Recommended Book: Real World Java EE Night Hacks by Adam Bien

Real World Java EE Night Hacks – Dissecting the Business Tier, Adam Bien, 2011, ISBN 9780557078325.

I highly recommend this very thin and down-to-the-earth-practical book to everybody interested in back-end Java (a basic knowledge of servlets, Java ORM, and REST might be useful). The book evolves around a small but realistic project (X-Ray), which we follow from the inception through couple of iterations til the end. Bien shows us how lean Java EE can be, how to profit from the functionality that it offers, and how these pieces of functionality fit together to deliver something useful. He actually introduces a complete Java EE development environment including continuous integration (CI), code quality analysis, functional and stress testing.

Some of the things that I appreciate most in the book is that we can follow author’s decision process with respect to implementation options (such as SOAP vs. REST vs. Hessian etc., a REST library vs. sockets, or when (not) to use asynchronous processing) and that we can see the evolution of the design from an initial  version that failed through cycles of growing and refactoring and eventually introducing new technologies and patterns (events, configuration over convention) to support new and increased requirements.

Creating Custom Login Modules In JBoss AS 7 (and Earlier)

JBoss AS 7 is neat but the documentation is still quite lacking (and error messages not as useful as they could be). This post summarizes how you can create your own JavaEE-compliant login module for authenticating users of your webapp deployed on JBoss AS. A working elementary username-password module provided.

Exposing Functionality Over HTTP with Groovy and Ultra-Lightweight HTTP Servers

I needed a quick and simple way to enable some users to query a table and figured out that the easiest solution was to use an embedded, ligthweight HTTP server so that the users could type a URL in their browser and get the results. The question was, of course, which server is best for it. I’d like to summarize here the options I’ve discovered – including Gretty, Jetty, Restlet, Jersey and others – and their pros & cons together with complete examples for most of them. I’ve on purpose avoided various frameworks that might support this easily such as Grails because it didn’t feel really lightweight and I needed only a very simple, temporary application.

I used Groovy for its high productivity, especially regarding JDBC – with GSQL I needed only two lines to get the data from a DB in a user-friendly format.

My ideal solution would make it possible to start the server with support for HTTPS and authorization and declare handlers for URLs programatically, in a single file (Groovy script), in just few lines of code. (Very similar to the Gretty solution below + the security stuff.)

Most interesting links of February ’12

Recommended Readings

• List of open source projects at Twitter including e.g. their scala_school – Lessons in the Fundamentals of Scala and effectivescala – Twitter’s Effective Scala Guide
• M. Fowler & P. Sadalage: Introduction into NoSQL and Polyglot Persistence (pdf, 11 slides) – what RDBMS offer and why it sometimes isn’t enough, what the different NoSQL incarnations offer, how and on which projects to mix and match them
• Two phase release planning – the best way to plan something somehow reliably is to just start doing it, i.e. just start the project with the objective of answering “Can this team produce a respectable implementation of that system by that date?” in as short time as possible (i.e. few weeks). Then: “Phase 2: At this point, there’s a commitment: a respectable product will be released on a particular date. Now those paying for the product have to accept a brute fact: they will not know, until close to that date, just what that product will look like (its feature list). What they do know is that it will be the best product this development team can produce by that date.” Final words: “My success selling this approach has been mixed. People really like the feeling of certainty, even if it’s based on nothing more than a grand collective pretending.”
• Tumblr Architecture – 15 Billion Page Views A Month And Harder To Scale Than Twitter – what SW (Scala, Finagle, heavily partitioned MySQL, …) and HW they use, the architecture (Firehose – event bus, cell design), lessons learned (incl. “MySQL (plus sharding) scales, apps don’t.”
• Jay Fields’ Thoughts: Compatible Opinions on Software – about teams and opinion conflicts – there are some areas where no opinion is really right (e.g. powerful language vs. powerful IDE) yet people may have very strong feeling about them. Be aware of what your opinions are and how strong they are – and compose teams so that they include more less people with compatible (not same!) opinions – because if you team people with strong opposing opinions, they’ll loose lot of productivity. Quotes: “I also believe that you can have two technically excellent people who have vastly different opinions on the most effective way to deliver software.” “I suggest that you do your best to avoid working with someone who has both an opposing view and is as inflexible as you are on the subject. The more central the subject is to the project, the more likely it is that productivity will be lost.”
• Jay Fields’ Thoughts: Lessons Learned while Introducing a New Programming Language (namely Clojure) – introducing a new language and winning the hearts of (sufficient subset of) the people is difficult and requires lot of extra effort. This is both an experience report and a pretty good guide for doing it.
• Jay Fields’ Thoughts: Life After Pair Programming – a proponent of pair-programming comes to the conclusion that in some contexts pairing may not be beneficial, i.e. the benefits of pair-programming don’t overweight the costs (for a small team, small software, …)
• The Why Monitoring Sucks (and what we’re doing about it) – the #monitoringsucks initiative- what tools there are, why they suck, what to do, new tools, what metrics to collect, blogs, …
  • Related: Getting started with the Sensu monitoring framework
• JBoss Byteman 2.0.0: Bytecode Manipulation, Testing, Fault Injection, Logging – a Java agent which helps testing, tracing, and monitoring code, code is injected based on simple scripts (rules) in the event-condition-action form (the conditions may use counters, timers etc.). Contrary to AOP, there is no need to create classes or compile code. “Byteman is also simpler to use and easier to change, especially for testing and ad hoc logging purposes.” “Byteman was invented primarily to support automation of tests for multi-threaded and multi-JVM Java applications using a technique called fault injection.” It was used e.g. to orchestrate the timing of activities performed by independent threads, for monitoring and statistics gathering, for application testing via fault injection. Contains a JUnit4 Runner for easily instrumenting the code under test, it can automatically load a rule before a test and unload it afterwards:

  @Test
  @BMRule(name="throw IOException at 1st call",
  targetClass = "TextLineProcessor",
  targetMethod = "processPipeline",
  action = "throw new java.io.IOException()")
  public void testErrorInPipeline() throws Exception { ... }

• How should code search work? – a thought-provoking article about how much better code completion could be if it profited more from patterns of usage in existing source codes – and how to achieve that. Intermediate results available in the Code Recommenders Eclipse plugin.

REST

• What Makes Jersey Interesting: Parameter Classes (by Coda Hale, 5/2009) – brief yet rich and very practical introduction into Jersey (the reference implementation of JAX-RS. i.e. REST, for Java) including error handling, parameter classes (automatic wrapping of primitive values). The following article, What Makes Jersey Interesting: Injection Providers, might be of interest too.
• How to GET a Cup of Coffee, 10/2008 – good introduction into creating applications based on REST, explained on an example of building REST workflow for the ordering process in Starbucks – a “self-describing state machine”. The advantage of this article is that it presents the whole REST workflow with GET, OPTIONS, POST, PUT and “advanced” features such as the use of If-Unmodified-Since/If-Match, Precondition Failed, Conflict. The workflow steps are connected via the Location header and a custom <next> link tag with rel and uri. Other keywords: etag, microformats, HATEOS (-> derive the next resource to access from the links in the previous one), Atom and AtomPub, caching (web trades latency for scaleability; if 1+s latency isn’t acceptable than web isn’t the right platform), URI templates (-> more coupling than links in responses), evolution (-> links from responses, new transitions), idempotency. “The Web is a robust framework for integrating systems at local, enterprise, and Internet scale.”

Links to Keep

Tools, Libraries etc.

• ClusterSSH – whatever commands you execute in the master SSH session are also execute in the slave sessions – useful if you often need to execute the same thing on multiple machines (requires Perl); to install on Mac: “brew install csshx”
• HTML5 Boilerplate (H5BP) – customizable initial HTML5 project template for a website; can be combined e.g. with Bootstrap, the HTML/JS/CSS toolkit (there is even a script to set them both up). Includes server configs for optimal performance, “delivers best practices, standard elements”.
• High performance libraries in Java – disruptor, Java Chronicle (ultra-fast in-memory db), Colt Matrix library (scientific computations), Javolution (RT Java), Trove collections for primitives, MG4J (free full-text search engine for large document collections), some serialization & other banchmarks links.
• Twitter Finagle – “library to implement asynchronous Remote Procedure Call (RPC) clients and servers. Finagle is flexible enough to support a variety of RPC styles, including request-response, streaming, and pipelining; for example, HTTP pipelining and Redis pipelining. It also makes it easy to work with stateful RPC styles; for example, RPCs that require authentication and those that support transactions.” Supports also failover/retry, service discovery, multiple protocol (e.g. http, thrift). Build on Netty, Java NIO. See the overview and architecture.
• Eclipse Code Recommenders – interesting plugin in incubation that tries to bring more more intelligent completion based more on context and the wisdom of the crowds (i.e. patterns of usage in existing source codes) to Eclipse

Clojure Corner

• Clojure/huh? – Clojure’s Governance and How It Got That Way – an interesting description how the development of Clojure and inclusion of new libraries is managed. “Rich is extremely conservative about adding features to the language, and he has impressed this view on Clojure/core for the purpose of screening tickets.” E.g. it took two years to get support for named arguments – but the result is a much better and cleaner way of doing it.
• Clojure Monads Series – comprehensive explanations of monads starting with Monads In Clojure

Quotes

A language that doesn’t affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing-

 - Alan Perlis

Lisp is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it; that experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use Lisp itself a lot.

Eric S. Raymond, “How to Become a Hacker”

Release 0.9.9 of Static JSF EL Expression Validator with Annotated Beans Autodetection

I’ve released version 0.9.9 of Static JSF EL Expression Validator (tool to check that EL expressions in JSF pages use only existing beans and properties), available for download from Maven Central. The main addition since the last version is the ability to detect managed beans based on annotations instead of reading them from faces-confix.xml or Spring config, thanks to the cool Reflections lib, and support for ui:repeat.

Most interesting links of November

Recommended Readings

• Recommended Reading by Poppendiecks – an excellent selection, starting with Lean from Trenches, Management 3.0, Specification by Example, The Lean Startup etc.
• Eric Allman says that Programming Isn’t Fun Any More  because problem solving has been replaced with learning, configuring, and integrating tons of libraries, frameworks, and tools and many people agree with that (as discussion on reddit proves). In other words we tend to go for any benefit we can have without considering the costs and for “easy” solutions without considering the true enemy: complexity. Perhaps we should always listen to the Rich Hickey’s Simple Made Easy talk before we add a lib/tool/framework?
• Dean Wampler claims that functional programming can bring the joy back – “[..] a functional language, Scala, Clojure, Haskell, etc. will greatly reduce the amount of code you create. That won’t solve the problem of trying to integrate with too many libraries, but you’ll be less tempted. I also believe those libraries will be less bulky, etc.“
• Few quotes from a related article by M. Taylor: To put it another way, libraries make excellent servants, but terrible masters. | [..] frameworks [..] do keep their promise of making things very quick and easy … so long as you do things in exactly the way the framework author intended | On libraries: [..] we all assume (I know I do) that “plug in solutions X1 and X3″ is going to be trivial. But it never is — it’s a tedious exercise in impedance-matching, requiring lots of time spent grubbing around in poorly-written manuals [..] | On the effect of language choice: [..] different languages, with their different expressive power and especially their different culture, yield very different experiences.
• To sum it up: Choose your tools and libraries wisely and always mind the global complexity. More usually means worse.
• Java Magazine – Adam Bien: Stress Testing Java EE 6 Applications (page 41+) – do developer stress testing! Using: JMeter, VisualVM to find out resource consumption and behavior in the application, VisualVM’s Sampler profiling tool [cca 20% overhead], a webapp to extract metrics from GF (STM)
• Java Magazine – Polyglot Programming on the JVM (page 50; excerpt from The Well-Grounded Java Developer) – why you should consider polyglot programming and how to decide whether to use it and what languages to pick, f.ex.: “These [Java's] qualities make the language a great choice for implementing functionality in the stable layer [of the polyglot programming pyramid]. However, these same attributes become a burden in the middle and upper [lower, DSL, on the linked image] tiers of the pyramid; for example: Recompilation is laborious; Static typing can be inflexible and lead to long refactoring times; Deployment is a heavyweight process; Java’s syntax is not a natural fit for producing DSLs.” “There is a wide range of natural use cases for *alternative languages*. [after identifying such a UC] You *now need to evaluate* whether using an alternative language is appropriate.”
• Intrusion Detection for Web Apps – Detection Points – If security is a concern of your web application then you should build intrusion detection into the application f.ex. leveraging the  OWASP AppSensor project. The key is to detect malicious/unexpected behavior and proactively do something such as locking the user out or alerting the admins. The page linked above lists some common suspicious behaviors such as the use of multiple usernames, unexpected HTTP command/method, additional/duplicated data in request. Worth checking out!
• Yammer Moving From Scala to Java- Scala is a cool language but sometimes its cost is higher than the benefits. Snippets from the post: “…the friction and complexity that
  comes with using Scala instead of Java isn’t offset by enough productivity benefit or reduction of maintenance burden …”. “Scala, as a language, has some profoundly interesting ideas in it. [...] But it’s also a very complex language. The number of concepts I had to explain to new members of our team for even the simplest usage of a collection was surprising: implicit parameters, builder typeclasses, ‘operator overloading’, return type inference, etc. etc.” (It’s claimed that only library authors need to know some of that but if it’s a part of library APIs, the users need to understand it too.) Notice that the author isn’t saying “Scala is bad” but only that Scala isn’t the best balance of their needs at this time, as Alex Miller put it*.
  Important note: The text wasn’t intended for publication and it is a private opinion of a Yammer developer, not the company itself. You should read the official Yammer’s position where Coda puts it into the right context.

Refactoring

• Opportunistic Refactoring by Martin Fowler – refactor on the go – how & why
• Michael Feathers: Getting Empirical about Refactoring – gather information that helps us understand the impact of our refactoring decisions using data from a SCM, namely File Churn (frequency of changes, i.e. commits) vs. Complexity – files with both high really need refactoring. Summary: “If we refactor as we make changes to our code, we end up working in progressively better code. Sometimes, however, it’s nice to take a high-level view of a code base so that we can discover where the dragons are. I’ve been finding that this churn-vs.-complexity view helps me find good refactoring candidates and also gives me a good snapshot view of the design, commit, and refactoring styles of a team.“

UIs and Web Frameworks

• Devoxx 2011 - WWW: World Wide Wait? A Performance Comparison of Java Web Frameworks (slides) – the authors did extensive performance testing of some of the most popular web frameworks. Of course it’s always hard to guess how general their results are, if/how they apply to one’s particular situation, and if they aren’t distorted in some way but it’s worth for their approach alone (AWS with its CloudWatch monitoring, WebDriver, additional measurement of page load with HAR and a browser plugin). In their particular tests GWT scored best, followed by Spring MVC, with JSF and Wicket lagging far behind (especially the MyFaces implementation). Conclusion: A web framework may have strong impact on performance and scalability, if they are important for you then do test the performance early with as realistic code and load as possible.
• JSF2 – Benchmark datatable by N. Labrot, 2/2011 – performance comparison of PrimeFaces 2.2.1, IceFaces 2.0, Richfaces 4.0.0M4 on a simple page with Ajax. I do not trust any benchmark that I don’t fake myself (for there are always too many factors that influence the conclusions to be drawn) but it’s interesting anyway – and perhaps a good thing to do before you decide for a JSF component library.
• Alex MacCaw: Asynchronous UIs – the future of web user interfaces and the Spine framework – users in 2011 shouldn’t anymore wait for pages to load and operations to complete, we should build asynchronous UIs where changes to the UI are performed immediately while a request to the server is sent in the background, similarly to sending e-mail in GMail, which returns at once displaying a non-intrusive “Sending…” notification. As a user I very much agree with Alex.
• Matt Raible’s 20 criteria for evaluating web frameworks, 2010 (detailed description, here’s a brief list) – Matt’s results are disputable and as he himself says you should always do your own evaluation and spikes but the criteria are pretty useful: Developer Productivity, Developer Perception, Learning Curve, Project Health, Developer Availability, Job Trends, Templating, Components, Ajax, Plugins or Add-Ons, Scalability, Testing, i18n and l10n, Validation, Multi-language Support (Groovy / Scala), Quality of Documentation/Tutorials, Books Published, REST Support (client and server), Mobile / iPhone Support, Degree of Risk.

NoSql

• Don’t use MongoDB via @nicolaiarocci – a (fake?!) bad experience with MongoDB – the text is not credible (the author is anonymous, s/he doesn’t explicitely state which version of MongoDB they used, the 10gen CTO can’t find a matching client and any evidence for some of the issues mentioned) but it  gives context for the read-worthy response from the 10gen CTO, and a post that nicely explains how to correctly design for MongoDB. A comment about MongoDB experience at Forsquare: “Currently we have dozens of MongoDB instances across several different data clusters storing over a TB of data and handling 10s of thousands of requests per second (mostly reads but the write load is reasonably high as well).Have we run into problems with MongoDB along the way? Yes, of course we have. It is a new technology and problems happen.Have they been problematic enough to seriously threaten our data? No they have not.“
• Martin Fowler on Polyglot Persistence – the are when will be choosing persistence solution with respect to our needs instead of mindlessly picking RDBMS is coming. Applications will combine multiple, specific solutions, f.ex. we could pick Redis (key-value) for caching, MongoDB (document DB) for product catalog, Neo4J (graph DB) for recommendations, RDBMS for financial data and reporting… (of course not all in one project!). Polyglot persistence will come at a cost (complexity, learning) – but it will come because the benefits are worth it – performance, data storage model and behavior more aligned with the business logic (NoSql databases ofer various models and tradeoffs and thus we can find a much better fit than with general-purpose RDBMs).

Talks & Video

• Adam Bien’s JavaOne talk Java EE 6: The Cool Parts (1h) – absolutely worth the time – a very practical fly through the cool features of Java EE (eventing, ..), most of the time is spent actually coding. Don’t forget to check also the interesting discussion below the video (JEE and other frameworks, Java FX and JSF 2, …).
• Jurgen Appelo’s keynote How to Change the World at Smidig 2011 is well done and highly useful. We all strive to change the world around us – as consultants we want to make our clients more agile, as team members we want to make our Scrum teams more self-organizing, as employees we want to help building knowledge-sharing and open culture, … . However it isn’t easy to influence or change people and culture and if we aren’t aware of all the dimensions of a change (system, individuals, interactions, environment) and how to work along each of them, we are much less likely to succeed. The knowledge and experience that Jurgen shares with us can help us a lot in having an impact. You can also download the slides and change management questions.
• Project X: What is being a programmer like? (5min) If ever again a non-geek asks you what you as a developer are doing, just show him this short and extremely funny video (created by my ex-employer – perhaps they estimated how much time and energy developers loose trying to explain it to normal people and decided to prevent this great waste )
• RSA Animate – Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us (10 min) – entertaining and enlightening; once we’ve enough money to cover our needs, it’s autonomy (self-direction), mastery, and purpose what motivates us (money actually decrease our performance). Now this is a great evidence for lean/agile – for they’re based on making people self-directing and encourage mastery (as in continous integration and top quality to enable steady pace). Autonomy enables engagement as does a higher purpose (“make the world a better place”) – Steve Jobs with his visions was able to provide such a purpose. Atlassian’s FedEx Days are a good example of what engagement and benefits autonomy brings.
• Simon Sinek: How great leaders inspire action (18 min, subtitles in 37 languages) – do you want to succeed, to change the world around you for the better, to start a new company? Then you must start by communicating “why” you do what you do, not “what” – like M. L. King, bro Wrights, and Apple. Very inspiring! (More in his Why book.)

Links to Keep

• Beyond jQuery: JavaScript tools for the HTML5 generation – three dozen JavaScript libraries tuned for mobile devices, Canvas-based animation, HTML5 video, local databases, server interaction, charting, geolocation, and more
• Best Practices for Securing Apache Tomcat 7

Favorite Quotes

Refactoring is like advertising: it doesn’t cost, it pays.
- Mary & Tom Poppendiecks, Implementing Lean Software Development, p.166

Clojure Corner

• Real World Clojure – email status tracking – using mulimethods to implement a state machine
• Slides from the Clojure/conj 2011 conference
• Conway’s Life in Clojure visualized via Processing

Where to Get Sample Java Webapps

I was unsuccessfuly looking for some decent, neither too simple nor to complex Java web application for Iterate hackaton “War of Web Frameworks”. I want to record the demo apps and options I’ve found in the case I’ll need it ever again. Tips are welcome.

What Is CDI, How Does It Relate to @EJB And Spring?

A brief overview of dependency injection in Java EE, the difference between @Resource/@EJB and @Inject, and how does that all relate to Spring – mostly in the form of links.

Context Dependency Injection (CDI, JSR 299) is a part of Java EE 6 Web Profile and itself builds on Dependency Injection for Java (JSR 330), which introduces @Inject, @Named etc. While JSR 330 is for DI only and is implemented e.g. by Guice and Spring, CDI adds various EE stuff such as @RequestScoped, interceptors/decorators, producers, eventing and a base for integration with JSF, EJBs etc. Java EE components such as EJBs have been redefined to build on top of CDI (=> @Stateless is now a CDI managed bean with additional services).

A key part of CDI aside of its DI capabilities is its awarness of bean contexts and the management of bean lifecycle and dependencies within those contexts (such as @RequestScoped or @ConversationScoped).

CDI is extensible – you can define new context scopes, drop-in interceptors and decorators, make other beans (e.g. from Spring) available for CDI,… .

Resources to check:

Most interesting links of October

Recommended Readings

• Steve Yegge’s Execution in the Kingdom of Nouns – I guess you’ve already read this one but if not – it is a well-written and amusing post about why not having functions as first class citizens in Java causes developers to suffer. Highly recommended.
• Reply to Comparing Java Web Frameworks – a very nice and objective response to a recent blog summarizing a JavaOne presentation about the “top 4″ web frameworks. The author argues that based on number of resources such as job trends, StackOverflow questions etc. (however data from each of them on its own is biased in a way) JSF is a very popular framework – and rightly so for even though JSF 1 sucked, JSF 2 is really good (and still improving). Interesting links too (such as What’s new in JSF 2.2?). Corresponds to my belief that GWT and JSF are some of the best frameworks available.
• Using @Nullable – use javax.annotation.Nullable with Guava’s checkNotNull to fail fast when an unexpected null appeares in method arguments
• JavaOne 2011: Migrating Spring Applications to Java EE 6 (slides) – nice (and visually attractive) comparison of JavaEE and Spring and proposal of a migration path. It’s fun and worthy to see.
• xUnitPatterns – one of the elementary sources that anybody interested in testing should read through. Not only it explains all the basic concepts (mocks, stubs, fakes,…) but also many pitfalls to avoid (various test smells such as fragile tests due to Data Sensitivity, Behavior Sensitivity, Overspecified Software [due to mocks] etc.), various strategies (such as for fixture setup), and general testing principles. The materials on the site were turned into the book xUnit Test Patterns: Refactoring Test Code (2007), which is more up-to-date and thus a better source.
• Eclipse tip: Automatically insert at correct position: Semicolon, Braces – in “while(|)” type “true {” to get ”while(true) {|” i.e. the ‘{‘ is moved to the end where it belongs, the same works for ‘;’
• Google Test Analytics – Now in Open Source – introduces Google’s Attributes-Components-Capabilities (ACC) application intended to replace laborous and write&forget test plans with something much more usable and quicker to set up, it’s both a methodology for determining what needs to be tested and a tool for doing so and tracking the progress and high-risk areas (based not just on estimates but also actual data such as test coverage and bug count). The article is a good and brief introduction, you may also want to check a live hosted version and a little more detailed explanation on the project’s wiki.
• JSF and Facelets: build-time vs. render-time (component) tags (2007) – avoid mixing them incorrectly
• StackOverflow: What are the main disadvantages of Java Server Faces 2.0? Answer: The negative image of JSF comes from 1.x, JSF 2 is very good (and 2.2 is expected to be just perfect ). Nice summary and JSF history review.
• Ola Bini: JavaScript in the small – best practices for projects using partly JavaScript – the module pattern (code in the body of an immediately executed function not to polute the global var namespace), handling module dependencies with st. like RequireJS, keeping JS out of HTML, functions generating functions for more readable code, use of many anonymous functions e.g. as a kind of named parameters, testing, open questions.

Talks

• Kent Beck’s JavaZone talk Software G Forces: The Effects of Acceleration is absolutely worth the 1h time. Kent describes how the development process, practices and partly the whole organization have to change as you go from annual to monthly to weekly, daily, hourly deployments. What is a best practice for one of these speeds becomes an impediment for another one – so know where you are. You can get an older version of the slides and there is also a detailed summary of the talk from another event.
• Rich Hickey: Simple Made Easy - Rich, the author of Clojure, argues very well that we should primarily care for our tools, constructs and artifacts to be “simple”, i.e. with minimal complexity, rather than “easy” i.e. not far from our current understanding and skill set. Simple means minimal interleaving – one concept, one task, one role, minimal mixing of who, what, how, when, where, why. While easy tools may make us start faster, only simplicity will make it possible to keep going fast because (growing) comlexity is the main cause of slowness.  And simplicity is a choice – we can create the same programs we do today with the tools of complexity with drastically simpler tools. Rich of course explains what, according to him, are complex tools and their simple(r) alternatives – see below. The start of the 1h talk is little slow but it is worth the time. I agree with him that we should much more thing about the simplicity/complexity of the things we use and create rather than easiness (think ORM).
  Read also Uncle Bob’s affirmative reaction (“All too often we do what’s easy, at the expense of what’s simple. And so we make a mess. [...] doing what is simple as opposed to what is easy is one of the defining characteristics of a software craftsman.”).

Random Notes from Rich’s Simple Made Easy Talk:

There are also better notes by Alex Baranosky and you may want to check a follow-up discussion with some Rich’s answers.

The complex vs. simple toolkit (around 0:31):

COMPLEXITY                             SIMPLICITY
State, objects                            Values
Methods                                   Functions, namespaces
vars                                          Managed refs
Inheritance, switch, matching  Polymorphism a la carte
Syntax                                      Data
Imperative loops, fold              Set functions
Actors                                      Queues
ORM                                         Declarative data manipulation
Conditionals                             Rules
Inconsistency                            Consistency

What each of the complexity constructs mixes (complects) together

CONSTRUCT                        COMPLECTS (MIXES)
State, objects – everything that touches it (for state complects time and value)
Methods – function and state, namespaces (2 classes, same m. name)
Syntax – Meaning, order
Inheritance – Types (ancestors, child)
Switch/matching – Multiple who/what pairs (1.decide who, 2.do what ?)
var(iable)s – Value, time
Imperative loops, fold – what/how (fold – order)
Actors – what/who
ORM – OMG
Conditionals – Why, rest of program (rules what program does are intertw. with the structure and order of the program, distributed all over it)

HE SIMPLICITY TOOLKIT (around 0:44)
CONSTRUCT            GET IT IVA…
Values – Final, persistent collections
Functions – a.k.a. stateless methods
Namespaces – Language support
Data – Maps, arrays, sets, XML, JSON etc.
Polymorphism a la carte – Protocols, Haskell type classes
Managed refs – Clojure/Haskell refs (compose time and value , not mix)
Set functions – Libraries
Queues – Libraries
Declarative data manipulation – SQL/LINQ/Datalog
Rules – Libraries, Prolog
Consistency – Transactions, values

True abstraction isn’t hiding complexity but drawing things away – along one of the dimensions of who, what, when, where, why [policy&rules of the app.], how.
Abstraction => there are things I don’t need – and don’t want – to know.
Why – do explore rules and declarative logic systems.
When, where – when obj. A communicates with obj. B. => put a queue in between them so that A doesn’t need to know where B is; you should use Qs extensively.

Links to Keep

• Incredibly Useful CSS Snippets -  “a list of CSS snippets that will help you minimize headaches, frustration and save your time while writing css” – few float resets, targetting specific browsers & browser hacks, cross-rowser transparency/min height/drop shadow, Google Font API, link styled by file type,

DevOps: Tools and libraries for system monitoring and (time series) data plotting

• Hyperic SIGAR API – open-source library that unifies collection of system-related metrics such as memory, CPU load, processes, file system metrics across most common operating systems
• rrd4j – Java clone of the famous RRDTool, which stores, aggregates and plots time-series data (RRD = round-robin database, i.e. keeps only a given number of samples and thus has a fixed size)
• JRDS “is performance collector, much like cacti or munins”, uses rrd4j. The documentation could be better and it seems to be just a one man project but it might be interesting to look at it.

Clojure Corner

• Alex Miller: Real world Clojure – a summary of experiences with using Clojure in enterprise data integration and analytics products at Revelytix, since early 2011 with a team of 5-10 devs. Some observations: Clojure code is 1-2 order of magnitude smaller than Java. It might take more time to learn than Java but not much. Clojure tooling is acceptable, Emacs is still the best. Debugging tools are unsurprisingly quite inferior to those for Java. Java profiling tools work but it may be hard to interpret the results. “[..]  I’ve come to appreciate the data-centric approach to building software.” Performance has been generally good so far.
• Article series Real World Clojure at World Singles – the series focuses on various aspects of using Clojure and how it was used to solve particular problems at a large dating site that starting to migrate to it in 2010. Very interesting. F. ex. XML generation, multi-environment configuration, tooling (“If Eclipse is your drug of choice, CCW [Counter ClockWise] will be a good way to work with Clojure.”, “Clojure tooling is still pretty young [..]  - but given how much simpler Clojure is than most languages, you may not miss various features as much as you might expect!”)
• StackOverflow: Comparing Clojure books – Programming Clojure, Clojure in Action, The Joy of Clojure, Practical Clojure – which one to pick? A pretty good comparison.
• Clojure is a Get Stuff Done Language – experience report – “For all that people think of Clojure as a “hard” “propeller-head” language, it’s actually designed right from the start not for intellectual purity, but developer productivity.”

JSF: Beware the Difference Between Build-Time and Render-Time Tags in Facelets

This is to remind me that I should never ever forget the cruical difference between build-time-only tags (i.e. having tag handlers only) and render-time tags that have corresponding components. The problem is that their lifespan is different and thus mixing them can easily lead to nasty surprises. Build time tags are used to modify the building of a component tree and have no effect during its rendering, where only the components participate.

A typical mistake is the nesting of ui:include (build-time) inside ui:repeat (render-time) using the var that ui:repeat declares: