Goodbye Google Reader

Yesterday, I was browsing my feeds in Google Reader and came upon an article relaying the news that Google Reader will be retired on July 1st.  According to the post on Google's official blog, the service was launched in 2005.  I started using it shortly after launch and have visited the site most days since, so I was pretty disappointed to hear the news.  I knew it was a bad sign when the Reader link disappeared from the prominent section of the Google app bar and moved more than half way down the "More" menu, but I hoped that Google would at least keep it alive as long as it made them more money than it cost to operate.  Perhaps that's no longer true, but I have my doubts.  After a certain point, the service ceased to receive much in the way of UI or feature updates and it's hard to believe it's been a resource hog (the same can't be said of Google Wave).  Although I doubt it will make a difference, I signed a petition on change.org, asking that the service be kept alive.

Rather than waiting around and hoping for its revival, I thought it would be worth exploring alternatives to Reader.  A quick Google search led me to a CNET article discussing five other options and Digg announced today that they'll be building one as well.  My plan is to try out Feedly in Chrome and on my phone and see what I think.  So far, so good, but I'll let you know if my opinion changes.

GPars For Beginners Presentation

I'll be giving a presentation titled GPars For Beginners to the Boston Grails Users' Group on Wednesday, May 25 at 7 P.M.  Here's my description of the talk:

The GPars (Groovy Parallel Systems) project provides multiple abstractions for concurrent, parallel programming in Groovy and Java. Rather than dealing directly with threads, synchronization, and locks, or even the java.util.concurrent classes added in Java 5, the project allows you to think in terms of actors, data flows, or composable asynchronous functions (to name a few).
In this talk, I'm planning to cover the basics of GPars, including what it's like to learn to use it. Although I've done a fair amount of concurrent programming, I've just started using GPars. As such, this talk should be suitable for Groovy beginners.

If you're a fan of Groovy and will be in the Boston-area, I hope you'll attend.  If you can't, I'll be posting a link to the slides here when they're ready.

In the presentation, I'll be referring to several resources I found helpful.  Here are links to each of them:

• Groovy in Action 2nd Edition (aka ReGinA) Chapter 17 - http://manning.com/koenig2/
• GPars User Guide - http://gpars.org/guide/
• GPars User Mailing List - http://xircles.codehaus.org/lists/user@gpars.codehaus.org
• Dierk König's presentation (Concurrent programming for you and me) - http://skillsmatter.com/podcast/groovy-grails/concurrent-programming-for-you-and-me
• Alex Miller's DevWorks article - http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-gpars/index.html
• Václav Pech's blog - http://www.jroller.com/vaclav/

(Sorry if this shows up as an entirely new post.  Blogger seems once again to be acting funky.)

Update: Here are the slides from my talk.  Sadly, I forgot to record the audio to go along with it.

GPars For Beginners

View more presentations from Matt Passell

Is Xmarks Dying or Not?

Early this year, I made the switch from Google Bookmarks to Xmarks. I've been really happy with Xmarks and have used it to sync the bookmarks and open tabs in Firefox, Chrome, and IE on Windows and Firefox, Chrome, and Safari on Mac OS. They had plans for an Android client which I would have installed the moment it was released. Unfortunately, the company announced on September 27th that they'd be discontinuing the service around the end of this year. You should have seen how much the news deflated me. I'd finally found a way to keep all of my browsers in sync and now the service would be going away! Well, I found out some promising news today. The outpouring of support and the number of disappointed users expressing their willingness to pay for the service has made the company reconsider. If you're an existing customer or even someone who just found out about the service and would be willing to pay at least $10 per year for it, please go and sign the pledge at PledgeBank! I really hope it reaches their 100,000 signature threshold.

Update: Xmarks was acquired by LastPass, a company that provides a password management service. You can continue to use each service for free, pay $12/year for each of the premium services separately, or do what I did and sign up for the combination for $20/year.  What a nice outcome! :)

Finally Bit the Bullet – I'm on Twitter

So, after saying a while ago that I didn't understand Twitter, I've now signed up for an account (softwaregrove).  Why the change of heart?  I thought I'd give it a try to see if it helped me understand the phenomenon.  Truthfully, the thing that finally convinced me is a bit embarrassing – the lure of free (as in beer) software.  See my tweets (I can't believe I just typed that!) to learn more.

Terracotta Acquires Ehcache

Exciting news!  This morning I received a note from Greg Luck via the Ehcache Open Discussion mailing list announcing that the Ehcache project was joining forces with Terracotta and that Greg would be joining the team at Terracotta, Inc.  Since there's been a Terracotta Integration Module for Ehcache for a while, I don't foresee any instant improvements with regard to integration between the two technologies, but I was quite excited to see the following in Greg's blog post announcing the news:

I am full-time on Ehcache. I have not had the time I would have liked to devote to Ehcache (I have been doing a miserly 10-15 hours per week for the past 6 years) but now I do. Look out!

Given what he's done so far with limited time, I'm looking forward to seeing what Greg can do when Ehcache becomes his full-time job!

For more information, see Terracotta's announcement, CTO of Terracotta Ari Zilka's blog post, or Alex Miller's blog post.

p.s. I submitted a patch that Greg ended up incorporating into Ehcache 1.6, so I feel a tiny bit of ownership toward the project – similar to the way I feel toward Tomcat.

Update: Terracotta and Ehcache are holding a webcast on August 20th at 4PM ET to further discuss the acquisition.  Also, I just submitted my second patch to Ehcache. :)