattern testing with aspects I've just stumbled on a new project called Pattern Testing that looks interesting, particularly as its being packaged up as a Maven plugin. I remember Vincent telling me about it over lunch a few months ago. Vincent is one of the main developers behind it and he's also an active Jakarta committer and one of the main guys behind Cactus as well as being a committer on Maven and Struts. 6:12:38 PM    comment []

Temporal Decoupling via Messaging Darren makes some good comments which I agree with on temporal decoupling and the use of messaging (MOM) to loosely couple systems and components. Temporal Decoupling [Pushing the envelope] As well as temporal decoupling and being loosely coupled, the use of MOM can also lead to an efficient SEDA style architecture using asynchronous processing of messages, rather than less effcient blocking RPCs. The disadvantages Darren quotes (extra network hop and system administration) can actually be considered advantages too. :-) By using a message broker in between producers and consumers, you can optimise your network communication (e.g. optimising the use of sockets, networks, WAN traffic etc) rather than every producer connecting to every single consumer. Also the message broker can act as a load balancer to implement efficient message distribution through your network. Some MOMs even implement throttling to slow down fast producers to avoid flooding your network. Also using a MOM means that you can monitor the MOM to determine the health of the system. e.g. you can monitor queue depths, throughput rates, monitor subscriptions, consumption and production rates to monitor your systems and components. So most MOMs can also act as an extra system management tool. For me one of the best things to come out of all this Web Services hype is the focus on XML-based messaging. 5:18:15 PM    comment []

Languages for the JVM [bayard] responded in one of my comments sections with a great list of  Languages for the Java VM which includes over 160 entries. Some fascinating projects on the list. I never knew so many languages run on top of the JVM. 2:18:57 PM    comment []

Eiffel for Java The GNU Project has released SmartEiffel 1.0, an Eiffel compiler that can compile Eiffel to C source or Java byte code. It "should run on any platform for which an ANSI C POSIX compiler or a Java Virtual Machine exists." Naturally it's released under the GPL.  [Cafe au Lait] So there are lots of different languages for the Java platform. Off the top of my head there's JavaScript, Jython, Jacl, JRuby, Eiffel, JScheme, JLisp, JBasic (Jaba), pnuts, beanshell. I'm sure there are others I've missed off. So far MS has often marketed .Net as being language-neutral. What with recent findings that .Net isn't too great for high level languages, maybe its time for Sun to market the cross-language benefits of the Java platform? 8:12:31 AM    comment []

Let's get ready to GoogleFight!. Let's get ready to GoogleFight!. GoogleFight lets you compare hit counts for two search keywords run through Google. They do however claim no affiliation with or sponsorship by Google. Here is the results for Java vs .NET: Java (31 800 000 results) .NET (242 000 000 results) [dsuspense] Hardly suprising when .net is a domain name extension. Take a look at the top 10 entries for .net and none of them are actually about MS .Net! SourceForge and Freshmeat are in the top 10! Maybe Java should rename itself to .Org? :-). 7:22:15 AM    comment []