Has the process of developing and delivering software really changed?

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As announced at the London Coherence SIG last week, we’ve released a new set of updates to the Coherence Incubator, the major highlights being;

• Introduction of the new Examples Project: This contains a set of Coherence Incubator Examples.  Once easy download that includes all of the patterns, including multiple push-replication deployments.
• A significant update to the previously released Processing Pattern, including new types of dispatchers and executors.

While a lot has been achieved in this set of updates, if I had to pick my favorite thing for the release, it would be our improved documentation examples.  In particular, the multi-site Auction example really rocks.  In the past few weeks we’ve demonstrated this around the world, including Oracle Open World and the London Coherence SIG, with fantastic feedback.  I can’t wait for the next release… and to demonstrate it on multiple clouds at QCon San Francisco in a few weeks.

So cool.  Just saw the latest Sun Microsystems home page.

Sun have just released their first in depth Oracle Coherence blue-print (white paper) documenting the architecture, performance and scalability impacts seen in a large application.  As a comparison, the document outlines the performance and scalability of an application both with and without using Oracle Coherence.  Apart from the performance numbers (which are obviously good), their independent tests demonstrate near perfect linear scalability to over 80 servers and a 40% resource reduction on the database.  The numbers are very consistent.

The lesson here:  Predictable Performance and Predictable Scalability beats plain old scalability, every time.

It’s hard to believe but another year has passed and it’s time again for Oracle Open World in San Francisco. Like last year, it’s going to be big.  Apparently San Francisco is bracing itself for an influx of 85,000 or so delegates, not all talking about Coherence obviously, but there will be a lot more than last year. A lot more!

In terms of agenda the Coherence presentations, panels, tutorials and hands-on-labs all appear as part of the Application Grid theme – think of Application Grids as fully managed and flexible infrastructure for running applications, everything from the operating system to the top of the application stack (including open source stacks).  Perhaps “private cloud” might be a way of thinking about it (typically how our customers are talking about it).

There are over 80 sessions on the topic of Application Grids, covering everything from WebLogic, Tuxedo, JRockit, Enterprise Management, Virtualization and Coherence.  There are over a dozen customer presentations.  Nearly half of these sessions are focusing on Coherence.

Like last year everything is being “demoed” in the DEMOgrounds, the Fusion Middleware Pavillion and the Oracle Technology Network lounge.  All of the areas are staffed by the actual engineers, product managers and/or executives from the product divisions.

So if you’re in San Francisco, be sure to drop by the Coherence booth (and others) to say hi.  We’ve got some really cool demos cooking. We can’t wait to show them off!

A quick guide to Application Grid sessions is available at http://www.oracle.com/goto/appgridopenworld, or if you like as a PDF.

Hope to see you there.

Here’s the current agenda for the next London Coherence SIG event, to occur on the 29th of October, from 2pm to 6pm at the Oracle London Office.

[Updated] Registration is now open at http://www.ukoug.org/calendar/show_event.jsp?id=4563

1. Coherence and Incubator Update
Noah Arliss: Coherence Engineering, United States

In this talk we’ll look at some of the new features in Coherence 3.5.2 and changes since 3.4 and 3.5.  We’ll also outline some of the feature themes for the next set of releases.

2. Simplifying (Server Side) Event Driven Architectures
Brian Oliver: Coherence Engineering, United Kingdom

In this talk we look at the results of the “Seismic” research project – a new way to develop server-side event-driven system with Coherence, without using Backing Maps and other custom extensions to Coherence.

3. Processing Pattern Revisited
Noah Arliss: Coherence Engineering, United States

We’ve done a lot of work since the first release of the Processing Pattern.  In this talk we’ll look at some of the changes and new features to enable “compute-grid” style development with Coherence.

4. Rapid Talk: Building GUIs with Coherence, SWT and JFaces
Brian Oliver: Coherence Engineering, United Kingdom

In this rapid talk (no slides) we’ll look at techniques for simplifying the construction of GUI’s for Coherence when using SWT/JFaces.

5. Rapid Talk: How to use the Command Line utility
Brian Oliver: Coherence Engineering, United Kingdom

In this rapid talk (again, no slides) we’ll look at how to use the Command Line utility, how to perform queries, extract values, define filters and repeat commands.

Hope to see you there!

– Brian

We finally managed to get the new Coherence Incubator releases out at the end of last week.  Unfortunately I’ve been on the road/in the air so I didn’t get much of a chance to blog about them.  As usual each project page contains a high-level overview of the new stuff/updates and changes. For those that want more even more detail, there’s always the history.txt files in the source. However for those that want to know more about the factors/motivations for the changes, here’s a brief commentary.

Cross-Project Changes

With increasing adoption of the Incubator Projects in the community we found that some adopters were running into name-clash problems with the cache names we’ve been using.  ie: we use a cache called “messages” and so it seems do other people!  So one of the major changes in the release was to introduce name-spaces for all of the Incubator cache names.  Hence forth all Incubator cache names are prefixed with “coherence.<incubator-project>.<cachename>”.

In addition to this we refactored more of the commonly used code and pushed it down into Coherence Commons.  But more about that next.

Coherence Common 1.4.0

Within Coherence Common we made two significant changes.  The first involved moving the sequence generation code from the Coherence Command Pattern into Common making it more generally available without needing to depend on Coherence Common.  The second  change involved “hardening” the Ranges implementation.  While the previous Ranges implementation was sufficient for the uses within the Coherence Incubator, after code review we found several things needed to be changed, improved and fixed.

Coherence Command Pattern 2.4.0

Within the Command Pattern we also made two significant changes.  The first was an internal refactoring to remove the use of the Invocation Service and instead use EntryProcessors.  The motivation for this was mainly to support the use of *Extend clients to submit Commands (and example Extend Cache Configuration is included in the source).  The main impact of this change was the internal separation of Commands that are managed as “co-located” v’s those that are “distributed”.  That is, there are two caches now to hold Commands, depending on the “management strategy” chosen for the contexts.  There are where no changes to the APIs.  The second change introduced the notion of a “batch command”.  This allows a batch of commands to be submitted atomically.  For some use cases this allows for significant performance and throughput improvements.

Coherence Functor Pattern 1.2.0

Apart from the introduction of name-spaces for the Functor Pattern caches, we simply upgraded the project to use the new Command Pattern and Commons releases.

Coherence Messaging Pattern 2.4.0

Apart from the introduction of name-spaces for the Messaging Pattern and the upgrade to use the new Command Pattern/Common projects, the only changes involved resolving two defects and hardening subscription time-outs.

Coherence Push Replication Pattern 2.4.0

Within the Push Replication Pattern we made several enhancements.  These included;

a). The ability to support cache-side asynchronous batching of replication to the push replication engine (will provide at least 2x performance improvements)

b). Introduced the FilteringBatchPublisherAdapter that provides the ability to filter out entries before they are pushed to a site (publisher)

c). Introduced the CoalescingBatchPublisherAdapter that provides the ability to coalesce entry operations (ie: coalesce multiple entry updates into a single operation) prior to being pushed to a site (publisher).

d). Fixing the spelling mistake in the DefaultPushReplicationManager class name! (oops).

Having just finished the planning for the next round of releases (and new patterns), I’m really looking forward to what’s next. We should get the roadmap for everyone to see in the next week.

Here’s the current agenda for the next London Coherence SIG event, to occur on the 13th of August, from 2pm to 6pm at the Oracle London Office.

You can now register using the UKOUG Coherence SIG site  here

1. Introduction to Oracle Enterprise Manager for Coherence

Oracle Enterprise Manager provides a complete integrated management solution for monitoring and management of applications, middleware, security, databases, virtual machines, configurations, operating systems and other enterprise class non-Oracle infrastructure.  With the recent release of the Coherence Management pack, Oracle Enterprise Manager now has the capability to manage Coherence Clusters, all from within the standard web-based management console.

In this talk we demonstrate the features of the Coherence Management Pack for Oracle Enterprise Manager, including monitoring real-time and historical information, runtime configuration, raising alerts and provisioning.

2. Just Plain Cool: The other cool things in Coherence 3.5

In this talk we look at several of the “other” new features inside Coherence 3.5.  In particular we look at the extensions made to the PartitionListener interface, Partitioned Backing Maps, the notion of a BinaryEntry, index support for local, replicated and continuous query caches, support for processAll() and POF Extractors.

3. Introduction to the Processing Pattern

In this talk we introduce the concept and incubated implementation of the Processing Pattern – a new mechanism to perform grid-computing with Coherence.  We demonstrate how this may be used to have standard Java Runnables and Callables reliably managed and executed in the Data Grid, together with the framework for creating your own task execution framework.

4. Coherence and Incubator Release and Roadmap Update

In this brief talk we look at some of the up coming features in Coherence and new projects on the Coherence Incubator.

Hopefully it will still be Summer!

Cheers

– Brian

Upgrading software that you use and depend on all the time, especially for your work, can be a nervous process.  Questions like; will my old data still be available?  can I rollback if it goes horribly wrong?  Upgrading a phone, is potentially worse.  Not only could data be lost, but also the ability to communicate!

Luckily it seems that Apple have this worked out.  Today I upgraded my iPhone 3G (version 2.0) to version 3.0.  It worked beautifully.

Having expected to lose everything on my phone (as the update apparently wipes it during the upgrade process), I made sure everything was backed up, even to the point of remembering which episode of House I was up too.  However I performed the upgrade (took about 30 minutes) and everything worked.  Well it has so far

All of the stuff I spent time backing up was still on the phone, notes, music, videos and even all of my SMS messages.

Even better, it seems a little bit faster.  It’s certainly seems faster finding the communications network when I reboot it.

Reserve the afternoon of the 13th of August. That’s when the next London Coherence SIG: Summer Edition will be held.  It will be at the usual place, the Oracle City Office in London.

We should have the agenda and registration pages up on Monday/Tuesday next week.  As a sneak peek, expect a bunch of new Incubator patterns, focusing on simplifying the creation of event-driven grid applications and performing distributed-calculations across a grid.

Hope to see you there.

Back to the concrete jungle next week.