Merger Madness & One Sample App To Rule Them All

VMware ---	SpringSource ---	/---G2One
		\---CloudFoundry
Terracotta ---	Ehcache
Oracle ---	Sun

With all the mergers and acquisitions happening in the Java world, I thought I'd suggest a sample app someone could build to bring them all together.

Here it is: a Grails app using an Oracle DB with distributed caching provided by Terracotta and Ehcache, all running in a VMware cloud, with deployment and management handled by CloudFoundry.  I think that covers all the bases.  I have no idea what it will do yet, but let me know if I've missed anything. :)

Note: I actually have a lot of respect for all the technologies and people involved, I'm just feeling a bit overwhelmed with all of the recent consolidation!

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. :)

JPC: x86 Emulator in Java

Last night, I was reading Caches and Maps in Terracotta by Alex Miller when I came upon his link to the JPC (a.k.a. JavaPC) Project.  It sounded familiar and I decided to follow the link.  It turns out to be an open source project implementing an impressively functional and performant x86 emulator in Java.  I had fun last night launching an MS-DOS environment within an applet (what a concept!) and playing Donkey Kong for the first time in ages.  According to the site, the emulated layer runs at about 20% of your processor's speed - not bad for a emulator written in pure Java.

Note: After my first visit to the site, it seemed to be having problems.  Just in case it had to do with visitor load, I changed the link above to point to the copy in Coral Cache.  The site is now totally back up and behaving normally.  If Coral has any problems or is slow, you can safely go to the site directly.

Update: I got an email from one of the JPC team members saying that they'll be at JavaOne this year with some new stuff.  I wish I could be there to see it.  I guess I'll have to wait for it to show up on their site.

A Teeny Tiny Bit of Fame

When I noticed I was credited for a fix on the changelog page for Tomcat 5.5.27 (search for "Passell" on the page if you don't believe me!), it made me feel a bit giddy. Does that make me a total dork? Well, I've been using Tomcat since it emerged out of the Apache JServ project many years back, so it makes me proud to think that I've helped make it better, even if just a little bit.

 

Update: my fix was incorporated into Tomcat 6.0.20 as well.