Burning cycles: the next month

Getting back from RailsConf meant getting thrown into loads and loads of preparation work for London. Oh my. Since I'm moving in 8 days, and almost all packing needs to be done during the weekend (and I haven't begun yet), I don't think I'll be able to be that communicative. Further, I will have no access to a computer or cell phone from Wednesday to Monday, so if I don't answer email, don't get upset. =) That incidentally means I won't blog either.

June 4th will be my first day at ThoughtWorks and I'm incredibly excited by it. Hopefully I'll be able to blog some about my experiences, but I guess the first few days will be focused on getting setup and finding an apartment (If you know any nice place close to Camden Town that's available by the beginning of June, please do tell), and doing all manner of things.

If I'm unlucky I'll need to go to DC the week after that, but we'll see. Hopefully I can wrangle out of it, since Stella (my girlfriend) will arrive in London that weekend.

After that week I'll have a week of quiet and solitude, and then it's time for TheServerSide Java Symposium in Barcelona. I will in fact be involved in no less than three events during this conference. First, a technical session on JRuby, secondly a BoF about deploying JRuby on Rails applications, and third a panel discussion called "2020: A Developer's Odyssey Panel", which is bound to be interesting. I have no idea whatsoever about what I'll say yet, but Martin Fowler will be one of the panelists which makes it a certainty of fun. I'm looking forward to TSSJS for a few more reasons; seeing Barcelona, since that is said to be a lovely city, getting to say hi to Dr. Heinz Kabutz, meet up with Jonas Bonér from Terracotta and continue discussing how to utilize Terracotta and JRuby together. I'm looking very much forward to the whole event, in fact. If you are there, don't hesitate to say hi!

That gender thing

One of the foci on both JavaOne and RailsConf was the so called "gender problem"; that the current balance between men and women in the technological field is bad and that something needs to be done about it. I'm very happy about this getting awareness, but as my colleague Lars Westergren writes here (http://slashdot.org/~LarsWestergren/journal/172323) it seems like total hypocrisy when looking at the so called entertainment provided at these two events. We need to do better than this.

The ThoughtWorks story

As you know, I will be starting at ThoughtWorks Studios in June, and I've been to JavaOne and now RailsConf, head on head. There is something I really need to tell you right now, and something that I've felt very strongly this week and last week. As I said, I'll start at TW in two weeks. My interview process was basically like any interview process; I met lots of TW people, but I couldn't relate to them that much, because being part of the interview process made it very hard. My mind was focused on other things.

Martin Fowler said in one of his bliki entries (here), that people matter most, and: "I decided then that I wouldn't work with unpleasant people, however capable they might be.". And he then goes on and says that this was one of many reasons he actually joined TW. TW has a "no assholes" policy. I didn't actually get the reality of this (I mean seriously, would you believe that such a thing actually could be?), until RailsConf when I met something like 30-40 TWkers. I've spent much time with Roy, Chad Wathington, Cyndi Mitchell, Julian Boot, Alexey Verkhovsky, Desi McAdam and so many other people that I can't remember their names. But what I do remember is that I felt right at home with them; these are people I can relate to, I can discuss with them, I can agree or disagree with them but regardless I will have a good time. It feels very much like a family, and I feel so much at home going to TW. I think that this is the best thing that could ever happen me. I have no illusions about this; I know for a fact that most of these people are smarter in every way than me. That is totally fine, that means I can learn great things from them.

So, what I wanted to say is just that I feel great about this. I'm so excited, and it's going to be a great time; not only for me and TW, but for the Ruby and JRuby community.

Well, I just wanted all the TWkers I've met these days to know that I feel so great about this. I've never felt as welcome, and I've never found a place with such great people. ThoughtWorks is a radically different company, and it's the people who does that. ThoughtWorks is extremely different, in a very good way.

I will need to blog about the last day of RailsConf, and more overall feelings and stuff like that, but I'll do that when I get back to Sweden.

Some RailsConf impressions

So, I've spent lots of time talking to people about numerous things. We have had some really nice conversations about everything related to Ruby, JRuby and ThoughtWorks and there is an incredible buzz going on here. Yesterday me, Roy, Tim (Bray), Cyndi, Martin Fowler, Charles, Tom and Nick sat down over dinner with DHH and talked about JRuby, which was also very interesting.

All in all, it's very exciting, and I hope it will just continue to be. I'm looking forward to the rest of the day, and tomorrow is going to be a new story.

ThoughtWorks, Mingle, RubyWorks and JRuby

So this is something that's been brewing for a while now, and it's all very exciting and was announced this morning at the keynote by Cyndi Mitchell. The relevant points are Mingle (which I've talked some about already), RubyWorks which is an umbrella for the things the enterprise needs to make Ruby viable. The first product out of RubyWorks is an installable package which gives you the deployment story basically for free. It's quite awesame and ThoughtWorks will offer 24/7 support for it from June.

For me personally, the most important part is that ThoughtWorks will also offer JRuby support 24/7 from June. That's right, 24/7 JRuby support. Wow. ThoughtWorks does believe in JRuby, they think it's something really important, and we want everything to get this.

Find out more at http://rubyworks.thoughtworks.com.

David about Rails 2.0

The DHH keynote this year was really good for a few reasons. First of all, David was very quick in saying that Rails 2.0 will not be anything radical, nothing really new, just better. Also, he actually announced that he had changed his mind about HTTP authentication, and performance (and this is kinda amazing of him to say... =). But all in all, it was a good talk about what's coming next; an evolution of the current things, but still the same Rails, just with more REST support and other goodies.

JRuby RC2

The day before RailsConf started, me, Charles and Tom sat in the lobby of the Courtyard, coding away, fixing problems and pushing out something like 5 versions of 1.0RC2. But the final RC2 is really, really good. You should download it, test it, and if you're at RailsConf, report any bugs you find and get a cool t-shirt! JRuby is really making a huge buzz at RailsConf right now, and it's sort of overwhelming! I'm very happy about it, of course, and there is still some nice things happening. Yesterday, we got a small bug in truncating files fixed, which means exclusive file locking works now.

1.0 is looking really, really good. It should be out by the end of May, and it's going to be a smash.

RSpec 1.0

Yesterday, the RSpec team pushed out version 1.0 which I'm personally very happy to hear. RSpec is a really important project and we are seriously considering including RSpec in the base JRuby distribution. Congratulations on the 1.0 release!

Congrats to Ward Cunningham

I met Ward Cunningham for the first time this Thursday, but I've always been very impressed by the things he has done. And yesterday he got a new job at AboutUs, a wiki company founded in 2005, as CTO. Congratulations!

A scattering of posts from RailsConf

So, I've been really bad about blogging from RailsConf. I have basically not done it at all, and I'm going to change that right now. There are loads of interesting stuff happening here, and I plan to talk about several different things. I won't do it in one post, though. Instead, I'll post lots of small posts with specific intent, and maybe one or two overall posts.

But I really must say, the feeling of being here, among 1600 developers in a vibrant and very cool community feels great. I've met lots of nice people (to many to remember, in fact), and I've had many great discussions.

JavaOne day 4: the final friday

So, the day started out quite late (since I was way tired after last night...). First session was a very accomplished, though slightly shallow, comparison between doing an application with Java EE 5, Ruby on Rails and Grails. I didn't really learn anything new in this presentation except that Java EE 5 is even slicker with NetBeans, and that Grails is maddeningly, sickeningly, seriously slow when doing simple stuff like creating scaffolds. I can't understand why this is so, since it isn't much do it. Basically just create a file with a few rows of customization.

After that I paired up with Jon to look at Mingle again. Oh boy, the ones who is coming to RailsConf will get a treat, that's for sure.

The Jython session by Otmar Humbel was really good, and had a great example. Basically the whole demo sessions were done in one single application which he started at the beginning and never stopped. He just hotswapped the Jython code dynamically. Very nice. I think the most interesting part of that talk was in the Q&A when someone asked why you should use Jython instead of Groovy or JRuby. I'm sad to say that I had to literally run at that point, so I didn't hear the answer... But still, if someone was there and heard, please tell me. For me personally, it's very impressive that Jython got started in 97, and actually is still alive (due to a recent revival of course, but even so. I'm glad Charles gave up one of his talks to let the Jython guys in). It was also interesting to see the differences in philosophy between JRuby and Jython in terms of Java integration and things like that. Very good stuff.
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The bytecode manipulation talk was interesting; it was nice to see what (and how) Terracotta does with ASM. The TopLink parts were nice, but really way to basic to be interesting. Charles stuff was good, of course. We know Charlie always does good things, don't we? =)

I had great fun at the Java Puzzlers this year. I'm happy about there not being many puzzles incorporating generics, because those are usually boring. The main problem that these guys always exploits, seems to be mostly in the boundary between Java Objects and primitives, and interactions between primitives. That's what you get when you try to create a language meant for both system development and application development. It just shows in all the seams. A good language should not have seams, unless they're necessary for the specific domain of that language.

Finally, Rob Harrops talk about exploiting JRuby to create DSL's was really good. It was great, and Rob is a very accomplished presenter. I had great fun. That said, I think that some of the stuff still went over the head of most Java developers in the audience.

And that seems to be the theme. Most things I enjoy, I think most other people didn't enjoy. Interesting, that.

So, now it's off for dinner at the Stinking Rose with the JRuby guys, Dion, Barry Burd and Jon.

JavaOne day 3

The third day of the conference started slow, due to my being dead tired from the day before. But I still managed to get to Charles and Tom's JRuby on Rails presentation. Obviously, this was a very good presentation and JRuby is very important. But you know all that, already, don't you?

I then went on to a session giving a technical overview over GlassFish v2. Now, this seemed interesting, but wasn't really so. There was some nice information about how clustering should be setup so you don't lose to much data if you have more than one instance on the same machine, but other than that... Nah.

After lunch, I went to the Advanced Groovy talk, expecting to see cool overridings of the MetaObjectProtocol, or how to implement your own AST shufflers. But no. What we instead got was some tidbits here and there, and explanation of how to add new methods to existing Java objects (and this is really gross, you have to wrap the usage of these methods in a block, and the methods are defined on a new class as static methods...) Anyway, on to the demos. I got a real feeling of Deja Vu, since I had seen this exact same demo last year... XMLRPC communication between two Groovy instances, then ActiveX usage of Excel, combining it with Swing. So, yeah. As someone else said "It's a really great Excel demo, but what has that got to do with Groovy?".

Next, I took it easy for a while, walked around and did some programming. Finally, it was time for Tor's and Martin's talk about Ruby Tooling in NetBeans. And boy, it was an outstanding talk if you're interested in compilers, type inference, the challenges of dynamic languages and other stuff like that. I loved it, but I think most of it went over the head of most people in the audience.

Then I was of to the Sun Certified Professionals party which is always nice. I met some cool people and Lars won good swag by being smart really fast. Good for him!

The After Dark bash was quite allright, but nothing extraordinary. And it got really tasteless when the showgirl in metal corselet came onto stage with a grinder, which she turned on herself, making sparks fly all over the place.

After that, we went to the JRubME talk, about JRuby on Symbian and Java ME. A great talk and a great project. In fact, it's really really cool, and if you're interested in ME, you should download the source and start hacking a way on it! The project needs contributors.

We went back to the After Dark bash finally, took some more beer, and then decided to move on. The quest was for Aquavit, and someone thought that the Starlight Room would be a good place for this, so we headed there just to find out they didn't have either Aquavit nor any good scotch. Oh well, it was fun anyway, and the view was fantastic. Characteristically, me, Tom and Charles got into a real interesting discussion about the subjectivity of self presentation, and representation of knowledge in terms of probabilities and deltas from ideal knowledge, and how this applies to onthologies. Neat stuff. But maybe the dance floor wasn't the best place to have this loud discussion...

After that we settled down and decided it would be fun to have a JRuby summit in Minnesota! So, we'll see if that is possible... Then I crawled home to my hotel. My feet are killing me today, but there are some really interesting presentations, so I've gotta go.

JavaOne day 2

So, my day didn't start out with the Oracle general session, which I'm quite happy with in retrospect. Instead the first talk I saw was "Quick and Easy Profiling with Integrated Tools", about NetBeans profiling support. Very useful stuff, actually, and 6.0 can do some amazing things.

After that, it was time for a packed Josh Bloch's Effect Java Reloaded, except it wasn't really reloaded that much yet. I was a little bit disappointed, since most of the stuff was the same as last year. Some parts about the Builder pattern, much info about do's and don'ts with generics (much of it having to do with type parameters and wildcards). The TypeRef pattern was interesting, but not something I will find very much use of, I think.

After lunch a went to a presentation which I really thought would give me something. "Ruby on Rails Meets the World of Enterprise Applications". Now, I really hoped this would include some information on the Enterprise problem with regard to Rails. I was very disappointed. The talk was basically about a 3-week application written in Rails that connected to SAP. So the enterprise in question was there because of SAP. That said, the presenter was good, it was just not the subject I had wished for. And by the way, what does this presentation do on JavaOne?

After that, I spent some time looking at Mingle issues with Jon. I decided to go to the upper Haights' area to shop, and then get back to my hotel room for some programming. As it turned out, I really didn't go to any more sessions yesterday. After programming, I went to a Swedish Java User Group meeting here (and what a turnout! it seems like there's over 200 Swedes at JavaOne this year.)

The plan was to get back to the BOF's after that point; there was especially one I really didn't want to miss (the Dynamic Languages BOF with Frank Cohen). But, I happened to get invited to the Google party, so I spent the rest of the evening there, meeting lots of interesting people. It was great fun.

And now I'm about to go in and see Charles and Tom do the JRuby on Rails presentation. More information later.

The RedMonk unconference at CommunityOne

So, as you know, RedMonk arranged an unconference at JavaOne/CommunityOne this year. I couldn't attend all sessions, but among the ones done were one about dynamic languages, and we got some really good discussions going. We haven't really finished those discussions yet, though, and it seems we will take it onto a mailing list, but it was a very good environment to start out.

I really hope RedMonk will be able to do this next year too. More info about it can be found here: http://redmonk.com/wiki/index.php/RedMonkUnconference.

JavaOne: The rest of day 1

I am sitting in the alumni lounge, waiting for the sessions of day 2 to begin. I was thinking about attending the Oracle General Session, but decided to take it easy for a while instead.

So, where were I yesterday? Well, the Technical General Session was really interesting. As I mentioned yesterday, Charles and Tor did a great demonstration that was very well received. We also got some more on the technical side of JavaFX. Very nice.

After that, I attended Web Algorithms. It was a very accomplished presentation, detailing a few important things you can use to make life in computing easier, beginning with swap-XOR and credit card validation, going through public key cryptography and looking at Google MapReduce. It was a good presentation, but nothing new in it for me though, which was sort of sad.

The next presentation I went to was about the next generation of Web support in Java. The Servlet 3.0 specification and so on. The presentation was quite vague and didn't say much new things, really. Ok, so next generation servlets will use annotations, and there will be support for Rest style things and better security and more non-idiotic defaults? Not surprising.

After that presentation I was feeling really tired, so I went back to my hotel and tried to rest some. That didn't go so well so I finished writing chapter 11 instead. Then it was back to Moscone center to see a BOF on web development in Java EE compared to Ruby on Rails, with tool support. This talk was quite disappointing; it wasn't that well executed, and it was very un-nuanced in detailing the good and bad parts of Ruby on Rails. It seems that when people do these comparisons they just talk about how easy it is to do CRUD-style applications, but seems to forget that Ruby on Rails can do harder things (http://studios.thoughtworks.com/) and that the benefits from the Ruby language in development productivity scales. If you compare doing a small-sized web app in Java and Rails to each other, you will get some kind of percentage. But if you do a comparison between a medium-sized app in Java and Rails, that percentage will be greater, since the Ruby languages scales development time in a totally different way from Java. Not to mention maintainability after the fact.

Last I went to Neal Gafters BOF on Closures in Java. I really like the way Neal does presentations, but we couldn't really get into the meat of stuff, since half the people on the BOF didn't know closures from their elbows. So most of the presentation was spent rehashing what they are and why they're needed in Java.

After that, I was beat. And now it's a new day, started with breakfast meeting with Roy Singham. Very interesting and entertaining. I'm more and more convinced that I'm going to love working for ThoughtWorks.

JRuby on the technical general session

Charles O Nutter and Tor Norbye just got on stage here, and showed of deploying Mephisto as a WAR-file, and then changing it to add text-to-speech functionality, with a Java library that generates an audio file. The total code they wrote on stage was about 10 lines of Ruby... The power of Java and Ruby together: it's beautiful.

I already knew what they would do, having helped fix many of the issues getting in the way for Mephisto, but it's still incredibly cool. Charles and Tor got several impromptu applauds from the audience too, so I'm pretty sure people think it's neat.

Right now, I'm starting to get curious why people continue to use the term "scripting language". It doesn't seem to fit either Ruby nor Groovy anymore. Oh well. Nitpicking.

Next up is Arun Gupta. He's talking about jMaki and Phobos, both very nice usages of JavaScript and other languages.

JavaOne: Keynote and Groovy session

I'm sitting in the general session hall, waiting for the first technical general session to begin. Yesterday was CommunityOne, where we had some interesting discussion about dynamic languages within the context of the RedMonk Unconference. Aside from that, the best parts of the day way announcing that Mingle runs on JRuby, and meeting up with all my soon-to-be fellow ThoughtWorkers. They're a great bunch of people, and we had good fun.

Today was the opening general session, where Rich Green announced some very interesting developments. Among these are the fact that the open sourcing of Java is now complete, that Sun is coopering quite heavily with UN to provide resources for education to areas of the world where this have long been a huge problem. But the most important announcements were about something called JavaFX. I can't really say I understand it completely yet, but it seems to be an effort to tackle Microsoft Silverlight, and also fix several deficiencies in Swing by providing JavaFX Script (which looks very much like F3. I'm not sure if it actually is F3 or something else.). This obviously begs the question why Sun finds it prudent to invent a new language, instead of using one of the many great efforts existing in the dynamic language communities for this problem. For example, both Groovy, Jython and JRuby have different versions of SwingBuilders, which allow you to rapidly create Swing interfaces with a specialized DSL for this.

Except for that, the general session and keynote was more or less like usual. Very flash, very markety, but still more technical than I imagine other conferences are. And it was fun to see Rich Green being compared to Steve Jobs...

The first technical session I went to was called "Cool Things You Can Do with the Groovy Dynamic Language", and was presented by Guillaume Laforge and Dierk König. It was a quite good session, but I can't get away from my general opinions about the Groovy language. So, before I say something about the presentation, I need to describe my feelings for Groovy. Remember, these are my personal opinions, and some are definitely based on feeling without any specific rationalization.

I would really like to like Groovy, but I can't. I've really tried, but I can't find the Groovy language to my liking. And believe me, for some circumstances, Groovy should be able to fill the gap between Ruby and Java better than JRuby, at least in some cases. The Java integration in JRuby is quite hard, dispatch and overloading makes calling Java code complicated (from an implementation point, not for the user). All of this would be much simpler with the Groovy approach. But no, I still can't get along with Groovy. The main reason, I believe, is the feeling I get from all code that the language Groovy have grown piecemal, adding stuff that's neat wherever. I'm not sure this is the actual way Groovy was designed, but it feels like a modern version of Perl. The syntax doesn't mesh, and there are numerous (small, but nonetheless there) inconsistencies in how things are handled; many of the things that the language provide for you is things that really shouldn't be part of the language, but part of a library instead.

So, from this point of view, the presentation walked through several new features of Groovy, and lots of things you can do with it. They talked a bit about the new support for annotations and the plans for generics. Some of it was quite cool; I like the builders (but I prefer Markaby to the XMLBuilder), and some of the features are quite handy. But looking back at my earlier feelings I still see a design process more focused on finding problems with Java, and duct taping them with Groovy. (Like this: in Groovy, all exceptions get handled automatically, making it look as if all exceptions are unchecked.) I have no problem with many of these features, but I don't think it's a good way to create a general purpose language.

I'll be back later with more info on the rest of the days sessions.

Mingle on JRuby

Here's the deal: ThoughtWorks first product offering is called Mingle. The kicker is, it will be deployed on JRuby. I have been involved with this for a while, getting everything in good working order, and I'm sure TW won't regret this decision. JRuby is important in their strategy, and Mingle, as the first commercial JRuby application is a huge deal.

You should go and read more about this exciting news at http://studios.thoughtworks.com/2007/5/7/mingle-to-run-on-jruby.

Announcing mongrel_jcluster

As I mentioned in my last post, that server/client thing wasn't the only thing I worked on during the flight. I also did a very useful hack of mongrel_cluster, and turned it into mongrel_jcluster. It's not very large changes, actually... Almost everything is the same, except that this mongrel plugin only runs in JRuby, and will start several mongrels in the same JVM.

jruby -S gem install mongrel_jcluster
cd your_rails_app
jruby -S mongrel_rails jcluster::configure -p 4000 -N 3 -e production -R 20202 -K thesecretkey
jruby -S mongrel_rails jcluster::start

The only difference in the configuration parameters are -R and -K which is the JRuby server port and key respectively. Now, after executing these commands, it will take some time for the mongrels to get online, so be patient (or monitor the progress in the log-files generated).

I need to warn you that this is still quite experimental and not guaranteed to work in any way. =) But it does for me.

Another thing, if you start Mongrel in production mode, the defualt Rails front-page will give you an error if you try to get at the properties. This is the expected behavior in production mode, though, and nothing wrong with JRuby.

JRuby server

I spent some time on the flight to SF hacking on an idea I've had for a while. The result was checked in yesterday in JRuby trunk, and the important files are bin/jrubysrv and bin/jrubycli. This is still quite experimental, and only guaranteed to work in *NIX environments right now.

So, what is it? Well, if you don't want the overhead of running one JVM for each JRuby process, these two commands allow you to start a JVM that listens on a specific localhost port, and then you can send JRuby commands to that port. You need a key as password, otherwise the process will fail. Right now, this isn't as high security as it should be, since the key is passed as a command line parameter. This is still not that big of a problem, since the most common scenario is to start a bunch of things, and then not start anything more. Let me illustrate what you can do with a very simple example.

Say that you have a Rails application, and Mongrel for JRuby installed. Go the the base directory of your Rails app and do this:

jrubysrv -p 20202 -k secretkey &
jrubycli -p 20202 -k secretkey -S mongrel_rails -p 4000
jrubycli -p 20202 -k secretkey -S mongrel_rails -p 4001
jrubycli -p 20202 -k secretkey -S mongrel_rails -p 4002
jrubycli -p 20202 -k secretkey -n

Now, if you are patient, in a while there will be three Mongrels running, listening on ports 4000, 4001 and 4002. And they will run inside the same JVM, but in different JRuby runtimes. Quite neat, and very simple. You may wonder about the last command, with the -n flag. That flag tells the JRuby server running at port 20202 to not start any more JRuby processes. In this way, you can start what you need, and then close it down. Due to problems with thread scheduling and safety, I haven't implemented a way to kill a single runtime. What you instead need to do is use jrubycli with the -t flag, which will kill the whole JRuby server.

Stay tuned for my next post, on what I've actually used this functionality to create. (If you have some slight amount of imagination, you should be able to guess from this blog post...)

But now, of to the races. Or CommunityOne in this case. See you there.

San Francisco and Portland

Tomorrow morning I'll leave Stockholm for San Francisco. I'll be arriving 5:ish PM at SFO and will stay at the Handlery Union Square Hotel. I will not present at either JavaOne or RailsConf, though, so I will have a fair amount of time for fun stuff. I will attend the RedMonk unconference at CommunityOne, participate in the DynLang event, and then attend regular JavaOne. If you see me (I'll be wearing my black hat...), please say hi!

Next Saturday me and my coworkers will move out of SF and take a car to Portland, where we plan to arrive on the following Tuesday or Wednesday, just in time for RailsConf. We leave from Portland early Monday after the conference.

Hope to see many of you there! It will be exciting, that's for sure. I will also try to report as much as possible from all events.