Show Notes

• Spring 3.1 goes GA - http://blog.springsource.org/2011/12/13/spring-framework-3-1-goes-ga/
• Grails 2.0 Released - http://blog.springsource.org/2011/12/15/grails-2-0-released/
• Grails on Heroku goes beta - http://blog.heroku.com/archives/2011/12/15/grails/
• Peter Ledbrook on vert.x - http://skillsmatter.com/podcast/home/groovy-vert-x
• vert.x 0.2 with limited Groovy support - http://purplefox.github.com/vert.x/
• ember.js (formerly amber.js) - http://www.emberjs.com/
• Google Spreadsheet in 10 min with Neo4 - jhttp://blog.neo4j.org/2011/12/neo4j-labs-heroku-neo4j-and-google.html?spref=tw
• Groovy Algorithms - http://blog.chariotsolutions.com/2011/11/groovy-algorithms-shunting-yard.html
• Akka Scheduler - http://blog.chariotsolutions.com/2011/10/akka-scheduler-actors-with-heartbeats.html
• Scala Actors in Groovy - http://raibledesigns.com/rd/entry/concurrency_on_the_jvm_using
• Philly ETE 2012 Speaker Lineup - http://phillyemergingtech.com/2012/speakers

Ken & Jason

Welcome to Episode 39!  This week we discussed:

• Cleaning? ? Marco.org
• Roo (in the) Corner - new features in?trunk... - Rimple on Tech - Random Thoughts
• The Elements of Computing Systems / Nisan & Schocken / www.idc.ac.il/tecs
• Steve Jobs, 1955-2011 - Blog ? Stack Exchange

Enjoy!

In this episode, Ryan Campbell joins Ken to talk about the CloudBees development platform, Dev@Cloud, and Java runtime platform, Run@Cloud.  Dev@Cloud can host private maven snapshot and release repositories, your GIT or SVN version control, and hosted Jenkins CI testing.  

For information about CloudBees or about the platforms, including hosted Hudson and open source CI instances, visit them on the web, at cloudbees.com.

We originally lined up CloudBees for our fall Continuous Delivery conference.  

** Edit by Ken Rimple - removed some incorrect information **

Philly Emerging Technologies Podcast 2011 - #3

How MongoDB Helps Visibiz Tackle Social CRM

Speaker - Mike Brocious - Lead Architect, Visibiz

From the ETE Session Abstract

So you’ve heard about MongoDB and it sounds really sweet (BTW, it is!). Now you’re thinking about using it in your application. We can’t tell you if it’s right for your application, but we can tell you how we’re using it at Visibiz and that might help you with your implementation.

This presentation provides a use case of MongoDB at Visibiz. It first discusses why we chose to use MongoDB as our application’s primary datastore (what were the relevant application requirements and perceived benefits). It then covers how we’re using MongoDB in the application, touching on schema design of the primary collection and listing several secondary uses for it in the architecture. We also touch on lessons learned, as well as pros and cons.

Philly Emerging Technologies Podcast 2011 - #2

Doing the Mundane a Million Times a Minute

Speaker - Mark Chadwick, Invite Media/Google

From the ETE Session Abstract

When dealing with high-volume distributed systems, even the most mundane tasks can be daunting challenges. This talk describes some of the steps, as well as missteps, made while building such a system. It will work through the discovery of such pain points, as well as describe their resolutions with specific technologies or patterns.

Over the course of three years, Invite Media built a high-volume system for serving online advertisements from the ground up. Some of the more interesting challenges revolved around operating routine services at scale, such as distributing requests, logging diagnostics, and keeping track of simple transactions.

This talk will dive into some of these problems, showing the evolution of simple systems at scale, with a strong bias towards cloud-hosted applications. It will include details about the discovery and resolution of bottlenecks we experienced, as well as specific technologies and pattens discovered in the process.

It may serve as a springboard for ideas when building distributed cloud-based systems, as well as hone a sense of when components may be reaching their tipping point.

We continue our interview with Eric Shamow of Puppet Labs.  Show notes to follow soon, please refer to information from TechCast Episode 65 for now.  

Puppet Labs can be found at www.puppetlabs.com, and they are hosting PuppetConf, a conference on the west coast that is not only about Puppet.  

A word from our sponsor, Chariot Solutions:

Mark your calendars:  Chariot's DevOps seminar - October 18, 2011 at the Penn State Great Valley campus in the Philadelphia suburbs.  We'll have speakers from Chariot, CloudBees, NING, Puppet Labs, Sonatype, and a panel discussion at the end.  Lunch is provided as well. Save on our early bird - $75 instead of the already low price of $99.  More information on the event page.

Also, if Scala is your thing, come to our Fast Track to Scala training in New York City on October 4-5, 2011.  Seats are still available but they will fill up fast.  The course is taught by Typesafe, the company Martin Odersky formed around Scala and Akka to move the language and frameworks forward.  Save $100 by using the coupon code 'techcast' during registration, which can be found at chariotsolutions.com/education.

This week we catch up with all of the world's news in what normally is a quiet August. Then we discuss some new releases in the Firefox world, the new Java Lambda decision, Java 7 features, and a warning about Java 7 and Lucene.

Hosts:  Jason Gtitman and Ken Rimple

Show Notes

• Lamba decision for Java (sort of?)
• Software’s Receding Hairline
• Balsamiq
• Heroku for Java
• New Firefox Beta with Enhanced Performance | Future Releases
• Robots Have Taken James Gosling Away From Google
• The day Apple won the Flash fight
• Google to shut down 10 of its products - Neowin.net
• NSFetchedResultsController and Core Data Managed Object Updates « The Other Steve Smith
• [WARNING] Index corruption and crashes in Apache Lucene Core / Apache Solr with Java 7 - Uwe Schindler - org.apache.lucene.java-user - MarkMail

My discussion this week is with Eric Shamow of Puppet Labs.  He'll be presenting at our upcoming DevOps Seminar on October 18th.  We took a little time to discuss DevOps in general, and Puppet in some specifics.

Part two will be a deeper dive into Puppet itself.  Look for that podcast in early September.  

Resouces, per Eric:

• http://www.puppetlabs.com/ - the main site for Puppet
• Puppet Labs has recently put up a great getting started guide which should really help folks who want to get started. This page comes with a link to a training VM that you can use to get started with Puppet right away: http://docs.puppetlabs.com/learning
• PuppetConf will be held on September 22-23, in Portland, OR - http://www.puppetconf.com
• A great summary of a talk by Patrick Debois summarizing the notion of culture change and trust as the cornerstone for a DevOps environment: http://www.maestrodev.com/blogs/trust-as-the-cornerstone-of-devops-culture
• Eric has an article, DevOps at Advance Internet: How We Got in the Door, appearing in this month's Cutter IT journal: http://www.cutter.com/itjournal.html

Eric can be found at his blog, http://opsrealist.com and via e-mail at eric at opsrealist.com. Also twitter - @eshamow

Philly Emerging Technologies Podcast 2011 - #1

Polyglot Persistence for Java Developers

Speaker - Chris Richardson, VMware

From the ETE Session Abstract

Relational databases have long been considered the one true way to persist enterprise data. But today, NoSQL databases are emerging as a viable alternative for many applications. They can simplify the persistence of complex data models and offer significantly better scalability, and performance. But using NoSQL databases is very different than the ACID/SQL/JDBC/JPA world that we have become accustomed to. They have different and unfamiliar APIs and a very different and usually limited transaction model. In this presentation, we describe some popular NoSQL databases – Redis, SimpleDB, MongoDB, and Cassandra. You will learn about each database’s data model and Java API. We describe the benefits and drawbacks with using NoSQL databases. Finally, you will learn how the Spring Data project simplifies the development of Java applications that use NoSQL databases.

Download the Slides

Joining Ken Rimple this week are Jamie Allen (@jamie_allen) and Jason Gritman.  Topics discussed:

• Grails - user - Grails 1.4 is now Grails 2.0
• Countdown to Grails 2.0: Static resources | SpringSource Team Blog
• Essential JavaScript Design Patterns For Beginners
• Google+ buttons in CSS
• Heroku | Clojure on Heroku
• Ruby Creator Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto Joins Heroku
• The LMAX Architecture
• productivity - Why doesn't every company buy developers the best hardware? - Programmers - Stack Exchange
• The Ultimate Power Of Spring Batch by Anatoly Polinsky on Prezi
• Selenium 2.0: Out Now! ? Official Selenium Blog
• HTML5 - Document Outlines

Getting Involved

Want to send us audio feedback?  Email your feedback, or even better, record your MP3 and share it with techcastfeedback@chariotsolutions.com, or tweet us at @techcast.  We'd love to put your question, comment, rant or clarification on the air.  But please keep it civil...  

Events / Sponsorship

Chariot Solutions sponsors this DevNews episode.  

Training Events in August:

• August 2-5: Zero to Rails 3 Training courtesy of Engine Yard
• August 10-12: Hibernate with Spring training

Find out more about our courses, including Maven, Spring, and Rails, at chariotsolutions.com/education

What a couple of weeks!

The Philly Emerging Tech 2011 Conference really knocked me for a loop. What a great show, and so much to process from it too. We'll have content coming in very soon, including screencasts of close to a dozen sessions. Look for announcements here and on our blog soon.

The news this week

So, we're joined this week by @kgriffin - no, not Kathy Griffin, Kevin Griffin (one's British, the other is on the B-List...) Kevin talks to us about iOS 5, what we know, what we can say without getting in big trouble. We also talk about some other things such as the HTML5 web workers API.

Then, I run through some articles, including Ubuntu's shiny new upcoming Unity desktop, the move by Oracle to open source Java even more by handing out Open JDK 7 as the new JDK RI (I know, right?), the VMWare vFabric internal cloud offering (Chariot is a SpringSource/VMware partner but we're including it because we talked about the Cloud Foundry offering, and this is a contrasting offering). We take Ben Darfler's (@bdarfler) audio feedback on the inaccuracies of our recent reporting about Jenkins and Hudson. Thanks to Ben for that feedback note!

Links

• Riding Rails: Rails 3.1: Release candidate
• www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/workers/basics
• The Modernizr - a Javascript library that lets you detect what features of HTML your browser supports or does not support.
• Comparison of Protobuff, Thrift, Avro, etc : Pure Danger Tech
• VMWare announces vFabric 5 - SaaS for Java apps in a private cloud
• Moving to OpenJDK as the official Java SE 7 Reference ...
• Sonatype Blog " Hudson Survey Results Show Reliability and ...
• Ubuntu moves into its own UI with Unity

Sponsorship/Plugs

• Learn about Chariot's Training Services in Spring, Maven, Hibernate and Ruby.

In this week's episode, we've given Eric a lot of coffee and set him loose on the Google I/O announcements.  We also discuss the new Scala / Akka company, TypeSafe, Hudson being donated to the Eclipse foundation, 7 inch tablets, and Matt Riable's foray into demonstrating Java EE 6 security.

• Raible Designs | Java Web Application Security - Part I: Java EE 6 Login Demo
• Google App Engine Blog: App Engine 1.5.0 Release
• No Market for 7-Inch Tablets? News Begs to Differ: Mobile Technology News ?
• Google I/O 2011
• Upload all file types to any Google Account - Google Apps Developer Blog
• dzone.com - Scala & Akka Creators Launch Typesafe Company for Multicore and Cloud Architectures
• Hudson donated to Eclipse Foundation

The views and opinions expressed by Eric and Ken are their own, and not official viewpoints of Chariot Solutions. That said, enjoy!

Podcast Information

This final pre-ETE podcast brings together Josh Clark, designer, developer and author of Tapworthy, a guide to designing great iPhone applications, and Jonathan Stark, VP of Application Architecture at Mobiquity and author of three books including "Building iPhone apps with HTML, CSS and Javascript". Chariot's Kevin Griffin and I sat down over the intertubes to get their take on mobile app design and development. Both authors are speaking at the Philadelphia Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise conference.

Jonathan Stark's twitter handle is @jonathanstark, and Josh Clark's is @globalmoxie. 

Links

• Buttons are a Hack - Josh Clark's ETE session information
• Building Native Applications with HTML, CSS and Javascript - Jonathan Stark's ETE Presentation
• Josh Clark's blog
• Jonathan Stark's blog
• Charioteer Hiedi Utley's blog posts, which cover a wide range of topics on iOS development.

Books

• Tapworthy - Designing great iPhone apps - Josh Clark
• Building iPhone apps with HTML, CSS and JavaScript - Jonathan Stark

Davis Frank is an agile software engineer who created and contributes to the  open source Jasmine javascript testing framework.  He created the project to help him test applications for the former Palm, now HP webOS mobile application platform, which is written in native Javascript.   Pivotal has a number of projects related to jasmine on github, including the port of Jasmine to the HP WebOS framework, which he also created.

He is speaking at the Philadelphia Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise conference next week, and his talk, Practical Jasmine, will start with a 10 minute quick demo, then dive into real tips on how to best use (see how I didn't use utilize?) the framework.  We spoke last week about a number of topics, including how Javascript is just a bit different than other languages, how the current testing tools didn't meet the needs of Pivotal when they were developing applications on the HP WebOS mobile platform, and about where to go to see well-written Jasmine tests (how about the Jasmine source code itself?)

Resources

• Jasmine Homepage
• Viddler video demonstration of Jasmine in action
• Pivotal on GitHub including Jasmine and Jasmine on WebOS
• The website of Douglas Crockford For crying out loud, read Javascript, the Good Parts, will ya?

Sponsor

This podcast is sponsored by Heroku - they let you deploy and scale powerful ruby-based applications on their rock-solid platform in the cloud. For more information, visit heroku.com.

Brendan McAdams, 10Gen, the company behind MongoDB

Today's guest is Brendan McAdams. He works for 10Gen, the company behind MongoDB, the document-oriented noSQL database. Brendan is a software engineer who wears many hats - he is a developer on the Java and Scala casbah drivers, works with and commits database driver contributions to frameworks like Akka and Lift, and does community outreach and training in MongoDB. Eric Snyder and I sat down to talk to Brendan about the 1.8 release and the MongoPhilly Philly Emerging Tech Week event on April 26. We start by asking Brendan to define MongoDB. If you want to register for the MongoPhilly event and save 20%, register at bit.ly/mongophilly with the offer code 'chariot'.

Links

• The official MongoDB 1.8 Release Blog Entry
• Mongo Philly 2011 - use offer code 'chariot' to save 20%.

Sponsor

This podcast is sponsored by Heroku - they let you deploy and scale powerful ruby-based applications on their rock-solid platform in the cloud. For more information, visit heroku.com.

Ken Rimple interviews Johanna Rothman

My guest this time is Johanna Rothman, an esteemed project management consultant who runs Rothman Consulting Group, and writes/blogs/speaks/podcasts on a wide variety of topics including Agile, managing suites of projects, and more. Her website is jrothman.com. She is speaking at the 2011 Philly Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise Conference on April 27-28, 2011.

Podcast Topics

• 90% done and inch pebbles - are you continually 90% done?
• What Lifecycle? Selecting the Right Model for Your Project
• Kanban Development Oversimplified - from agileproductdesign.com
• Park Projects You Can't Staff, For Now
• Partial Commitments to Projects Create Unpredictable Projects

Some of Johanna's Books

• ManageIT! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management
• Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management
• Managing Your Project Portfolio: Increase Your Capacity and Finish More Projects

Sponsor

This podcast is sponsored by Heroku - they let you deploy and scale powerful ruby-based applications on their rock-solid platform in the cloud. For more information, visit heroku.com.

Hello there, and welcome to April 1st. Still working on those screenshot URLs from our episode on Friday, but we do have the links from articles we spoke about in the podcast below.

• I bought a Mac. So sue me. | ZDNet - Hee hee, couldn't resist.  Yet another person who walked smack into becoming a mac convert.  Welcome to the club, sir!
• Google Android 3.0 "Honeycomb": Open source no more | ZDNet - Wait, umm... Is Honeycomb closed only to Google's prime hardware partners, or is this something mis-understood?  Or is it not ready to be replicated yet because it's still too early?  Is Google Applifying?
• Useful Bookmarklets for your iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch Browser - We use this as a launching board for talking about productivity tools.
• Java Founder Gosling Joins Google - PCWorld Business Center - Fete Complete?  (sic) James Gosling is hired at Google... 
• Participants - Philly Tech Week - Concurrent with Philadelphia Emerging Tech - Technically Philly is running a "Philly Tech Week" with a lot of great sessions. Visit the site and see the events, from ETE to a day of MongoDB and much, much more. Chariot is a sponsor of Philly Tech Week and runs Philly Emerging Tech.

Have a great week.

Ken and Eric

The opinions expressed on our developer news show are wholly those of Eric and Ken, and not official statements from Chariot Solutions.

We start out this week looking at the career of superprogrammer Fabrice Bellard, and move on to topics as different as RSA seed files and potential compromise, Apple's 10.6.7 update, graphing and data visualization, metaprogramming in Ruby, heck the list goes on and on…

Brought to you by Chariot Solutions Education Services.  This Spring we have a Spring special - our Spring training courses are off-the-hook affordable for the months of April and May!  Save some money and learn how we deliver superior training in Spring, Maven, Hibernate, and much more at chariotsolutions.com/education.  Chariot Solutions is a VMware and Sonatype education services partner.

• Django 1.3 Cheatsheet
• Medihack " Blog Archive " Intend to extend (metaprogramming ...
• In JavaScript, curly brace placement matters: An example ...
• First steps with Node.js « Gridshore
• Cool Groovy aspect in Spring
• RSA’s silence spreads fear about use of SecurID - Technology & science - Security - msnbc.com
• dzone.com - Dear Web Design Community, Where Have You Gone?
• dzone.com - Fabrice Bellard: Portrait of a Superproductive Programmer
• Apple releases OS X 10.6.7, fixes MacBook 2011 graphics bug | MacFixIt - CNET Reviews
• A Sample of 20 JavaScript Libraries for Data Visualization
• InfoQ: Meet the Goliath of Ruby Application Servers
• Xcode3 – Debugging iOS Unit Tests « Hiedi Utley

Welcome to our Developer News, Episode #32. Eric is here in spirit and on assignment. He donated three articles - see if you can see which ones are his!. As usual, our dev news show notes are here, but can be accessed at delicious.com/developernews.32

• Why and when you should use Cucumber
• Java for Mac OS X Update Breaks dev_appserver
• Couchbase Releases iOS Preview
• Why VMware's WaveMaker Acquisition Is a Smart Buy - Application Development - News & Reviews - eWeek.com
• Addressing a Big New Audience: VMware Acquires WaveMaker | SpringSource Team Blog
• furbo.org · Mac App Store guide
• WaveMaker Springs To VMware
• InfoQ: DSL Evolution for Groovy Developers

Sponsors

Philly Emerging Tech - Seats are running out! Don't forget, register for Philly Emerging Tech, unless you don't want to meet everybody in open source mobile, Java, Javascript, OSGi, Ruby, NoSQL and a ton of other technologies.

Chariot Education Services - Fantastic discounts on our training courses in the months of March and April. Visit chariotsolutions.com/education for our course calendar today. Save almost $800 on our four-day SpringSource courses and $100 off our Maven training during March and April.

All the best, Ken

The TechCast is brought to you this (and every) week by our employer / sponsor, Chariot Solutions.  We have lots of training in Spring and Maven coming up in March, and if you hurry you can enjoy an early bird special rate.  Visit our training calendar at chariotsolutions.com/education.

Links (in no specific order - you can view them also at delicious.com/developernews/31

• Java 7 Fork/Join Parallel Programming
• Google requests re-examination of Java patents - The H Open Source - news
• Bash Completion for Maven + more
• Gordon Dickens is on Spring-based FIRE! Lots of great content.
• Rails 3.1 release, rumors about new features - hemju
• BNR iPhone Development - Kindle Version

Sponsor Links

Hurry and register for our Philly Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise before IT FILLS UP.

For SpringSource, Maven and custom training, come learn at Chariot. Course and calendar information available at chariotsolutions.com/education. We've extended the Core Spring and Spring Enterprise Integration course early bird specials for March!

Ken and Eric

Show notes to follow.  For now, visit http://delicious.com/developernews/30

Ken & Eric

Ross Mason is the founder of Mule, an open source enterprise service bus that implements the Gregor and Hohpe Enterprise Integration Patterns.  Easy to install and configure, Mule does not place heavy demands on developers - there is no required canonical form, services can be expressed in a number of ways, and it supports a wide range of scripting languages, from Groovy to JRuby and beyond.

Chariot integration specialist Rod Biresch and I sat down to chat with Ross recently to talk about Mule, the version 3 release, other related topics.  Chariot is a MuleSoft partner.

More show notes to come.

This week's Dev News is brought to you by the letter 'M', as in 'WebM'.  Google has announced that future releases of the Chrome browser will no longer support H.264, instead moving to the new WebM and VP8 codec/format.  So we riff on that for a while.  If you want a really good analysis from people who know Google and video really well, check out the latest episode of This Week in Google from the TWIT network.

We also discuss the App Store trend - both of us have used the Apple Mac App Store, and kinda like it, from a consumer perspective.

Big news in JRuby-land, a big release, we have it covered.  Also we talk about a very nice little feature in Spring's property placeholder configuration that enables default values, right in the XML.  And we follow up with a discussion on Rich Hickey's decision to close financial donations to the Clojure project.

Show notes (until it dies) are currently available on delicious.com/developernews/29.  Ken apologizes for the audio quality as he recorded it on his Macbook Air's internal mic, forgetting to bring his mics back from a recording session with 'da band' this weekend.

Have a good week.

Ken & Eric

Eric Snyder discusses MongoDB, a document-oriented NoSQL database.

Show Notes

• MongoDB is built and supported by 10gen
• Information on BSON, a Binary format similar to JSON: http://bsonspec.org/
• Document oriented datastore. Documents are JSON-like. Storage is really BSON, a binary representation of JSON. 
•  Supports ad-hoc querying (like relational)
• Queries are expressed as BSON documents. You can reference deeply nested attributes and there are a robust collection of query operators.
• MongoDB query optimizer is not cost based. MongoDB tries all query plans simultaneously until it one completes, then it terminates the others. It then reuses that plan for the query until it begins to perform poorly
• Document attributes can be indexed similarly to a relational db column.
• Map/reduce is available for more complex data analysis.
• MongoDB has built-in replication and auto-sharding.
• Uses a native binary over-the-wire protocol implemented by various drivers. There are drivers available for many languages/environments.

=== Sponsor Note ===

Philadelphia Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise Conference - April 27-28 2011 - is now taking registrations.  We have an amazing array of speakers on a wide range of topics, including NodeJS, Ruby, Rails, Scala, Spring, Agile, and more.  Visit the site today and take advantage of early bird registration.