November2004

Meeting Notes for November 16, 2004

Wilhelm Fitzpatrick Chair, attendance ~ 30
Presentation - Debu Panda on Service Oriented Architecture

Pre-talk-talk

Group Discussion:

• Who's using Java 5.0 in production? The show of hands poll indicated little interest in migrating using the current set of development tools. While the lag in tools is somewhat addressed by plug-in support for Eclipse, the general concensus was that tools lag is setting the pace for adoption of Java 5.0 in production environments. Neel Kumar related his positive experience with Thread management API's offered in 5.0 java.util.concurrent. Wilhelm shared that this API was grown out the work of Doug Lea's concurrent library, which might be a solution for those who aren't planning the migration to 5.0 in the near term.

Doug Lea's util.concurrent can be found at: http://gee.cs.oswego.edu/dl/classes/EDU/oswego/cs/dl/util/concurrent/intro.html

• Member Poll: how many are using continuous integration? What tools are being used for continuous integration? About 4/30 indicated they were using continuous integration, the follow-up discussion indicated that Anthill Pro, and Cruise Control were being used to facillitate automated integration management. The features these tools offer are continuous monitoring of VCS's for changes and adds; the integration management application then runs the standard build targets, and generates appropriate notifications on test failures.
• What source management tools are recommended? Neel Kumar had a client request a recommendation for source code management software. The constraints were to move toward a richer toolset, unencumbered with the known problems of CVS; price was not an early consideration. The group discussion revealed a comparison report generated by a European consultancy - The Ovum Report - ed anyone who can track down the pointer to this report please add here

A comparison of 15 different Source Version Control Systems can be found at: http://better-scm.berlios.de/comparison/comparison.html

Looking for workers

• Codesic Consulting - seeking Sr. J2EE, EJB development
• Blue Frog Mobile - looking for J2EE, JMX developers
• Mobliss - seeking J2ME, Java dev

Looking for work

• the discussion poll indicated nobody looking for work
• the post discussion indicated a number of individuals shopping
• be sure to check seajug_jobs mailing list where volume has been good the last few months

Presentation-Service Oriented Architecture

A current trend is to move enterprize level development to Service Oriented Architectures. Debu Panda of Oracle gave a primer on how this movement to loosely coupled services is being facillitated by existing standards organizations, and technologies. SOA's require a number of design considerations e.g. granularity of service, but the promise they hold are rapidly deployed custom applications that can service diverse partnerships. Mr. Debu revealed the differences that SOA's hold from the common ancestry (CORBA, modular design). Included was exposure to a number of tools that are evolving at Oracle to address SOA design and development.

The general discussion from the floor was focused on design considerations of granularity of service, the ability to manage versioning of services, and the overall practicality of SOA.

Presentation slides: Service-Oriented-Architecture.pdf ( missing!)

Some article by Debu Panda:

Turn EJBs into Web Services: http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-08-2004/jw-0802-ejbws.html Simplifying EJB development with EJB 3.0: http://theserverside.com/articles/article.tss?l=SimplifyingEJB3

Knowledge Pointers:

A number of well written treatments exist that explain many of the standards that address SOA interoperability and the technologies that fuel this movement. Please add relevant KP's below

The Semantic Web - A Guide to the Future of XML, Web Services, and Knowledge Management Michael C. Daconta, Leo J Obrst, Kevin T. Smith. Wiley, 2003.

Designing Web Services with the J2EE 1.4 Platform.--Inderjeet Singh, et al. Sun Microsystems Press, 2004.

Member Comments:

What did you think of the meeting?

What relevance did this topic have to your work?

What worked about the meeting format?

What about the format detracted from the meeting quality?