Caucho® Newsletter – April 2011

April 2011 News

Resin 4.0.17 Release

Resin 4.0.17, released on April 15th, includes putting final pieces together and finishes up with dynamic cloud support. You can now add or remove servers dynamically in the cluster as needed. Resin will automatically update the cluster to support newly added servers or reconfigure resources as you remove servers.

Resin Dynamic Cloud Support for new servers includes:

Automatic load balancing
Immediate updates of application .war files
Works with JMS Queue sender/receivers
Integrates with JMX management tools
Instantaneous sharing of clustered caching data

We have passed all the TCKs and are at the final steps towards Web Profile certification. And now with JMS, dynamic cloud support, configurable JMX meters, and improved CLI (support for log-level, profile, heap-dump and thread-dump), you can monitor and manage your applications performance from an in-house to IaaS environment with Resin 4.

Download Resin 4.0.17

CDISource, an open source project by Rick Hightower, Andy Gibson and Rob Williams

CDISource is an organization created to promote the use of CDI (Context and Dependency Injection) in Java EE 6 and beyond. Their mission is simple: expand the use of Java Context and Dependency Injection (CDI) framework to enhance Java EE development and provide developers with a lightweight and agile means of testing without complexities.

One of their first achievements was creating a faÃ§ade over Resin CanDI, JBoss Weld, and Apache OpenWebBeans using a similar interface. Which was followed by a unit-testing framework on top of the stand-alone faÃ§ade. Their most recent success this month involved creating a bi-directional CDI to Spring Bridge. This was a possible thanks to the contribution of Caucho’s engineering team and Mark Stuberg from OpenWebBeans. If you are not familiar with or new to CDI, the learning curve may be shortened thanks to the expert team behind CDISource; they included an open source library, Maven archetypes, and tutorials to speed up the process.

Go to the CDISource project webpage
Read “Spring meet CDI, CDI meet Spring” by Rick Hightower
Read press release on Bi-directional CDI to Spring Bridge

Java EE 6 Web Profile: The Profile Story by Reza Rahman featured in Java Tech Magazine

It used to be enough to have a fast and high performance Servlet engine. Then the Java EE collection of APIs grew over time to become a huge and heavy-weight set of APIs. Getting away from the monolithic APIs is what the Java EE 6 Web Profile is geared towards. It caters to the next-generation agile and lightweight Java EE application server platform to provides straightforward web application development. In this article by Reza Rahman, you’ll get his perspective on why it’s better to implement the Java EE 6 Web Profile over the Full Profile. You’ll also see why having the Web profile and implementing needed APIs improves performance as compared to other application server choices.

Download a Free copy of The Profile Story from Java Tech Magazine

Caucho® announces new engineering positions

We are actively looking for Java Protocol and Network Software Developers. Our engineering office is based in San Francisco next to the Montgomery BART station. If you are located in the Bay Area we can be flexible with telecommuting.

This position includes core application server development and involves active contributions to our technology and roadmap direction. As part of our team, you will be working with the latest Java web specifications such as WebSocket, Hessian and HMTP/XMPP, as well as pushing new Internet Network protocols. You will have the opportunity to influence the next generation of Java web specifications from the ground up as well as explore and test your software engineering limits.

To join our engineering team, please send your resume and sample code to hiring@caucho.com.

Check out the full job description

New Features

JSON for WebSockets

How should applications use WebSockets? This is a question that’s probably came up at least once when you read or heard about WebSockets. Hessian may be the preferred choice for some and JSON for others. Although JSON is an obvious payload format, sending plain JSON is insufficient since it doesn’t have enough structure beyond non-demo applications. Based on our experience with messaging payload and architecture, our engineering team has come up with a rough draft for JSMP (JSON Message Protocol) as a suggested JSON pattern for WebSockets.

Caucho’s JSMP draft focuses on:

Typed messages – applications to object-oriented messages for clean dispatch
Unidirectional messages and RPC queries – both styles needed with protocol effort and definition for queries
Addressing – decompose larger applications into smaller services

Check out the JSMP (JSON Message Protocol) draft

Improved Resin Command Line Interface (CLI)

Adding new features and continued improvement of current capabilities is rooted deep in our development culture. With the latest release, version 4.0.17, we improved the Resin CLI to focus on debugging and profiling. The new commands will allow you to produce Thread Snapshots, Memory Dumps and Code Profiling as well as increase logging levels that now can be changed at runtime. This improved version of Resin Eclipse plug-in simplifies configuration and adds support for remote deployment and debugging.

Get the updated Resin Eclipse plug-in

Caucho® Tech Talk

Resin HealthCheck System Enhancements

Shifting our focus to quality and stability, we’ve updated the HealthCheck system available in Resin version 4.0.16 and later. The new configuration file dedicated to health checks, actions and meters can be found in “health.xml.” While external application monitoring is important to your overall system architectures, adding Resin’s health monitoring system to your application allows for more control and health management. The real power of Resin’s health monitoring system is the ability to easily trigger restarts and thread dumps that would otherwise require custom external hooks.

In this blog entry by Caucho® engineer, Paul Cowan, you will see examples of how to implement health.xml to monitor CPU usage, tenured/heap memory pool, heap dumps, and much more. Included in the examples are also various ways of gaining greater control of your systems health using Resin’s HealthCheck System.

Upcoming Events

Java User Groups: NoVa JUG, Triangle JUG, Richmond JUG

Author of “EJB 3 in Action” and contributor to EJB 3.1 Lite and Java EE 6 Web Profile, Reza Rahman, will attend and present at three JUGs this June:

NoVa JUG – Northern Virginia area
Triangle JUG – mid-North Carolina area
Richmond JUG – Richmond, Virginia area

Java Users Group is a non-profit, vendor independent/agnostic organization, where professionals meet on a monthly basis for Java-related education and sharing of related technologies. This is a great place for software developers to network, learn current best practices, hear what hosted speakers have to say about Java trends and software development practices with technical presentations.

Go to the NoVa JUG website
Go to the Triangle JUG website
Go to the Richmond JUG website

Caucho® Engineer, Dominik Dorn, presented talks on JSF and SEO at CONFESS

CONFESS is an annual Conference For Enterprise Software Solutions, formerly known as JSFdays, was held in Vienna/Austria. Grown from JSF focused to now Java EE technologies, this year’s tracks were on: Web, Enterprise and Core technologies and solutions.

Dominik Dorn is the CTO of StudyGuru GmbH, a collaborative e-learning environment organization, and Software Engineer at Caucho® Technology focusing on Quercus. He’s the president of the Java Student User Group in Austria and an active contributor to several open source projects including PrettyFaces. This month, Dorn presented on PrettyFaces, his own new library “The JSF Resource Relocator,” along with a demonstration of PrettyFaces using Resin 4.0.

Caucho® Forum

Resin Twitter page

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