From NoSQL to NoServer

I attended an interesting presentation recently on CouchDB, a document store database that helped make the term NoSQL famous. One of the interesting ideas discussed is the idea of CouchApps: pure JavaScript/HTML applications working with and interacting exclusively with CouchDB. So not only do you not need a relational database, you can dump your application server too.

Let's get rid of middle management

Let's get rid of middle management.

No, not you, boss.

I'm talking about middle management in Java code. At one presentation in the New England Software Symposium in Boston last year, some Java-bashing guy (Stuart Halloway) described Java as the language that invented middle management. You have probably seen them: these classes often end with "Manager.java". I'm wondering whether we really need them.

NESS 2009: Remembering Java platform security

Java platform security is something we normally don't worry about when doing enterprise Java development. Originally designed as a sandbox for applets, Java platform security has evolved into a fine-grained access control architecture for all Java programs. Even so, it remains focused on protecting the host system from the Java application. The Java developer is more concerned about protecting the Java application from malicious users, or protecting users from each other.

So if Java platform security secures the host system, and we are concerned with securing our application, is the former useless? At the New England Software Symposium, I attended Ted Nugent's two presentations on Java platform security, and he argues that it is indeed useful. On the other hand, it is disabled by default, for ordinary Java applications as well as webapps running on Tomcat. This blog entry is based on Ted's presentation.

NESS 2009: multithreading and the Java memory model

At the New England Software Symposium, I attended Brian Goetz's session called "The Java Memory Model". When I saw the phrase "memory model" in the title I thought it would be about garbage collection, memory allocation and memory types. Instead, it is really about multithreading. The difference is that this presentation focuses on visibility, not locking or atomicity. This is my attempt to summarize his talk.

NESS 2009: The Coming Spring

One of the sessions I attended at the recent New England Software Symposium is the one on new features in Spring 3. This covers Spring Core functionality. This session got my attention because the presenter was Craig Walls, who wrote Spring in Action. The main features he covered were:

• Spring Expression Language (SpEL)
• Spring MVC annotations (@PathVariable, @RequestHeader, @CookieValue, @RequestParam defaults), some to support REST.
• jsp tag to generate context-sensitive URL
• Declarative validation of some sort that may or may not make it
• Etag support
• HiddenHttpMethodFilter (more Spring MVC REST support)
• ContentNegotiatingViewResolver
• RestTemplate
• JavaConfig (Java-based alternative to XML wiring). This has been around for a while, but is being bundled in Spring 3. 
• Object-to-XML mapping from Spring-WS
• Java 5 support