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Monday July 13, 2009

Google App Engine Urlfetch problem, possible impact on Google Docs/Spreadsheets

I'm trying out Google App Engine for Java with a small app that uses the ROME library to fetch some RSS feeds from my blogs. It's pretty cool when it does work, not least because my own Java hosting provider who hosts *this* blog firewalls off outgoing traffic, thus GAE represents one way to get around this limitation without having to pay for an entire dedicated server or say, VPS hosting.

I've been having some intermittent problems with the Urlfetch service on the Google App Engine in the past few days. Most RSS fetches would go through but some would fail with exceptions that go something like this :

Uncaught exception from servlet
java.io.IOException: Unknown
at com.google.appengine.api.urlfetch.URLFetchServiceImpl.handleApplicationException(URLFetchServiceImpl.java:56)
at com.google.appengine.api.urlfetch.URLFetchServiceImpl.fetch(URLFetchServiceImpl.java:30)
...

At the same time, over the past few days and particularly over the weekend when I was trying to update some spreadsheets online over at Google Docs, I have noticed that many of my automatically-updated currency/exchange rate cells would have errors/invalid values.

Now this is just speculation, but given the way Google's cloud is supposed to work, if platform updates are supposed to be almost instantly deployed and available across the entire cloud, perhaps the converse may be true - that platform errors are also instantly visible and affects the entire cloud. So this Urlfetch problem may well have an impact on Google Docs spreadsheets that pull data from elsewhere, such as those cells that automatically grab the latest forex exchange rate figures and populate them into my spreadsheets.

Now these are pretty early days yet for cloud computing, whether from Google, Amazon or anyone else, but it's something to think about if you are considering jumping onto the latest-and-greatest tech-fashion-bandwagon :)

(2009-07-13 11:43:18 SGT) [Java] Permalink

Monday April 20, 2009

Oracle to buy Sun Microsystems for $7.4 billion at $9.50 per share

money.cnn.com, nytimes.com :

Oracle said Monday [20 Apr 2009] it has entered into a definitive agreement to buy Sun Microsystems in a deal worth $7.4 billion. Oracle said it will buy Sun Microsystems common stock for $9.50 per share in cash, a 42% premium from Friday's closing price of $6.69.

The deal with Oracle came about 2 weeks after IBM ended its talks with Sun. The Sun board balked after IBM lowered its offer to $9.40 a share from $10. A Oracle-Sun deal disrupts the traditional relationships formed between some of the technology industry's largest players. "The acquisition of Sun transforms the IT industry," said Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, in a statement. "Our customers benefit as their systems integration costs go down while system performance, reliability and security go up."

First thoughts :

1. How many jobs are going to be lost over at Sun? Just received this tweet earlier from Chris Yeo : "Wow, Sun Microsystems has laid off quite a number of people in its Singapore office. Sounds bad."

2. Oracle now owns Java. Now what for Java?

3. Oracle now has both Oracle Database and the MySQL database. Now what?

4. Ditto for Weblogic and Glassfish.

5. Ditto for their portal, SOA, ESB and other products.

6. So, what happens to Jonathan Schwartz?

7. Sun sold out for a difference of 10 cents per share. Well I don't know the background story yet, but perhaps it made a big difference to them.

8. Yup, the IT industry and landscape has just been transformed. Big time.

9. So as a customer, should I look forward to bundled deals with Sun servers pre-installed with Weblogic App Server and Oracle Database and ready to go? I'd like that.

(2009-04-20 21:06:57 SGT) [Java] Permalink

Friday November 14, 2008

Sun Microsystems to cut 6000 jobs amid global credit crisis, Java pioneer Rich Green to leave

bloomberg.com :

Sun Microsystems plans to cut as many as 6,000 workers amid the global credit crisis. The reduction will eliminate as much as 18% of the staff, Sun said today [14 Nov 2008] - it had 33,000 employees at the end of September. The company is cutting back to cope with the "global economic realities," CEO Jonathan Schwartz said. Rich Green, executive vice president for software, will leave. Sun last month posted its second loss in three quarters and said its financial-services customers were curbing orders until they have more liquidity. Sun is the third company in Santa Clara to cut jobs this week. Applied Materials announced plans to cut 1,800 jobs, and National Semiconductor said it will shed about 5% of staff.

- This is hardly the first time that Sun has had to wield the axe. But in this environment of ongoing global economic collapse, this hardly comes as a surprise either. What is really telling in this instance is how the rapidly imploding financial industry is dragging down entire chunks of the business eco-system around it as it sinks, from limo drivers in New York to Broadway shows to IT jobs and now to server companies. The body count will be high.

(2008-11-14 23:01:56 SGT) [Java] Permalink

Thursday March 29, 2007

eBay Internals

javablogs.com -> ostas.blogspot.com -> addsimplicity.com :

It's a presentation on the internal architecture of eBay. Some statistics : 212,000,000 registered users, 2 Petabytes of data, 26 Billion SQL executions, and over 1 billion page views (!!) per day.

Under the section "Scaling the Application Tier - Massively Scaling J2EE", they have a "Step 1 - Throw out most of J2EE. eBay scales on servlets and a rewritten connection pool". That's interesting :)

(2007-03-29 10:50:09 SGT) [Java] Permalink Comments [3]

Tuesday March 27, 2007

IBM J9 JDK in Eclipse

Instructions for setting up the Windows edition of the IBM J9 JDK for local development of mobile applications in Eclipse.

1. Install the IBM J9 JDK for Windows (aka WEME - "Websphere Everyplace Micro Environment").

2. Look for, and unzip weme-win-x86-ppro11_6.1.1.20061110-161633.zip into an empty directory. I chose c:\weme-6.1.1 - just change the references below if you choose a different directory.

3. From Eclipse, go to Windows, Preferences, Java, Installed JREs and click Add.

4. Browse to the directory that was unzipped to earlier (c:\weme-6.1.1).

5. You will get an error message : "Target is not a JDK Root. Java executable was not found"

6. To fix that, copy c:\weme-6.1.1\bin\j9.exe to java.exe in the same directory

7. If you try Step #3 again, you will get another error message : "Target is not a JDK Root. System library was not found."

8. Not a problem : just create the directory c:\weme-6.1.1\jre\lib and copy
c:\weme-6.1.1\lib\jclFoundation11\classes.zip to c:\weme-6.1.1\jre\lib\rt.jar

9. There should be no further complaints from Eclipse at this point.

10. Enter a name for the JRE, let's say, weme-6.1.1

11. Uncheck "Use default system libraries", click Add External Jars, and add the required libraries :

12. Select weme-6.1.1 as your default JRE, click OK, and your project will now re-compile under the J9 JDK.

13. If you try running your application, you will get this error message :

JVMJ9VM011W Unable to load jclfoun10_23: The specified module could not be found.
JVMEXEX013E Internal VM error: Failed to create Java VM
JVMEXEX014I Run C:\weme-6.1.1\bin\java.exe -help for usage

14. Go back to Installed JREs and edit your weme-6.1.1 JRE

15. Under Default VM Arguments, add -jcl:ppro11

16. Your application should now run under the J9 JDK. You should be able to debug as well.

17. (optional) - If you would like to browse the JDK source code, add the source attachment settings :

- Skip the error messages above and enter all the required settings directly to save time. Just showing them here for my own reference.

(2007-03-27 18:19:48 SGT) [Java] Permalink

Monday November 13, 2006

Sun makes Java tech. open-source project

news.yahoo.com :

Computer server and software maker Sun Microsystems said that it had begun to make its Java technology an open-source software project available for free on the Internet. The announcement represents one of the largest additions of computer code to the open-source community - and it marks a major shift for a company that had once fiercely protected the source code used in 3.8 billion cell phones, supercomputers, medical devices and other gadgets.

Making Java an open-source project allows programmers from around the world to examine, modify, fix bugs and contribute new features in Java's underlying code. It requires that any changes be made public. All the Java source code is expected to be released by March 2007. The move covers all Java technology, which includes software that runs on handheld devices, personal computers and servers. Analysts said the decision would likely extend the life of Java, which was released more than a decade ago, and boost business for the company.

See also :

1. Q&A with Tim Bray

(2006-11-13 13:41:40 SGT) [Java] Permalink

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