These days, everyone and his dog are getting their own Web 2.0 service online. And finally, there's hardware to base your Poopr or Sneezr or whatchamacallit on: "Thumper", the harddisk-munching and O'Reilly-approved Web 2.0 server from Sun! Seriously, folks, what's so "Web 2.0" about this X4500, as its official name is? Sure, it's impressive, with its high performance storage capacity of up to 24TB in a single case. But "Web 2.0 server", that's cheesy unless it does social networking with other servers, tags my network cables automatically and offers an AJAX management web interface. :-) But, since it has some interesting features, I'm trying to get my hands on one for some tests. And I'm sure that Ralf will publish a review afterwards.

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I just replaced my ever growing blogroll list by a Grazr panel. Grazr is a nifty Javascript applet that not only shows every blog I read ordered by category but also lets you browse every blog's entries right on my page. Reducing clutter while increasing functionality? That decision was a no-brainer.

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It's been a busy week -- much to do at the company and CAJ meetings on the Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday evenings. That's why I had no time to do some blogging (among other things). But heeere comes the weekend! Yesterday evening was occupied as well: I went to Stuttgart for a meeting of the local Java User Group. Its JBoss SIG(Special Interest Group) had organized a talk about JBoss Cache held by Bela Ban, project lead for JGroups and JBoss Cache Bela gave an interesting overview of how to replicate data across a cluster of application server instances using JBoss Cache in its two incarnations, the Tree Cache and the POJO Cache. The Tree Cache divides cachable data into hierarchical nodes with attributes that can be replicated indivually, thus preventing the replication of huge data sets. The POJO Cache ensures that every change of an object gets replicated once the object has been registered in the distributed cache. Cache instances can be connected to a distributed tree much like a HTTP cache hierarchy can be built with Squid. At what time the replication of changes actually gets done depends on if the changes are made in a transaction context. If not, replication happens immediately. Inside a transaction, replication occurs not until the transaction is commited. Cache distribution can be extended by cache persistence where cache data is written to a filesystem or database. This provides the possibility of "swapping" data on a cache host or even between cache hosts. Locking is crucial point in distributed data storage and JBoss offers two opposite strategies, optimistic and pessimistic locking. When Bela showed a diagram depicting that JBoss HTTP Sessions are based on JBoss Cache as well, I first concluded that this facilitated using a simple load balancer distributing HTTP requests randomly between JBoss instances. JBoss Cache should make sure that every instance can handle every current HTTP session, after all. But Bela pointed out that HTTP session should be sticky to one host each because the cache data isn't evenly distributed but gravitates to where it's used the most. It was an interesting talk supplemented by a small live demonstration. Bela certainly knows what he's talking about. It seems to me that JBoss Cache is a well thought-out solution to distributed data storage. Since Bela held this talk already as a keynote at TheServerSide Java Symposium Europe, his slides (in PDF) are available for download on the conference website. This SIG meeting was an evening well spent and I was even given a JBoss backpack for taking part in suggesting presentation topics for future meetings. Meetings some of which I'll attend, I'm sure.

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Mobility is something that's just expected from workers in this information age. Well, I'll volunteer if I can have this mobile office in a van!

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As a manager, it's important to have clear leadership principles. Hallmark put some on an online greeting card I dedicate this blog entry to my current and future staff. :-D

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Manik Surtani, Lead of the JBoss Cache team, advises against just wrapping a cluster environment around an application. According to his reasoning in the JBoss Labs Blog&ctrl:window=default.blog.PrjBlogPortletWindowDefaultBlog&project=all&from=1&link=The_Myth_of_Transparent_Clustering#The_Myth_of_Transparent_Clustering, performing in a cluster is something that has to be considered already when building the application. As much as people would like to think that with modern techniques like AOP, bytecode injection, annotations, along with a healthy dose of ignorance of reality, wishing upon a star and belief in the tooth fairy, clustering can be a truly decoupled aspect that can be applied to anything, they are wrong.

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Who needs actors or even native speakers if you have a CEO that's able to explain the advantages of his company's products? Daimler-Chrysler thought so and let Dr. Dieter Zetsche alias Dr. Z" do the "new Chrysler US commercials, highlighting how Chrysler and Dodge cars benefit from German technology. Additionally, there's a special website Ask Dr. Z where an animated version of the D.-C. CEO answers consumer questions. Do Germans have a sense of humour after all?

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Last week, I gave a talk about examples and principles of Web 2.0 technology. If someone is interested, the slides (in German) are online

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Among the things I change regularly, there's also my mobile phone. Last time I got a new one, I spent about an hour transferring all my contacts and other information from the old one by bluetooth, one contact by another. Especially when the two phones aren't from the same manufacturer, this seemed to be the only way. But there's another! Thanks to the SyncML standard, you can synchronize many mobile phones with a central repository, forth and back. In the current issue of c't, there's a tutorial how to install your own SyncML server. But it's even more effortless if you use ZYB, the mobile phone synchronization service on the web. They provide a central SyncML server for free, letting you backup and transfer your mobile phone data. If you have more than one mobile, you can even keep their data synchronized. Furthermore, you can access all your contact and calendar data over a nice AJAXish user interface. It took me about a minute to get all my contacts onto ZYB. And when my Nokia E61 gets delivered this week, I'll just download the contacts and it'll be ready to go. The mobile life actually can be easy!

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"Some genius took Bush's speeches and made them into the greatest version of U2's Sunday Bloody Sunday I've ever heard." Well, that's right! You have to see George W. Bush doing U2's Sunday Bloody Sunday

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