netzooid

I’m on my way back from The Server Side Java Symposium, also known as the Convention That Needs To Find a Shorter Name. All in all a really good time. I’m completely exhausted from it though. There were a ton of smart people there and it was an honor to be in the speaker lineup.

There were a lot of really great sessions and unforunately I missed many of them, but heres a quick recap.
XFire Session: Yeah, so this is one I had to attend because I was speaking :-). I realized afterward that my session had very little to do with XFire at all. It ended up being about SOA, JAX-WS, and how to write effective web services. I think it was well received. The most surprising (and cool) part to me was about the dozen or so individuals coming up to me afterward to tell me that they were using XFire and in many cases how much they liked it. Thanks everyone!

The slides from my talk are posted here if you’re interested.

SOA with POJOs: James Strachan gave a talk on the first day that gave a nice recap on the principles of SOA. He also gave a good quick overview of JAX-WS, SCA, etc.

Mobile Java Application Continuum: OK, I didn’t attend this talk but I really wish I had. Eugene Ciurana put it on and talked about all the problems in developing J2ME applications. J2ME is unique because most of the problems that you run into are not technical, but rather political. Its a lot of carriers trying to protect their turf and it is just sickening. This talk will also go down as having one of the nicest entries from Hani ever.

Ted Neward on Messaging: Ted gave a good overview of when we should use RPC and when we should use messaging. While Paul Brown was nitpicking a few things during the session, it was overall very good - Ted is a good speaker and easy to listen to.

Codehaus BOF: while almost no one showed up to the Codehaus BOF because it wasn’t listed on the schedule, I did meet a half dozen great people which was excellent. The other reason that people didn’t show was because of Crazy Bob’s crazy star trek wedding, which nearly all the Codehausers went to. Congrats Bob and I hope you’re feeling more coherent now than the last time I saw you!

If you’re having troubles emailing me, this is why:

DDOS Attack on Joker.com Nameservers
Joker.com currently experiences massive distributed denial of service
attacks against nameservers.
This affects DNS resolution of Joker.com itself, and also domains which
make use of Joker.com nameservers.
We are very sorry for this issue, but we are working hard for a
permanent solution.
Thank you for your understanding,
Your Team of Joker.com

Joker is my registrar and this had made all my servers unusable right now - probably because of some kids thought it would be cool to bring down a whole bunch of nameservers. The worst part about it is that I can’t do anything to fix it.
Oy vey.

On my to Vegas today for The Server Side Java Symposium. I’ll be doing a BOF on the Codehaus and a talk on XFire and SOA. There was a bit of discussion/confusion in my talk at ETech on whether or not we actually need web services (some guy was pushing CORBA hard). I hope to bring some of that in focus a bit and dicuss what makes a WS based SOA a bit different, from say a POJO SOA, and when you should consider one or the other.

Anywho, if you’re going and would like to meet up, drop me a line - dan AT netzooid.com.

About a week and a half ago I finally received my new Sun T2000 machine. While I was expecting a big machine, I wasn’t expecting a forklift pallette with a couple boxes on it. Nor was I expecting it to take two people to get down into my office. So it is a bit cluttered with boxes right now.

My first experience with the machine was a disappointment. I had a little run in with the Advanced Lights Out Manager (ALOM). ALOM is for “remote out-of-band management”. I.e. its a mini OS that lets you turn the machine on and off. When you start up the machine ALOM boots and you need to log into it to turn on Solaris. However, to log onto this machine you need a Serial->RJ45 cable and have to connect through your computer’s local serial port. Oy! What year is this? This actually wouldn’t have been that bad except that they didn’t ship that cable to me and no one in west Michigan sells one. So after a couple trips to the computer store and some soldering work, I managed to assemble one myself.

Power on. “My goodness, it sounds like a hurricane.”

Onto benchmarks. I had a specific project which I needed to benchmark last weekend involving web services. My first realization was that between my laptop and my desktop I wasn’t able to throw enough raw data at it to make it hurt. The benchmark involved 1K request and 1K response SOAP messages. I was maxing out at 1100 tx/s (about 1MB read/1MB write per second). While this was about 4-5x faster than my 2GHz Dell, I knew I wasn’t pushing it. CPU utilization on the Sun box was about 40% and both my client machines were at 100%. So this weekend I did a more thorough benchmark with large message sizes. I hope to do a follow up benchmark soon with small message sizes (1-5K), but I need to find more client computers first.

The Benchmark

• Server: Sun T2000, 4x 1 Ghz cores, 16 GB RAM
• Client: Dell Dimension 2400
• Network: Crossover cable, full duplex 100 MB/s

The benchmark was designed to test the web service performance of the machine. I developed a Customer web service. It contains the following operations:

• Add: Allows you to to submit an array of customers. (100K request, .4K response)
• Add Async: Same as Add, except no response message (100K request)
• Get: Allows you to retreive an array of customers. (.4K request, 100K response)
• Echo: Echoes an array of customers that you sent back to you (100K request, 100K response)

This should give a good idea of real world scenarios where data is being shared via a webservice. The web service used is described by this WSDL. The web service was run on XFire and Jetty. The underlying XML parser was Woodstox.

Results

I was mostly interested in two main numbers: throughput (MB XML/s) and latency (ms). Lets look at througput first:

As you can see, once we reach enough clients throughput is very consistent. Likewise, the latency scales very consitently with the # of clients:

Conclusions

The T2000 is a great machine. I would recommend it to anyone doing high volume web services. It can easily do 10 MB/s of XML/Web service throughput. To put the above numbers in comparison, it gets more than 5 times the througput of my Intel 2GHz Dell. I really regret not ordering the 8 core version as I think that would have made a big difference in my throughput. Latency is also quite reasonable provided you aren’t throwing more than 10MB/s of data at it. But if you do have spiked loads, it can definitely handle the extra connections. They’ll just need to wait their turn.

The one possible downside of the T2000 is that all the cores are 1GHz. So latency for any single message may be slower than if you were running a 4GHz machine. However, I don’t anticipate this being that much of an issue.

Justin Stepka pointed to this historic documentary on ARPAnet on his blog a couple days ago. Its really interesting to hear as you realize that some ideas have been around for a long time. If you look closely you can ever the beginnings of Service Oriented Architecture:

…the correlation, the coordination of the activity, is essentially right there in the computer network itself. This is obviously going to make a tremendous difference in how we plan, organize, and execute almost everything of intellectual consequence. [12:00]

…Stanford…sees the network as a multilevel experiment in resource sharing where the resources available are people, computers, data. [18:00]

…various computer centers would presumably become expert in some area and provide some kind of resource that be useful to all the others and they could concentrate on it. They wouldn’t have to cut accross the whole board and spread out their efforts among many different types of programs. [19:00]

It reminds me of a post from Eric Newcomer that comments that vendor suspicion still runs high for SOA and web services. I think that is partly because a lot of people don’t understand how old SOA is and how webservices are just another step on our attempt to approach it. This is a journey which started a long time ago and which has a long path ahead of it yet.

Just finished my presentation at the Philadelphia Emerging Tech conference. It was on SOA with XFire, now available online here. It goes into what I think SOA is and also some XFire basics. Get it while its hot!

In a post a while back I said that there is an expectation now for several things in web applications: social interactions, RSS, and tagging. Spout.com is a website which some of friends just launched which is bringing these together in an interesting way. (Take that as a disclaimer! :-))

Spout, I believe, aims to be a community of people who love films. It brings these people together through social interfaces, tagging, and blogs. For instance, It allows you to form ad-hoc groups of people. For instance, I was recently invited to a group called the SNL Alumni Foundation. Its a cool series of lists and discussions about former SNL cast members. Hone in on the Farley File and find Chris Farley’s movies. Want to be notified of updates? Subscribe to the feed. Or participate in discussions about the movies. One of the more interesting groups I ran into was the knitting group - for those who love knitting and movies that contain knitting scenes… I don’t think I’ll comment on that though.

Spout has also taken the tagging thing and run with it. Interestingly, tags on spouthave taken on a more verb form, like the Loved-It tag as opposed to the simple adjectives people use now days (like just “good movie”). The tags also let people form ad-hoc movie lists. I’ve always been a big fan of the lists at Amazon, but they’re usually controlled by one person. But via tagging people can form their own lists, like the niche list 6th-grade-sleepovers.

I kind of feel that Spout is like an Amazon meets Flickr meets MySpace. This is their first step out there and it’ll be interesting to see where they go. I know the team has a lot of ambitions to bring good films to people and have a lot of ideas on how to do it.

IONA’s Eric Newcomer writes about the need for a new kind of software:

People don’t need more IT, they need better IT…

In short, the industry needs a different kind of software. Not the stack of features and functions designed for new application development, but a kernel of distributed software capable of modernizing and improving existing software — providing just the right amount of added value (and at the right price of course) to solve today’s problems. Yesterday’s software just won’t do it - certainly not at any reasonable price.

Stacks just aren’t going to cut it as we move foward. We need to move away from focusing on technology issues and into solving business problems. But, Eric provides no guidance though as to what this new software will look like.
I’ve had a few thoughts which revolve SOA type concepts and are undoubtedly not new. First, in my little world writing a software spec would be nearly synonymous with writing the software. By defining the semantics, interfaces and model you wouldcreate the software. Easier said then done though. Second, I think we will undoubtedly see the rise of more reusable business components. Need to integrate payroll? Download this service and wire it in.

Given a chance to reinvent software development from scratch what would you do?

This article on Firefox making $72 million astounds me:

…the for-profit Mozilla Corporation, made $72M last year and is on target to have 120 employees this year….Mozilla Corporation makes all that money because of the Google Search box on the top right. If you search with that box (which I do all day long) and you click on the Google ads on the results page Firefox gets ~80% of that. They also have Amazon in the search box, and other services that I’m sure kick them back some affiliate fees. Brilliant.

Firefox is great and all that, but shouldn’t I be receiving some of that money for my attention (yes, I’m that selfish)? Someone should invent a wrapper which intercepts all the websites that you go to (amazon, google, etc) and gives you the commission if you buy something.

Or maybe I should just accept that only comes out to like $3 ever year, acknowledge that I’m getting a great browser, and move on. I’m just jealous really.

We’re currently evaluating the Sun CoolThreads T2000 boxes for a project we’re working on. At Jonathan Schwartz’s request, I’m blogging about my experiences.
These machines are looking pretty sweet. For instance:

• An 8 core 1.2 GHz UltraSPARC T1 processor
• The best performance/watt in its class
• They’re small
• They’re reasonably priced, starting at $3K for the T1000 and $8K for the T2000
• Did I mention they’re fast? Like double the speed of a dual 3.8 GHz pentium system.

Sun has this wonderful try before you buy idea going on. Except its not so wonderful in reality. Turns out the machines are in such high demand it takes forever to get ahold of one.

After I order my system, I get an email from one of the sales rep that said “thanks for the purchase, email Jane who will be your actual sales rep.” I think thats kind of strange, but I emailed her asking about possibly getting a T1000 to try instead of a T2. After a couple days they determine, no thats not possible. Oh well.

About two days pass and I start thinking… hmmm.. did they ship my machine? So I email. My sales representitive is OUT OF THE OFFICE (in caps because thats how it came in the email). I email again, finally someone else responds. My machine is not going to ship for another week. They are “ramping up product inventory.” Oi.
I emailed them a couple days ago asking for benchmarks relating to XML. No response. And once again my rep is OUT OF THE OFFICE. I also cc’d two others, no response from them either.
So now I’m in anxious anticipation of my machine. I’m hoping it actually shipped on Friday, but the comments here aren’t helping my confidence. All of them full of hope, but left still wanting their machine…
By now you’ve noticed this isn’t a review, just me protesting at the lack of machine to review and the crappy sales process. Heres hoping I get a machine and we can do part 2 next week!