OSCON Conference Is Awesome

Even though I haven’t attended an OSCON conference yet, but I already like it.  It is awesome because it covers a wide range of topics about open source software, internet and architecture.  Another great thing is the presentation slides are available online.  That’s is great for folks that couldn’t attend.  Unlike other conferences.

Here is the link to presentations from the OSCON July 2008 in Portland, Oregon.

I haven’t gone through all the presentation slides, but the one I really enjoyed reading is the session on Top 10 Scalability Mistakes.

Enjoy.

Scalability Mistakes

Scalability is one of the important metrics for measuring the soundness of a system’s architecture.  Many architects stumble a couple of times before getting it right.  What’s important to try one’s best not to make the same mistakes that other architects made by learning best practices from others.

Here is a great presentation at recent O’Reilly OSCON conference – Top 10 Scalability Mistakes.

Awaken Your Entrepreneurial Spirit

Most of us have some amount of entrepreneurial blood in our body. It is good to awake this spirit once in a while to spice up our work life and our creativity.

Last night I attended a meeting hosted by The Silicon Valley NewTech Meetup group and it was a blast (the event is free by the way). I came early and was able to grab a seat. The room was packed by 7pm and those came in late had to stand along the walls. The first hour of the meeting was for young Web 2.0 startups to demo their idea and the fruits of their labor and the second hour was for announcements and mingling.

Four companies did the demo of their product/website. The business ideas from these four companies were very different. You can checked them out at the website above.

It was amazing to see the entrepreneurial spirit flying around the room during the mingling hour. Peoples were exchanging business cards, business ideas, and questions and answers. There were about 300 to 400 people, so it was pretty loud. You basically had to stand pretty close to the person you are talking to in order to hear them.

I met one musician, who has an interesting idea, and he is looking for folks to help him out on the technical side as well as on the marketing side.

I was really glad I attended the meeting last night and planning to go to next month’s meeting. I felt more energized after hanging around with the attendees and may be something good will happen. Let’s hope

Ten General Points About REST

RESTful web services are becoming more and more popular as more and more developers understand the resource model techniques. Behind RESTful web services is the REST architecture style, which is not as well known or understood. This post is aimed to demystify some of the principles behind the REST architecture style.

Here is a list of 10 things about REST.

• REST is a obscure acronym. Whether you like it or not, it stands for Representational State Transfer
• REST is an architecture style for distributed hypermedia system that emphasizes minimizing latency and maximizing scalability
• REST is Roy Fielding’s doctoral dissertation in 2000
• REST architecture style has many elements and among them are:
  1. Client-server
  2. Stateless communication
  3. Caching
  4. Uniform interface
  5. Layered system
• The key information abstraction in REST is a resource, which is identified by a resource identifier
• The information being transferred between client and server is the representation of a resource
• Comparing REST to SOAP is like comparing apples to oranges. It is more appropriate to compare REST to SOA
• REST is about exposing your application as a big state machine through standard HTTP network protocol
• REST architecture style borrows many proven software design techniques from other fields like client server, distributed system and network protocol.
• REST is simpler and more beautiful

The next time someones asks you what REST is, hopefully the above 10 items can help guiding you in providing an intelligent and clear answer. If there is a desire to gain deeper understanding and more details about REST, a great resource would be Roy Fielding’s dissertation.

Performance Tuning Lessions

Depends on how you look at it, performance tuning can be a stressful task or a really fun and challenging adventure.  Just like anything else, to be good at it you have to at least gone through the performance tuning process once, but preferably twice.

One of the things that can greatly help you is to learn some commonly performance tuning techniques or even better yet is to learn from someone who just finished doing performance tuning.  Well luck has it, a recent article at the Architect Zone at DZone site talks about what Jeroen Borgers had gone through and he was generous to share with us his performance tuning adventure.

The takeaways for after reading this article are:

• When some operation is expensive, do it less often and if that is not possible, do it in batch or asynchronous.
• For a web application that involves a database, ensure appropriate indexes are created and tailored to the data access pattern based on business use cases.

Have fun performance tuning and please share your performance tuning techniques.

Presenting At 360|Flex Conference in San Jose 8/18-8/20

I am pretty excited about the opportunity to present at the upcoming 360|Flex conference in San Jose from August 18 to 20. My coworker and I will give a talk about our experiences and what we had learned from developing an internal SOA application at Yahoo!. This application uses Flex and a host of Java technologies on the server side. Come and check us out in August in San Jose.

Understanding Spring Framework Hierarchical Context

Not many people are familiar with the support that Spring framework has for hierarchical context. The question is why do we need such feature. This feature is useful in the scenario where your product has multiple web applications and all of them depend on a common framework or library. Instead of deploy that framework or library in each web application, you can deploy it in the Tomcat top level class loader, which affectively makes the framework or library available to all web applications deployed in that Tomcat server.

This is when hierarchical context feature comes to the rescue. A very good write up about this feature is at this blog.

JavaOne Week – CommunityOne Summary

JavaOne week was kicked off with CommunityOne event on Monday 5/5.  If you didn’t attend, you missed a free event that was packed with interesting session.

It seems like Sun is open up in a big way in terms of creating various open sources projects, supporting various popular scripting languages, supporting startups, and embracing open source in a big way.  I think that is great, but I wonder how they will make money from it.

One of the tracks at CommunityOne is NetBeans.  I must say NetBeans has improved a lot and I am impressed with recent features that were added.  I got my hands dirty with NetBean 6.1 and surprised its speed and rich feature set like UML, scripting languages support like Ruby and Rails, PHP and Python (in the near future).   Highly recommend that you check out the latest feature of NetBeans.  The folks at Sun created a layer called GSF services to allow NetBean to support future languages easily.  I saw a demo of developing PHP in NetBeans and it was great.  All the usual convenient features like code completion, debugging and deployment are there in NetBeans.  This should make a lot of PHP developers happy.

Who would think that Sun is working on a soon to be an open source game server.  I attended a presentation about project Darkstart – game server and learned the interesting challenges that they are solving for their massive and multiple online game server.  They combine a lot of techniques from various disciplines like enterprise development, distributed system to solve the scaling and failover issues.  The main goal is to allow developer to write online games that can scale easily, but without having write code to deal with scalability.

Another interesting session that I attended was about another Sun’s open source project call SocialSite, which basically is an implementation of the OpenSocial specification and more.   I think this is great.  In the near future it will be easy to integrate the social networking features into a Java web-based application.  I am intending to keep an eye on this project and possibly would like to contribute.

Stay tune for my report on JavaOne.

10 Tips For Success Career

I found an old email in my mail box dated back in 1999, but the content is still pretty applicable. The content of the email contains 10 tips for a successful career. Since I haven’t really taken all those tips seriously over the years, it is no surprise that my career is not as successful as it can be Looking back though, I can see that I unconsciously practiced some of those tips and I can totally say the pay off is good and led to unexpected pleasant surprises. So for the next 5 years, I am planning to take these tips seriously and constantly going back to them for reminders.

Here are the tips:

1. Don’t wait for permissions
2. Don’t burn bridges
3. Respect others
4. Be a team player
5. Be Flexible
6. Have confidence in your decision
7. Learn technologies
8. Find a champion
9. Be both patient and tenacious
10. Thinks two steps ahead

There is one tip that I would like to add:

11. Have a health disregard for the impossible

Love to hear your career tips.

Looking for job or looking to hire

If you are looking for a job, you need to know what employers are looking for. If you are looking to hire, you want to hire the right candidate. What sits in between these two sides of the table is a list of questions. An article from http://www.artima.com lists out six hiring points that it will be worth to check it out.

Here is the six hiring points:

1. Technical knowledge
2. Critical thinking
3. Problem solving
4. Learning ability
5. Adaptability
6. Are you toxic