Boston Grails Users' Group!

Last night, I watched an interview with Dave Klein done by Scott Davis of ThirstyHead at JavaOne 2009, in which they discussed Dave's upcoming book, Grails: A Quick-Start Guide. At the end of the interview, Dave mentioned that one of his kids had put together a site called g2groups.net, which helps people find and start Groovy/Grails user groups. I visited the site and was very excited to see that Boston has a newly formed group and that their first meeting is on Thursday! I have a conflict, but this is important enough that I plan to drop my original commitment to attend. See you there!

FogBugzReporter: Introduction

This is the first post in what I plan to be a series about a small application named FogBugzReporter that I began writing in October of 2007.  I'd recently started using the on demand edition of FogBugz from Fog Creek Software to track my time spent consulting and was disappointed to discover that it had no direct way for me to generate time reports.  Fortunately, I discovered that along with the web UI, FogBugz also had a pseudo-REST API for interacting with the application (I say "pseudo-REST" because almost all operations can be performed with HTTP GETs, including ones that change state on the server).  I read the API docs, quickly wrote a simple Swing application in Java, and made it available to the rest of the FogBugz community.  Soon after, I started experimenting with Groovy and realized that porting the app would be a nice way to get some experience with the language, including SwingBuilder and the great APIs for processing XML.  I did that and eventually moved the code from a private Subversion repository to one on Google Code under an Apache license.  Until a few days ago, it sat for the most part unchanged.  In the meantime, my Groovy skills have improved a bit (I'm still no expert), the language has evolved, and the technologies around it have grown.  In this series, I plan to gradually bring the application up-to-date and polish up the code.  I'll update this posting with links to the other posts in the series as I write them.

Posts:

• NetBeans + Ivy = IvyBeans

Planned Posts:

• FogBugzReporter and Griffon
• Suggestions?

AWS Elastic MapReduce Webinar @Noon ET on May 28

Amazon's new Elastic MapReduce service makes it easier to run Map/Reduce jobs within EC2. If that sounds interesting, you can find out more about it by registering and "attending" the webinar they're holding on Thursday, May 28 at Noon ET. I'll be there, in a virtual sense. :)

ConcurrentLinkedHashMap and Possible Alternatives

I mentioned in an earlier post that a project I'm working on needed a thread-safe class with behavior similar to LinkedHashMap, which maintains the order of entries while allowing sub-classes to set a (rather primitive) eviction policy.  I came upon and started using Ben Manes's ConcurrentLinkedHashMap, with only minor modifications to allow for easier sub-classing.  I've been pretty happy with it so far and have been meaning to take a look at recent changes that he and "zellster" have made since I last downloaded the code.

The same project is also using ehcache for caching.  I was looking forward to the release of version 1.6 and inquired about the expected release date on the developer's forum.  That kicked off an exchange between me and Greg Luck, the lead for ehcache, that eventually led to him mentioning some problems he'd encountered with ConcurrentLinkedHashMap.  I'm going to check in with Ben and let him respond to what Greg said, along with giving him a chance to provide a guess for when his new version of CLHM is likely to be usable.  I also need to look into what Greg was referring to in the changelog for ehcache 1.6 beta5 when he said, "Make MemoryStore eviction policies injectable."  Interesting…

Just to confuse matters, I was also recently looking over some materials discussing Infinispan, which will essentially be the 4.0 release of JBoss Cache, and saw this interesting blog entry on "Implementing a performant, thread-safe ordered data container".  In it, Manik Surtani mentions their newly implemented classes FIFODataContainer and LRUDataContainer, which sound like another plausible way to approach my problem.  I'll make sure to ask more about them in the comments for that post.