Authors David Salter and Frank Jennings have written a very targeted book specifically for enterprise developers wanting to use NetBeans with the SOA plugins. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) can be loosely described as implementing business processes by combining web service calls to available services. Just as you would probably not want to perform database operations without transactions, when you combine web service calls for specific business processes you want to wrap them in transactions and using BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) modules makes it easier to express logic and error handling. The BPEL designer plugin lets you work with a graphical interface and avoid tedious hand editing of XML files. Just like using full J2EE stack adds a lot of complexity, with attendant benefits, to large scale Java server side development, SOA also adds a lot of "baggage" to building systems using web services, but as systems become larger and more complicated that struc

A funny moment: recently I heard a senior computer scientist blast Java on very poor performance (server side Java performance is very good - the language has other problems in my opinion) while extolling the virtues of Common Lisp as, if I understood him correctly, the one true 'do everything' language. I enjoy Lisp (I wrote 2 Springer-Verlag Lisp books, many years ago), but it is a marginal language if you count developers, available frameworks, and relatively few large deployed systems (a few notable exceptions to this). Lisp is a language that I can recommend to some people as a second or third language, but I would have a difficult time recommending it as any developer's primary language for writing production code. Lisp is great for research. In any case, whenever I hear someone blasting Java, I know that they likely don't have real experience developing large scale Java server side applications and don't understand the benefits of the server JVM and a huge co

Yesterday was fun. We use SBCL (Common Lisp) on a project I work on, and my customer hit a limit of SBCL not using all the memory on one of their new servers. A quick email to a SBCL developer, and we were patched and running very quickly (thanks Nikodemus!) A decision to use any open source project is usually based on how "vibrant" and active the community is surrounding an open source project. This is easy to determine developer activity by release history and user base by newsgroups + wikis. I definitely have my favorite commercial developers (plugs to Franz Lisp, Jetbrains/IntelliJ, OmniGroup/OmniGraffle, and TextMate) and my decision to purchase and use commercial products is based strongly on support, patches, and new versions.

I earned my living between 1988 and 1997 developing and being a mentor using C++. I usually argue against using C++, a language that offers superb runtime performance (speed and memory utilization) with the penalty of greatly increased development costs. For most applications, it is less expensive to optimize for developer productivity. In my decade of using C++, with hindsight, the only projects that needed the performance of C++ were a commercial product for Windows 1.03, some VR work for SAIC and Disney, work on two Nintendo video games, a real time expert system for PacBell, and a PC racing game. All other C++ projects could have been done with more economy and effectiveness using other languages. I used to error on the side of staying current with too many programming languages, although in the last few years I have invested heavy time in only three: Ruby, Java, and Common Lisp. Even though I find C++ development to be less fun, slow, and sometimes even a little painful, I am cons

I wrote about Sun's Lively Kernel web browser based programming environment last month and watched this excellent Lively Kernel talk by Dan Ingalls this morning. I especially liked one point that he made: with the right architectural decisions systems can be fairly simple and still be general. The demonstration on the video is both impressive and serves as documentation if you want to experiment with the Lively Kernel yourself. As it is, the Lively Kernel is a good prototype but if the performance is improved a bit and the programming environment and IDE (which is like Squeak Smalltalk, only for Javascript) continues to improve, then Lively Kernel is on my (personal) radar for something that I will use in the future. I remember getting a Xerox 1108 Lisp Machine in 1982 and I also wanted the optional Smalltalk environment which was not in the budget. However, a sales engineer at Xerox did let me use Smalltalk for a month on a trial basis. It is amusing to be able to get a smallt

My Spanish4.us web portal is a simple 1 page fits all study center for a Spanish class that my wife and I are taking. This is something that I love about Ruby on Rails: I had a simple idea and in less than 2 hours I had prototyped the application and deployed it to one of my leased servers. I will add more phrases to the popup translation tool and more general information over the next few weeks.

Good news: Apple is supporting Ruby 1.9 using the Objective C runtime . This mainly to support building native Mac applications but this will eventually be good for other more general purpose Ruby development on Macs. Very cool since both Objective C and Ruby have their roots in Smalltalk.