Open Web Foundation

Several days ago, the Open Web Foundation has been created. From the official announcement:

"The Open Web Foundation is an attempt to create a home for community-driven specifications. Following the open source model similar to the Apache Software Foundation, the foundation is aimed at building a lightweight framework to help communities deal with the legal requirements necessary to create successful and widely adopted specification."

You can also find a brief presentation on the announcement web page mentioned above. Some of the companies that support the efforts of the foundation are Facebook, Google, O'Reilly, Sourceforge, Yahoo, and many other.

Google Trends and Job Trends

Have you ever heard of Google Trends or Job Trends? I haven't, till today. You can find out interesting and useful data about a variety of today's trends. For example, I searched on Google Trends for "Java, C#, C++", which yielded the following graph:

The result is based on the average traffic for the term searched. You can filter your results based on rank, or a specific region/subregion and/or year to get more focused results. For example, in California, there is only one single city that 'uses' C# more than Java, and that city is Simi Valley (never heard of it? me neither, but probably that's my fault).

Searching on Job Trends for the same input yielded the following graph:

The company that provides this job trends is Indeed, which states that they "index over 50 million jobs a year from thousands of websites". You can also find specific jobs based on the search criteria you entered. Unfortunately, filtering options are almost non-existent.

I must confess that I played around with both websites for quite a while. Have fun with them too!

Oracle Application Diagnostics for Java

Oracle Application Diagnostics for Java is a solution for diagnosing applications in production environments and was implemented by enhancing the native diagnostic capabilities of the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). Here are some of the key features taken from here:

• Low overhead - there is no impact on the application on which the monitoring is done. Examples of application resource consumption include requests waiting on database, I/O, network, etc.
  
• Real-time transaction tracing - used to view the application activity (such as threads and their execution stack, waiting time due to locks, etc).
• Cross-tier correlation with Database - thus showing the state in which the database is (i.e. locks, tables, SQL statements that cause problems).
• Memory leak detection and analysis - abnormalities in memory consumption are detected; heap dumps can be taken without impacting the application running.
  
• Multiple platforms supported - runs on all major application servers.

pbwiki

pbwiki is a (collaborative) wiki service that offers a reliable communication of private information. Creating your own wiki page is straightforward. You first enter some personal information such as name and email address, choose a password and a name for your wiki, and that's it. Once you receive the confirmation/activation email, you start configuring you page. You can make your wiki public or private, depending if you want it to be accessible by anyone or not. Next you choose the wiki's features, but not before you get a chance of upgrading your free account with more access controls, storage (you only have 10 MB on your free account), customizations, site monitoring, or enhanced security. If you choose to go with the free version, you find that the offered features include

• creating a new page where you can choose from a variety of templates (such as Course, Logins, Meeting, Project, To Do List, Team Member Page, etc), or you can go with no template
• upload or view files
• add tags
• customize your sidebar
• create folders and put pages into folders
• leave comments on pages
• share your wiki with others

Below is a screen shot of the front page pf my newly created wiki:

Java Developer’s Journal June 2008 Issue

Two articles of the June Edition of JDJ I enjoyed. The first one talks about (Enterprise) Comet, an event-driven application architecture where the server pushes data asynchronously to a client, without the need of pulling, and by means of a always-on HTTP connection between the client and the server. Therefor, the client does not need to explicitly request any data from the server; any application that requires real-time updates could benefit. Such examples are mentioned in the article: "chat applications to exchange messages on social networks; online games; stock prices from online trading platforms; tools for online collaboration; betting odds for gambling sites; news feeds; and results from sporting events."
The article describes how Comet works, which are the supported technologies, the benefits and drawbacks of this architecture, and many more. If you are looking for articles on Comet, they can be found on the Comet Daily website.

The second article describes how Java can be used in real-time systems. Here you can read about Sun's Java Real-Time System (Java RTS), which implements the Real-Time Specification for Java (RTSJ) and its Real-Time Garbage Collector (RTGC). The article describes key concepts from the real-time realm, such as jitter, determinism, predictability, throughput. Furthermore, the main sources of jitter are explained, for instance class loading, synchronization, compilation, and garbage collection, together with how the Java RTS alleviates each of them.

Other articles could also trigger your interest, so go ahead and give the JDJ a try.