Coherence Incubator 10 Patch 2 Released

Just uploaded the latest fix patches for Coherence Incubator 10.  While mostly minor fixes, there’s also a few new additions, like the new @LiveObject annotation.  Check out the Coherence Incubator project pages for more details.  http://coherence.oracle.com/display/INC10

OSX Lion Upgrade (Part 4)

Finally upgraded to OS Lion 10.7.2.  Hooray! All known issues I seen have resolved, including the random mouse pointer jumping.   Now to upgrade other machines and devices.

OSX Lion Upgrade (Part 3)

Hmmm… Mysteriously Print Preview now crashes with OSX Lion :(  It worked perfectly in the beginning.

After about an hour or so of searching/reading, I found the following forum details a related permissions problem:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3194835?start=0&tstart=0

For some reason the “root” user doesn’t have read/write permissions to the Libraries folder!  Very weird.

Looking forward to 10.7.2 to fix the remaining “niggles”.

OSX Lion Upgrade (Part 2)

Updated to 10.7.1 last night.  Unfortunately the mouse pointer acceleration issues aren’t resolved, but network connectivity seems to be way smoother (over the past week I’ve occasionally had to reboot the machine to get the network to work).

However I’m now completely “sold” on the new scrolling (reversed like the iPhone/iPad).  :P.  That and the new Mail.app are nice. Really looking forward to 10.7.2 or what ever the version is that will resolve the erratic mouse pointer acceleration.

OSX Lion Upgrade (Part 1)

Upgrading from OSX Snow Leopard to OSX Lion has so far been somewhat of a disappointment, especially when compared to previous upgrades. Actually I’m glad it only cost $29, as any more and i would have probably returned it. The upgrade process itself was fairly smooth and seamless (apart from one complete hang/lockup requiring a reboot).  It’s the post upgrade, i.e.: adoption, that’s caused the most, or be they “slight” frustrations.

A quick summary of the upgrade.
1. Upgraded Macbook 5.1 (first uni-body aluminum macbook released) from 4GB to 8GB ram.
2. Installed new Crucial M4 256GB Solid State Drive.
3. Performed Clean Install of Lion (via USB stick) – takes about 1 hr (probably would have been less if it didn’t hang half way through)
4. Install everything and migrate from old 256DB SATA drive to new install.

Elements of Frustration.
1. Random Mouse Pointer Jumping / Acceleration.
It seems OSX Lion is plagued with these problems. Don’t underestimate how annoying these are.  Seriously, your Mouse Pointer will simply disappear and randomly jump around the screen real-estate.  If you have multiple screens you’ll have to look to find it!

So far there are no fixes.  If tried everything I’ve found.   (this is on a regular Mighty Mouse).

2. Performance is Poor.
Out of the box it’s remarkably slow. Well, it appears to be remarkably slow. While there are some beautiful GUI transitions between windows, applications loading, spaces etc, these chew a lot of CPU. Basically add one second at a minimum to all window opening/application loading interactions (on my machine anyway). Luckily there are some solutions.

Open a terminal and execute these commands:

defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSAutomaticWindowAnimationsEnabled -bool NO
defaults write com.apple.Mail DisableReplyAnimations -bool YES

These will disable the animations for windows (which use to be an option in Snow Leopard, but is now gone).

3. Auto Repeat (when holding down a key) Doesn’t Work.
Yup. Amazing, but here’s how to turn it on (again using a terminal)

defaults write -g ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool false

4. Eclipse Margin Warnings Aren’t Displayed
There is a defect in Eclipse (all versions I can tell) that prevents the compiler error/warnings some being displayed in the right-hand scroll-bar area. This is fixed by turning on the “hide scroll bar” option.

Apple > System Preferences > General > Show Scroll Bars: Select "When Scrolling" Option.

Any other option seems to break Eclipse. Trust me, without this fix you’ll be searching for compiler errors by scrolling through each document by hand (or having to click through the Errors Panel).

5. Adium crashes intermittently
Not a biggy, but Adium randomly seems to crash if you change networks.  Have you upgrade to the “beta” as all other versions are not supported on Lion.  Funny, seems like is a “beta” too :(

Bottom line: Unless you’re willing to invest some time ironing these things out, I avoid the upgrade. I’m certainly not upgrading my other Mac’s.  If I had time I’d probably roll back, but I’m determined to move forward.

On the Positive Side: There are some very nice features, like the new Mail.app which I’ve become addicted to pretty quickly.

London Coherence Training Schedule

If you’re in London and looking for Coherence training, you’re in luck.  Oracle University is now offering regular training.  While based on Coherence 3.6 at the moment, it’s a great introduction to Coherence.  Moving to Coherence 3.7 will be a snap.

Coherence SIG: Spring Edition: 3rd May, 2011

Updated: The registration is now open here:  http://www.ukoug.org/events/ukoug-coherence-sig/

LONDON COHERENCE SPRING “ROYAL WEDDING” SIG

3rd May, 2011
Oracle London
One South Place,
London. EC2M 2RB (Google Map)

SCHEDULE

The theme of this SIG is to discuss and cover in some detail, the latest (to be released very very shortly unless there’s some kind of disaster), version of Coherence.  Essentially the morning will cover Coherence, the afternoon will cover Incubator examples (also being released simultaneously).

For this SIG we’re only running a single track, simply to focus on the latest release.  For the next SIG we’ll be running multiple tracks again.

10:00 Registration

Registration, Badge and Schedule Pick Up.  Tea, Coffee and refreshments served.

KNIGHTSBRIDGE

10:30  Coherence 3.7 Update: Part 1 (Brian Oliver and friends, Oracle)
In this talk we’ll take a look at some of the latest features in Coherence 3.6+.  More details to come once it’s released.

11:45  Coherence 3.7 Update: Part 2 (Brian Oliver and friends, Oracle)
The follow on session from Part 1 :)

13:00  Lunch

13:30  Evolution of Gridman (Andrew Wilson)
In this talk, Andrew will walk through the architectural progression from “put-get” man right through to real-time-scalable-events man. It took him 4 years to make this transition and he’s still learning!

14:45  Incubator 10 Goodies: Testing and Tooling (Brian Oliver, Harvey Raja, Oracle)
Finally it’s here and there’s a lot of new goodies.  This talk will focus on Testing and the latest things in Coherence Common, including reflection-based POF serialization

15:45  Break

16:15  The Event Distribution Pattern (Brian Oliver, Oracle)
In this talk we take a look at the newest edition to the Incubator, the Event Distribution Pattern, a simple pattern enabling the distribution of application level events to multiple devices and/or clusters.  Now the basis of latest Push Replication Pattern, the Event Distribution Pattern opens up an entirely new range of new architectural styles for your applications.

17:00 (to be announced)

17:45 Close

Announcement: Next London Coherence SIG: 3rd May 2011

It’s that time again, time for another London Coherence SIG.

Although the agenda is yet to be finalized, the theme of the event will be the up-and-coming Coherence 3.7 and Incubator 10 releases.  So lock in the date, Tuesday May 3rd, 2011 at the London Oracle Offices.

The complete agenda and registration page will announced soon!

Trading Applications Developer Workshops

If you’re in London on March 1st or New York on March 15th and have an interest in trading application development then you might be interested in the following Oracle, Sun and Intel event.

Trading Applications Developer Workshops

The presentations cover a range of technologies, from each layer in the stack, that should be considered when designing or maintaining trading applications.

London Coherence SIG: Winter Edition: 27th of January, 2011

Happy New Year!
I hope you had a fantastic 2010 and 2011 is even better.

For 2010 the Coherence SIGs were a huge success, expanding into even more cities around the world, bringing in a large variety of speakers and expanding the content covered. In London we moved to the full day format which has proven to be really successful.  The great thing is that 2011 is going to be even better, promising more cities, even more content and especially, the release of Coherence 3.7 (at some point).

To kick things off for London in 2011, the next London Coherence SIG, scheduled for the 27th of January 2011, will run all day and with two parallel tracks.  That is, we’re going to double the number of seats available, double the content and double the number of speakers.

Registration for the SIG is now available online at the UKOUG site here:
http://www.ukoug.org/calendar/show_event.jsp?id=5563

NOTE: You’ll have to choose which of the tracks you’d like to attend during registration.  But don’t worry you can change on the day.

Look forward to seeing you soon!

LONDON Coherence WINTER SIG

27th January, 2011
Oracle London
One South Place,
London. EC2M 2RB (Google Map)

SCHedule

10:00 Registration

Registration, Badge and Schedule Pick Up.  Tea, Coffee and refreshments served.

Knightsbridge Track

10:30  Coherence Update (Brian Oliver, Oracle)
In this talk we’ll take a look at some of the latest features in Coherence 3.6, briefly discussion Coherence 3.7 and what’s new in the latest Coherence Incubator Release, including annotation driven serialization.

11:45  Inside the Coherence Management Framework (Everett Williams, sl.com)
As the lead engineer and contributor to the Coherence Management Framework, Everett (now working at sl.com) will present an inside view of the Coherence Management Framework, how it works, is put together, things you may not know about and how to use the JMX Reporter.

13:00  Lunch

13:30  Testing Coherence-based Applications (Andrew Wilson)
Testing distributed applications, especially those that use Coherence, typically requires a little more effort than a  single threaded/single process application.  In this talk Andrew will discuss and demonstrate a number of tips and tricks covering unit, integration and performance testing that will make your life easier when testing Coherence-based applications.

14:45  Coherence Performance Under The Microscope (Tom Lubinski, CTO, sl.com)
Using the Coherence API is relatively easy, but how your calls onto the API are measured and reported is something different all together.  In this technical talk Tom outlines the underlying schematics of messages, requests and tasks, things that you commonly seen in JMX.  He discussed what are they, why should you care and which ones are important, especially in a production system. Tom Lubinksi then explains how these metrics relate to the workings of the distributed cache service, the invocation service and entry processors.  He will show you how to plot these metrics  to literally “ see” how Coherence is executing your code and using system resources. These insights can then help you tune and troubleshoot your data grid.

Tom founded SL Corporation in 1983 and currently serves as the company’s Founder and CTO. He has been instrumental in developing RTView, a real-time monitoring, analytics and visualization platform, as well as RTView Oracle Coherence Monitor and Viewer for the monitoring and management of Oracle Coherence data grids. Since founding the company, he has been involved in thousands of successful customer deployments of real-time visibility solutions. He has an immensely deep understanding of monitoring and managing distributed systems.  He’s an entertaining and talented speaker with a passion for technology.  Not a talk to be missed.

15:45  Break

16:15  Where does it run? (Andrew Wilson and friends)
In this talk Andrew (and friends) walk through the numerous APIs, extensions and plug-ins available to developers in Coherence, what they are, how they work and importantly where they are executed, knowledge that’s crucial to know if you want to take full advantage of your investment and save yourself some time.

Guaranteed to be an entertaining talk about there experiences in learning the Coherence API, including what they learnt, mistakes they made and their recommendations for each feature.

17:00  Java Platform Update (Sten Garmark, Oracle)
While not specifically focused on Coherence, in this talk we discuss the road ahead for the Java Platform, including the up-and-coming Java 7 and 8 platforms.

If you’re interested in what’s coming in Java and would like an opportunity to interact directly with Oracle Java Product Management, this will be a great talk.

17:45 Close

Waterloo Track

10:30  Beyond Caching and Data Grids:  Lessons in using Coherence as a System of Record  (Ben Stopford)
For most Coherence Architects, denormalising an object model to scale out data access and parallelize queries is a bread and butter activity. However when attempting to use Coherence as a system of record, especially in much the same way as one would use a traditional database, so that things like versioning and joins are easily permitted, normalizing the object model is what you really need.  Unfortunately having a completely normalized relational model will often lead to some serious scalability and or performance challenges.  Likewise having a completely denormalized model will often lead to large amounts of communication to perform things like joins.

In this technical talk Ben outlines the use of Star Schemas and how the adoption of data-ware housing approaches with Coherence provides a mechanism to represent and manage cached data in a normalization manner so that joins (and versioning of data) are possible without sacrificing too much performance and maintaining linear scalability.

11:45  The Live Object Pattern (Brian Oliver, Oracle)
In this talk we’ll introduce the concept of the “Live Object Pattern” and how Live Objects may be used to model configuration, scheduled jobs and points of integration with non-Coherence resources.

The Live Object pattern is fundamental to other pattern implementations, like the Command, Messaging and Push Replication.

13:00  Lunch

13:30  How To Build a Coherence Practice (Craig Blitz)
In this talk Craig discusses what happens after you’ve chosen and started to adopt Coherence.  ie: when the hard work begins.   The talk will help you get the most out of your investment both from a project and enterprise perspective by introducing you to the resources available from Oracle and through the Coherence ecosystem. He’ll discuss best organizational practices we’ve seen and how you can implement them to ensure success with Coherence. Drawing on significant experience with customers’ Coherence deployment, Craig will show what works and what doesn’t in practice.

14:45 Integrating Coherence and OSGi (David Whitmarsh)
In this technical talk David discusses the steps to integrate Coherence with OSGi.  David outlines the challenges, how to’s, traps and benefits of adopting a modular architecture with Coherence.

If you’re interested in adopting Coherence in an OSGi container, or even building a modular application with Spring, this is a great introductory talk.

15:45  Break

16:15  Cool Coherence Features (Harvey Raja, Oracle)
In this technical talk Harvey walks through some of the new features in Coherence 3.6, including Quorums and Default Serializers.  Additionally Harvey presents the new CohClipse plug-in for Eclipse, a tool to help generation serializers for Coherence.

17:00 Developing Custom Push Replication Providers (Brian Oliver, Oracle, with Solace Systems)
In this technical talk we discuss the development and configuration of custom Push Replication Providers, including the new JMS Push Replication Provider, that allows Coherence to use standard JMS providers as a means to manage replication state.

As a demonstration we’ll show how to configure Push Replication to use a Solace Messaging Appliance as replication infrastructure.

17:45 Close