plain old objects

In April 2012, I started giving a talk called Decomposing applications for deployability and scalability. It discusses the benefits and drawbacks of decomposing a monolithic application into a collection of independently deployable and scalable services and explores various design issues that then need to be addressed.

I’m publishing the reimagined transcript of the talk as a series of articles on this blog. Part 1 in the series  described the limitations of a monolithic architecture. In Part 2 (PDF), I look at the benefits and drawbacks of decomposing a monolithic application into a collection of independently deployable and scalable services. Part 2 introduces the scale cube, which is a three dimensional scaling model, and describes the impact of applying Y-axis splits (a.k.a. functional decomposition) to a system.

After SpringOne Beijing and SpringOne Bangalore, Hyderabad was the third stop on the fourteen day trip. This was my first visit to the city, which seems to have a richer history than Bangalore, and a lot more to see as a tourist. On the first afternoon, @jencompgeek, @jeremyg484 and I had time to visit the amazing Golkonda Fort.

SpringOne Hyderabad was massive. There was even more people, more energy and more enthusiasm than at SpringOne Bangalore. After giving the same keynote and presentation as in Bangalore, I spent the rest of the day talking with lots of attendees and getting my photograph taken numerous times! Unfortunately, I haven’t seen many of those photos online.

Incidentally, the food at  SpringOne Bangalore, and SpringOne Hyderabad (along with SGCE 2012 Mexico City) was the best conference food I’ve ever had. It was impressive that high quality, host and very tasty food was prepared for a such large number of people. Other conferences should take note.

Speaking of food, that evening we went to Paradise, a delicious Hyderabadi Biryani house. Afterwards, we stopped by the christmas decorations outside the hotel.

The day after the conference I went on a great tour of Hyderabad courtesy of detoursindia.com. I’ll write about that in a separate post.

After Hyderabad, I then flew to Dubai, the fourth and final stop on the trip, for a relaxing weekend on the beach.

Last week I attended the excellent Oredev conference. This was my first time at Oredev, which covers a wide range of software development topics and takes place in Malmo, Sweden.

I gave a talk titled Polyglot application development on Cloud Foundry. Here are the slides:

You also watch the video.

Some of my favorite talks included:

• Brian Foote‘s Why Mud still rules and Software in the Age of Sampling. Brian is one of the authors of the famous Big Ball of Mud paper. I’ve been a fan of his work for many years and it was a real pleasure to listen to his talk.
• It’s Not You, It’s Them: Why Programming Languages Are Hard To Teach by Zed Shaw. A very thought provoking talk although I didn’t agree with every point.
• Micro-Service Architecture by Fred George. Fred pushes the idea of a modular, polyglot architecture (see, for an example my Decomposing applications for scalability ande deployability talk) to the extreme by building application out of very small (e.g. 100 LOC) services. It’s an intriguing idea since you no longer have to worry about technical debt accumulating since you can simply rewrite the service. Nor do you need to worry about inexperienced or cowboy programmers since the amount of damage they can do is limited.
• Nashorn: Optimizing JavaScript and dynamic language execution on the JVM by Marcus Lagergren. This was a fascinating talk especially because of the idea of Node.jar – a NodeJS implementation for the JVM. Imagine being able to escape the shackles of the single-threaded Javascript runtime by writing a NodeJS application that uses  JSR-223 to invoke an ExecutorService.
• From Collective Intelligence to Collaborative Creation by Hojun Song an artist who has built satellite that will be launched in the very near future. This talk blew my mind. Apparently, if you are determined to work through challenges such as the regulatory hurdles the launch costs are around $40K thanks to the Cubesat project. You can even buy a Cubesat kit. Hojun has partially funded the project by selling t-shirts. Wow!

Here is something to consider when thinking about and discussing software:

But love is blind and lovers cannot see
The pretty follies that themselves commit;
For if they could, Cupid himself would blush
To see me thus transformed to a boy.

Hate (e.g. OrmHate) is equally as blinding.

It’s important to remember that every technology that solves a problem comes with  benefits and drawbacks.

Except for PhillyETE, and GlueCon, most of the conferences I’ve been to this year have been overseas, e.g.  JavaZone, JFokus, QCon London, and Egyptian Java developers conference and the Cloud Foundry open tour in Ukraine, Russia, England, and India etc..  Consequently,  it made a nice change to recently speak at some local events: JavaOne 2012 and Silicon Valley Code Camp.

On the Sunday of JavaOne I taught a one day Spring class at JavaOne’s Java University. The class covered the fundamentals of the Spring framework – dependency injection, aspect-oriented programming and portable service abstractions – along with more modern features such as Spring Data for NoSQL and Cloud Foundry‘s support for Spring applications.

I also had a couple of conference sessions on the Wednesday. The first was Developing polyglot persistence applications.  This talk describes how an application can leverage the strengths of both SQL and NoSQL databases such as Redis. You can listen to the audio or view the slides:

The second talk was Developing applications with Cloud Services. This talk described how to develop applications that use cloud services such as Twilio (Telephony-aaS) and Factual (Geo database -aaS). You can listen to the audio or view the slides:

On saturday I spoke at Silicon Valley Code Camp. I’ve wanted to go to this event for the past few years but there were always conflicts. What a great event! Over 3000 attendees; awesome conference; the only thing lacking was plentiful coffee. At this event I gave the latest version of Decomposing applications for deployability and scalability. Here are the slides for that talk:

Recently @vambenepe tweeted

An excellent developer who doesn’t think like a PM is like a tennis player with awesome shots but who doesn’t aim.

This tweet reminded me of another excellent analogy that I’d heard many years ago:

Developers are like cars. They have an engine that determines how hard they can work; a gas tank that determines how long they can work; and a compass that determines which direction they head in.

In other words, it doesn’t matter how clever you are and how hard you work. If you are not creating something of value to your customer then you are wasting your time.