Java resource management technology advances
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(InfoWorld) - A standard mechanism for managing resources such as memory and network bandwidth in Java applications is advancing through the Java Community Process. Java Specification Request 284, which features an API for partitioning resources among applications and querying about resource availability, was published in an early draft form late in August. Officially known as the Resource Management Consumption API, JSR 284 is considered important to evolving Java to allow for better system management. It also will provide a means for exposing various resources. "It's important because right now, when people like to run computations inside the JVM (Java Virtual machine), they have extremely crude ways to manage resources," said Grzegorz Czajkowski, the specification lead on JSR 284, and an engineer at Google. Czajkowski formerly was a senior staff engineer at Sun Microsystems. "You can control the JVM process through OS controls but there's not a lot you can do within the JVM itself," Czajkowski said. The JSR document notes the criticality of what JSR 284 attempts to provide. "Software systems in many circumstances need awareness of their resource usage. Meeting performance requirements often requires the ability to manage consumption of resources provided by the environment. Resource management is traditionally handled by operating systems, but the growing need to use the Java platform in the systems programming domain adds increased pressure to equip it with resource management capabilities at a level of abstraction that fits gracefully with the language. "Preventing denial of service attacks, providing load-balancing, and monitoring the usage of a given resource are all difficult to do in the current version of the Java platform. In general, these and other features cannot be provided without going beyond the Java language proper, through mechanisms such as native code or shell scripts that ask the OS to handle matters related to resource management. The lack of a standard, programmatic way to partition resources available to virtual machine(s) among Java applications has led to a number of ad-hoc solutions," the document reads. A public draft of JSR 284 is expected in early-November, with a three-week voting period likely for December. The specification could be completed by January.
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As hardware gets more powerful, Sun expects the desktop version of Java to gradually replace the stripped-down mobile version. Will it un-fragment Java for gadgets?
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This paper will cover the challenge of identifying a reliable source of information to populate and maintain accurate configuration information from the distributed application and server environment for use in the CMDB.
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Delivering the capabilities of traditional EAI products within a light-footprint, standards-based infrastructure supporting incremental integration
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Chris Chabot has posted a PHP package he's worked up that functions as a daemon sitting and listening on a socket.   To deal with 1000's of concurrent, always on (comet aka hanging iframe) http (server) connections, and an equal amount of IRC client connections, plus being able to interpret and parse and delegate all the messages and events, i needed a very fast, stable, flexible and easy to use 'daemon' library for PHP.   He links to the tarball of the release and to the project page as well as including an example of its usage - creating a simple HTTP server with various hooks built in (like on_connect, on_read, and on_timer).
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Increasing front-side bus speed from 800 to 1,066 MHz addresses crucial bottleneck in system performance.
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The trials and tribulations of application dependency in a virtualized, hosted world.
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In a follow-up to a previous blog post, Alexey Zakhlestin shares a few more thoughts on the project and the proper object hierarchy's going for.   actually, I changed it completely 3 times already in my thoughts. I finally "see the light"(tm) and will implement it on a weekend. I think about converting SCGI-part to a simple "driver" and move all http-related stuff to a separate driver-agnostic set of classes. This way, I would be able to implement FastCGI as anther driver without altering applications. If you have any better ideas - let me know.   He also includes a link to another sample application that uses the functionality to create a pie chart (including some benchmarks) with the help of the eZ components framework.
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'Filthy rich internet applications' Sun has given the world a (slightly) better idea of what's on the way from client-side Java.â¦
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Continuing the thread on commoditization of scalable server software, the third installment. Yesterday, Matt Tucker from the OpenFire community, said: "I'm not sure that S3 magically kills off the scaling priests. It certainly makes it easy to turn on more storage resources, but writing an application to scale efficiently across multiple virtual machines is no easy task." To which I responded... It won't make scaling obsolete, but what it does do is commodify it. Right now I can't buy a Jabber server that scales without also hiring someone who will scale it for me. But in a few years I should be able to buy a Jabber server that, when it needs more CPUs, just asks for them all transparently to the user, the same way my word processor asks the OS for more memory today. I remember word processors that didn't do memory management, you got a 64K buffer and that's it. One document. When you filled it up, you started another. Technology will go forward and scaling won't be a black art, it'll be something built into the software you license.
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Sun is working on technology to make it easier to run different languages on the Java Virtual Machine. Called the Da Vinci Machine, the project is being described by Sun as "a multi-language renaissance for the Java Virtual Machine architecture." The project features prototype JVM extensions to run non-Java languages efficiently as well as architectural support.Although many languages besides Java have been implemented on the JVM, including Ruby, the intent is to make the JVM more compatible with other languages, said Charles Nutter, core developer of JRuby, which is a version of Ruby to run on the JVM. "For the most part, almost every language that's more than five years old has some kind of implementation on the JVM," he said. ?The JVM allows programs using it to run on any platform supporting the JVM; it provides hardware and OS independence. Benefits like flexible online code loading and online garbage collection, in which objects are moved out of the way automatically rather than having to be saved manually, are featured.Da Vinci Machine is intended to overcome obstacles like mismatches between a source language's design patterns and JVM capabilities. Because the JVM was designed for Java and Java favors some design patterns over others, implementers can find themselves dealing with these mismatches, Sun said."Specifically, the JVM was originally for Java, and many other languages have features unlike what Java provides. We need to find ways to support those features," said Nutter.Some pain points to running new languages on the JVM include limitations on calling sequences and control stack management, finite inheritance, and scaling problems when generating classes.Nutter pointed out that Java, in being a statically typed language, differs from scripting languages like Ruby, which are dynamically typed. Thus, Java gives the JVM more clues about what code is going to be executed. Ways need to be found to let the JVM make the correct call for these languages, he said. In JRuby, this obstacle is addressed via a piece of code to inspect target operations.Capabilities of Da Vinci Machine are planned for inclusion in the upcoming JDK (Java SE Development Kit) 7, which is based on Java Platform, Standard Edition 7. Sun could not provide a release date for JDK 7. It is not known how many Da Vinci features might actually get into JDK 7, Nutter said.Da Vinci represents an experimental branch, or even a fork, of the JVM, said Nutter. He cautioned that fork in this case is not meant to carry the same negative connotations associated with forking of a platform.Java developers questioned liked the idea of Da Vinci Machine."[Da Vinci Machine] sounds like something I was thinking was going to happen and should have happened," said Daniel Hinojosa, an independent Java developer and a founder of the Albuquerque Java Users Group. "I think there's going to be a race between Java and the Microsoft [CLR (Common Language Runtime)]." The CLR has been likened to a virtual machine supporting multiple languages. "I think Java's a great language, but I think people like to program differently, whether it's a functional language or a scripting language," he said. Hinojosa said has been running JRuby, Groovy, and Java on the JVM.Developer Alex Miller, tech lead at Java clustering technology vendor Terracotta, also agreed with the Da Vinci Machine effort."There are lots of people writing and running dynamic languages on the JVM these days, and there are certain things that are complicated or obscure with the use of [dynamic] languages," Miller said.A lot of dynamic languages differ from Java in that they leverage functions rather than objects, Miller said. Making them work on the JVM requires extra work, he said.Sun's JRuby project, meanwhile, is getting an upgrade. Version 1.1, due within a month, features a full compiler to greatly improve performance, Nutter said.
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Oracle Application Server 10g is an application platform suite that offers full support for J2EE, high-speed caching, rapid application development, enterprise portals, identity management, business intelligence, application and business integration
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(InfoWorld) - Middleware vendor BEA Systems Inc. will lay out its Java virtualization strategy later this week in China, an approach the vendor hopes will differentiate it from its competitors. At its BEAWorld user conference in Beijing from Wednesday to Thursday, the company will announce a product road map for software due out in 2007 and aimed at optimizing how enterprise Java applications run in virtualized environments. The move has been driven by customer demand, according to Guy Churchward, vice president of WebLogic products at BEA. Users are looking for ways to improve on the more general-purpose server virtualization capabilities already provided by vendors such as EMC Corp., XenSource Inc. and Microsoft Corp. "Customers were running into challenges around efficiency, optimization and performance," he said. Come the first quarter of next year, BEA plans to release WebLogic Server Virtual Edition (WLS-VE), a version of its Java application server that includes the vendor's new Liquid VM technology. Liquid VM is a BEA-specific Java Virtual Machine that enables Java applications to run directly on a hypervisor without requiring an operating system to be present. Initially, Liquid VM will work only with VMware's ESX Server hypervisor, but BEA plans to support other hypervisors in future including those from XenSource and Microsoft, Churchward said. Being able to run Java applications virtually without recourse to an operating system will enable users to substantially reduce the amount of computer power, enabling them to lower the hardware costs per application. Drawing a comparison betweenÂ VMware's current approach towards application virtualization and BEA's new take, Churchward gave an analogy about moving house. VMware's like a removal firm that comes in and packages up the entire contents of a person's house and transports it using massive trucks. "Once you open the boxes at your new place, you discover you don't need 60 percent of it," he said. BEA's approach resembles an individual taking the time to go through all their possessions prior to moving and throwing away what they don't need, therefore requiring smaller vans to transport their belongings. "BEA's approach directly targets Java infrastructure flexibility, which has not always been the platform's core strength," James Governor, analyst with RedMonk, wrote in an e-mail interview. He believes the vendor is the first among the major middleware vendors to go down this path, but points to smaller companies Cassatt Corp. and DataSynapse Inc., which are already pursuing what he terms "a virtualize/automate/WebLogic strategy." Due out in the summer of 2007 is Liquid Operations Control (LOC), BEA software to manage and control Java applications running on virtualized infrastructure. While users can combine LOC and Liquid VM to improve their WebLogic virtualization capabilities, BEA intends to widen LOC's scope so it can be applied to all enterprise Java applications, Churchward said, including support for the Apache Software Foundation's Tomcat technology. Moving to manage other Java application servers is a course BEA has already begun to pursue, Governor wrote. "It's the right strategy, which BEA could dramatically accelerate by purchasing Covalent," he added. Open-source company Covalent Technologies Inc. provides products and services for Tomcat and other Apache software including the Axis Web service framework and Geronimo application server. Â
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Latency obvious BEA Systems is adding go faster stripes to its Java application server, with two products designed for time-critical work environments.â¦
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Mike Wallner has thrown together some stats for the latest edition of the pecl/http package to test its response performance.   The results surprised me, because it clearly shows that the performance drop for starting the PHP engine and doing the neccessary negotiation to provide caching is not that bad.   There's a chart of the results as well as a full PDF with all of the stats the graph maps out. He includes the legend to make the graph easier to understand.
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Sun Java Workstations are designed to support simultaneous 32-bit and 64-bit computing with no compromises in performance, allowing users to maintain their existing x86 infrastructure
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Ever wanted to write a Java program that crawls the Web, reads HTML-pages, retrieves the links, and gets the new pages with more links? Well, this month Keld Hansen shows you how.