Luca Garulli - The Zion City

GraphDB benchmark part II

2011-04-28T11:54:00.014+02:00

After some months since my last post about OrientDB (sorry but I prefer micro-blogging than blogging...) I'm back to write some news about the OrientDB engine.

The hard work has been the optimization at many levels:

minimize the wasted space created by set/delete operations (HOLES)
minimize marshalling/unmarshalling operations, specially on LinkSet type responsible of relationships between vertices and edges
fine tuning of Transactions

The main difficulty has been reduce the Disk I/O when you update a record. In facts when you execute an update, rarely the serialized content size will be the same of the original size. In this case you've a new HOLE, namely a free space marked to being reused.

The problems I found with the HOLES were that small spaces aren't reused at all and huge defragmentation was present. This caused a global slowness and the growth of the database on disk (in some cases many times the original size). After 2 weeks of work I've published in the SVN and maven the new version of the OrientDB storage with:

In-line defrag: something like some File Systems already do by joining small holes all together. In-line defrag works while the database is online and in use
Improved the management of small changes to records
2 configurable strategies of how to find the best hole to join during defrag process
configurable hole distance to decide when to join multiple holes all together

The gain of overall speed has been perceived by a lot of users. Since there are not benchmarks against GraphDB yet I've re-run the TinkerPop Blueprints Test Cases (see my previous post about this).

This test suite is part of TinkerPop Blueprints project and is NOT a BENCHMARK, but just a lot of tests against GraphDB implementations to test the compliance level of them. So please don't flame about this. It's not an official benchmark, just a way to test how OrientDB performs in comparison with other GraphDBs and with the previous releases of the same OrientDB. More how OrientDB performs on different platforms. The comparison in this case is only with Neo4J (the market leader?) since DEX supports only few Test Cases and it wouldn't be fair. Note that both GraphDBs run with default settings.

These are the results on a cheap Linux server (Linux CentOS, Intel Atom Dual Core 330 1,6Ghz, 1GB Ram DDR2, HD U-ATA 7200rpm):

Test name	Times in ms. Less is better = faster
Test name	OrientDB 1.0rc1 snapshot	Neo4J 1.3	+ faster, - slower
VertexTestSuite	11,190.80	48,354.85	+432,1%
EdgeTestSuite	6,421.55	24,361.78	+379,4%
GraphTestSuite	12,642.21	36,932.11	+292,1%
IndexableGraphTestSuite	1,173.55	2,618.00	+223,1%
IndexTestSuite	462.70	1,052.32	+227,4%
AutomaticIndexTestSuite	1,719.91	4,912.81	+285,6%
TransactionGraphTestSuite	1,603.59	4,237.17	+264,2%
GraphMLReaderTestSuite	1,291.93	2,365.85	+183,1%
Total	36,506.24	124,834.89	+342,0%

OrientDB completes all the tests in less than a third of the time of Neo4J: +342% faster than Neo4J!

The difference is lower running the same test against a MacBook Pro (OS X 10.6.7 64bit, 4GB Ram, CPU Intel core 2 duo 2.4ghz, HD 5400rpm):

Test name	Times in ms. Less is better = faster
Test name	OrientDB 1.0rc1 snapshot	Neo4J 1.3	+ faster, - slower
VertexTestSuite	13,380.67	23,647.54	+176,7%
EdgeTestSuite	7,508.78	14,139.71	+188,3%
GraphTestSuite	9,514.58	18,664.99	+196,2%
IndexableGraphTestSuite	523.92	969.06	+185,0%
IndexTestSuite	263.58	640.80	+243,1%
AutomaticIndexTestSuite	1,672.92	2,943.86	+176,0%
TransactionGraphTestSuite	1,378.59	3,047.77	+221,1%
GraphMLReaderTestSuite	1,418.21	1,805.27	+127,3%
Total	35,661.25	65,859.00	+184,7%

In this case OrientDB completes all the tests in about half time: +184,7% faster than Neo4J. I was not able to complete all the tests on Windows 7 machine (Intel i7 720q, 4GB Ram, HD 7200rpm) since Neo4J gives errors and break the test suite:

Test name	Times in ms. Less is better = faster
Test name	OrientDB 1.0rc1 snapshot	Neo4J 1.3	+ faster, - slower
VertexTestSuite	7,762.61	51,474.76	+663,1%
EdgeTestSuite	6,737.59	71,479.28	+1.060,9%
GraphTestSuite	7,280.43	75,695.77	+1.039,7%
IndexableGraphTestSuite	2,766.07	Error	n.a.
IndexTestSuite	1,064.49	Error	n.a.
AutomaticIndexTestSuite	2,796.08	Error	n.a.
TransactionGraphTestSuite	3,471.80	Error	n.a.
GraphMLReaderTestSuite	3,067.81	Error	n.a.
Total	34,946.88	198,649.81	+921,2%

However by looking at the 3 available tests OrientDB outperforms Neo4J also on Windows machines of +921,2%!

Another interesting point is about the platforms. Linux CentOS performs very well even if the underlying HW is cheaper & older than the other 2 machines.

I'm pretty satisfied of these results in relation to the previous ones where Neo4J performed better in some circumstances. Thank you to all the OrientDB contributors and users that have made this possible!

It's not time to rest or sleep, because the work is not yet ended: all the efforts now are for the 1.0 release.

How to execute these test on my PC?

To re-execute the same test on your machine just install Java 6, Git and Apache Maven. Then execute these command in a shell (or command prompt if you've MS Windows):

> git clone git://github.com/tinkerpop/blueprints.git

> cd blueprints

> mvn install

Now wait that all the software is compiled and all the tests start. Now you've your results. Please share them to the OrientDB Group attaching your HW/SW configuration!

Codemotion 2011, the most important Italian conference about programming

2010-11-23T12:05:00.010+01:00

Save this date: March 5th 2011! In Rome, Italy there will be the most important conference about programming. The event is totally FREE. About 1,500 attendees. Sessions in English and Italian languages.

For information: http://www.codemotion.it

When someone is criticizing something you care...

2010-10-19T15:26:00.001+02:00

When someone is criticizing something you care, don't defend it till death, but ask him what's his idea to improve it! Both will growth. Lvc@

A standard for GraphDB

2010-10-14T20:12:00.007+02:00

Yesterday GraphDBs have covered a niche market. In the last period things are changed and they are becoming much more popular than ever. This is due to:

The always growing need to have data strongly interconnected. What better than a GraphDB for it?
Applications are much more "social" than before. And social means relationships among subjects that perfectly bound to the Graph model
Performance on large datasets. You can live without a pure GraphDB, and therefore continue to use a Relational DBMS, until you need a real fast access to your data
The NoSQL movement has contributed a lot to change the mind of developers to focus to DBMS different (and sometime very different) from the Relational model.

The GraphDB has few but strong concepts. Graphs are composed by:

Vertex or Node, the linked entity. Vertexes can have properties.
Edge or Arc, as the link between the Vertexes. Edges can have properties and can be unidirectional or bidirectional
Property, is a value to assign to Vertexes and Edges. A property has a name and a value

Each GraphDB product is based upon the above concepts, but features can be very different among them. Furthermore there isn't a standard for them and an application can't migrate from one to another one at zero or low cost.

This is the reason why I want to introduce the Tinkerpop Blueprints. This Open Source project aims to have a shared set of basic interfaces to abstract the concepts of Graph, Vertex, Edge and Property. In this way applications can easily migrate to another available implementation of the specification.

Furthermore Tinkerpop has created a complete stack of tools and framework to work with Graphs. Below the main ones:

Gremlin is a Turing-complete, graph-based programming language designed for key/value-pair multi-relational graphs. Gremlin makes use of an XPath-like syntax to support complex graph traversals. This language has application in the areas of graph query, analysis, and manipulation.
Rexster is a RESTful graph shell that exposes any Blueprints graph as a standalone server. Extensions support standard traversal goals such as search, score, rank, and, in concert, recommendation. Rexster makes extensive use of Blueprints, Pipes, and Gremlin. In this way its possible to run Rexster over various graph systems.
Pipes is a graph-based data flow framework for Java 1.6+. A process graph is composed of a set of process vertices connected to one another by a set of communication edges. Pipes supports the splitting, merging, and transformation of data from input to output.

(1) What do you think about this effort to standardize GraphDB?

(2) What is missed today in Tinkerpop Blueprints API?

(3) Does a .NET porting make sense?

Working on large datasets in OrientDB

2010-09-28T22:37:00.008+02:00

I was really busy in the last 5 days because I'was working in a huge rewriting of the RB+Tree algorithm that is behind the OrientDB index system. All is started some days ago when in the OrientDB Group the user Mark Harwood was sharing the first experiences in the import of the entire Internet Movie Data Base (IMDB) inside an OrientDB instance. We're talking about 13 millions of Vertices and about 8 millions of Edges.

Well, performance seemed good, specially in comparison with Neo4J, but the insertion time was not-linear and after some millions of records the engine slow down a lot. Furthermore a nasty bug in the management of multiple segments broke the import job after some minutes in his machine while on my PC all went correctly.

This is the reason why I stopped the development of the Cluster feature in favor of a strong review of the RB+Tree algorithm. Indexing has been alway fast, but the Mark Harwood's case stressed the engine as no one did until now. The reason is in the import process itself that executes random reads into the index while the RB+Tree seemed optimized for sequential insertion and retrieval.

I'm fixing all the pending issues but first benchmarks show a speed improvement in Indexing between 100% and 800%! Furthermore times now are really linear. Inserting the first millions of Vertices is the same of the last million. This is a big result to the already super-fast OrientDB engine.

Once finished the test phase (with new Unit tests, of course) I'll commit all the changes in SVN to be reviewed by the community before the next release.

Started the development of OrientDB clustering

2010-09-16T10:21:00.006+02:00

Today is a new day, the day after the official release of OrientDB version 0.9.22. I apologize to all the requesters of the issues planned for this release and not yet finished and postponed to the 0.9.24. What is the reason?

---> Replication, Clustering, Fault-Tolerance <---

Seems that the most missed feature in OrientDB is the support for clustering, and therefore high scalability, high availability and high volume of transactions that a single node can't handle. In the last months I studied the whole different architectures of other NoSQL solutions for clustering.

Today is a new day because I'll start the development of clustering for OrientDB with the following features:

Master-Slaves type, where it can be only one Master and N Slaves. If the Master crashes a Slave is elected to be the new Master
IP multicast to discover cluster nodes
Configuration of nodes using TCP/IP, useful for Clouds that don't allow the IP multicast
Two sync modes: full where all the database is compressed and sent over the network, and partial by sending only the changes happened since the last sync
New database handled by the Master OrientDB Server instance to store all the pending records until a configurable threshold. Up this threshold the logs are deleted and the node need a full-sync on startup
New console commands to display nodes, listen clustering messages and elect the master manually

The release 0.9.23 is planned for the October 15th, 2010. Stay tuned and contribute with comments, ideas or critiques.

Released OrientDB 0.9.22

2010-09-15T18:09:00.002+02:00

Hi all,

many thanks to all the contributors for this new piece of software. A new version of OrientDB has been released after more than 1 month of work (and holidays).

Starting from this version you can use OrientDB as a pure GraphDB using the custom API (http://code.google.com/p/orient/wiki/GraphDatabase), by the Tinkerpop stack (Blueprints, Gremlin, Pipes, etc.) or again by using the Erlang language with the Cali project (http://github.com/dmitriid/cali).

Direct URL to download: http://orient.googlecode.com/files/orient-database-0.9.22.zip

New features:

- Issue 21: Full text index against schema fields

- Issue 91: SQL UPDATE against collections and maps

- Issue 94: Support for GREMLIN graph language

- Issue 108: Regular expression support in WHERE clause

- Issue 109: Support for memory clusters inside regular persistent database

Bugs:

- Issue 86: Cannot insert record from console

- Issue 87: Cannot query records from OrientDB Studio Command-page

- Issue 100: Transaction does not work as expected

- Issue 101: Error in using orient queries having ' character

- Issue 104: Bulk record creation in cluster with pre-created indices causes ClassCastException

- Issue 105: Error in using UPDATE query

- Fixed other minor bugs

The next release is planned for the end of September 2010 with the first version of Clustering support. Here the details: http://code.google.com/p/orient/issues/list?q=label:v0.9.23

To test the OrientDB Studio go here: http://www.moobilis.com:2480. Users: reader/reader and writer/writer. To manage the server: root/root.

If you'd like to suggest some new feature for the next releases please open a New Issue as "New feature": http://code.google.com/p/orient/issues/entry?template=New%20feature

Erlang interface for OrientDB and micro-benchmark between NoSQL DBMSs

2010-09-11T21:45:00.004+02:00

Dmitrii 'Mamut' Dimandt made a micro benchmark against Neo4J, Redis, ThinkerGraph (in memory only) and OrientDB using the erlang language. These are the results:http://github.com/dmitriid/cali/wiki/Benchmarks-of-sorts.

OrientDB is the fastest implementation (only ThinkerGraph is faster but it's not a DBMS since works only in memory). It's nice to see that OrientDB performance are very close to the in-memory only implementation.

OrientDB the fastest GraphDB available today?

2010-09-09T15:06:00.016+02:00

Two days ago I've finished the integration of the last part of the Blueprints: the Index. Now OrientDB can be used as for Neo4J with the entire ThinkerPop stack. This include the Gremlin language as well.

First tests shows that OrientDB outperforms Neo4J, the market leader of GraphDB, in all the tests but the iteration (and therefore counting). This is due to the implementation of the Blueprints that need to create a new wrapper object to contain the OrientDB's OGraphVertex and OGraphEdge objects. I've some ideas to improve it, but I need more time for it. Maybe in the next weeks or earlier if some users need it. However using native OrientDB Graph APIs this overhead is removed.

These are the results:

Test name	Description	Time in ms (less is better)		OrientDB vs Neo4J
Test name	Description	OrientDB 0.9.22	Neo4J	+ faster, - slower
testVertexEquality	1 vertex added and retrieved in	4.74	2.33	-203,4%
testRemoveVertexNullId	1000 vertices added in	216.73	2,070.74	+955,4%
	1000 vertices deleted in	1,093.71	1,910.02	+174,6%
testVertexIterator	5000 vertices added in	476.62	8,314.04	+1.744,4%
	5000 vertices counted in	86.94	1.60	-5.433,8% *
testAddManyVertexProperties	750 vertex properties added (with vertices being added too) in	72.34	43,437.29	+60.046,0%
testAddEdges	6 elements added and checked in	0.79	30.70	+3.886,1%
testAddManyEdges	3000 elements added in	2,314.44	8,031.12	+347,0%
	1000 edges counted in	8.45	12.54	+148,4%
	2000 vertices counted in	31.62	0.51	-6.200,0% *
	2000 vertices checked in	98.27	14.05	-699,4% *
testGetEdges	3 edges retrieved in	0.45	0.12	-375,0%
testRemoveManyEdges	200 vertices counted in	167.28	0.14	-119.485,7% *
	100 edges counted in	34.92	0.79	-4.420,3% *
	100 edges removed and graph checked in	20,555.44	332.54	-6.181,3% *
testStringRepresentation	1 graph string representation generated in	0.01	0.01	100,0%
testClear	75 elements added in	45.89	152.87	+333,1%
	75 elements deleted in	30.76	422.05	+1.372,1%
testRemovingEdges	500 vertices added in	133.62	974.37	+729,2%
	1000 edges added in	1,130.64	4,521.90	+399,9%
	1000 edges deleted (with size check on each delete) in	36,773.66	4,411.69	-833,6% *
testRemovingVertices	500 vertices added in	10.48	1,110.03	+10.591,9%
	250 edges added in	132.32	1,089.45	+823,3%
	500 vertices deleted (with size check on each delete) in	70,675.74	2,140.07	-3.302,5% *
testTreeConnectivity	1464 vertices added in a tree structure in	1,506.82	5,832.02	+387,0%
	1464 vertices iterated in	427.67	0.75	-57.022,7% *
	1463 edges iterated in	9.89	5.39	-183,5% *
testTinkerGraphEdges	graph-example-1 loaded in	43.75	541.15	+1.236,9%
testTinkerGraphVertices	graph-example-1 loaded in	6.81	520.29	+7.640,1%
testTinkerGraphSoftwareVertices	graph-example-1 loaded in	5.31	543.02	+10.226,4%
testTinkerGraphVertexAndEdges	graph-example-1 loaded in	5.01	544.17	+10.861,7%

* are the tests with iteration

2010-08-12T14:07:00.006+02:00

Yesterday Mike Tallent, via Twitter, made his congratulations to me for my recent "Db4o community award".

Is it a joke? The reason seems to reside in the homepage of TevereFlow that claims to support db4o. After some private messages with a db4o guy I explained that TevereFlow supports db4o since it uses DataNucleus as OR-Mapping and it supports db4o. Therefore TevereFlow can run on top of db4o but the support is indirect. All clear.

But after some days I found my name in the "DB4O MOST VALUES PROFESSIONAL" list:

Thanks a lot, but I never have written a single line of code for/with db4o!

Furthermore I'm the author of OrientDB, a competitor of db4o.

So is it a joke? :-)

Published the Roma presentation for the Open Source Italian Conference in Cagliari, Italy

2010-06-12T00:25:00.003+02:00

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

Roma introduction and concepts

View more presentations from Luca Garulli.

Published the OrientDB presentation for the Open Source Italian Conference in Cagliari, Italy

2010-06-11T18:46:00.003+02:00

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

Orient db introduction

View more presentations from lvca.

Romulus workshop in Madrid

2010-02-19T00:38:00.008+01:00

Madrid, February 18th 2010. The day seems to be finished and it has been a pretty long day for me. This morning wake up at 7:30 o'clock, 8:30 breakfast at the Starbucks in front at the hotel and then straightforward to the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UP M) for the Romulus meeting and for the Romulus Workshop in the afternoon.

Today I've presented Roma Meta Framework to a bunch of students and some business IT men interested on the fast developing of Web Applications following the DDD approach, the Meta Framework philosophy and obviously Roma. We have had a hands-on session where almost all the attendees tried to follow me step by step on the building of a simple social application. I hope today the Roma community welcomes some new committers.

Below some photos shooted by Marco.

Anyone is in Madrid until Saturday morning?

Orient DB almost ready for the show time!

2010-02-13T18:13:00.009+01:00

After some weekends of work I've in my hands the first version of Orient DB! I wrote a lot of Unit Tests that helped me a lot on the heavy refactoring in order to achieve the best performance than ever. The main features of Orient are:

Full ACID: Optimistic transaction available with recovery of aborted transactions when the engine restarts. Tested with 1 billion of records even with simulated crashes during the commit phase. Pessimistic (with object-level locking) transaction in the next releases.
Extremely light: less than 400kb of jar without any dependency with other libraries
Super fast: stores 1,000,000 (yes one million) of records in 3.5 seconds on common hardware (my notebook). The KeyValue engine stores 100,000 entries indexed in 9 seconds. Lookups are so fast as memory access.
tested up to 1 billion of records, but the limits are up to 9.223.372.036 Billions. Actually I think I'll never will be able to include this test in my Unit tests :-)
A lot of cool features such as Asynchronous Queries, SQL language, Partitioning of data, native sharding support, and more
Requires: Java5 or major and run on all the most used Operative Systems.

What about the license? I have no choose yet, maybe LGPL?

http://www.orientechnologies.com.

Released TevereFlow, the first workflow engine with a Web Editor

2009-12-24T12:32:00.001+01:00

Starting from December 22nd 2009 is available the new version of TevereFlow.

Tevere Flow is a light-weight Workflow engine built using the Java® technology. Just download it and create your process using the Web interface. You can use Tevere as embedded or as external engine by using the provided Web Services API.

Tevere was built using Roma Framework under the Romulus consortium an it's currently used in several production systems.

Main features:

Open Source Apache 2.0 license
Web User Interface using the Ajax technology
Stand-alone application: just download and start it
Fully Transactional supporting any RDBMS or db4o ODBMS
Set of built-in commands available (email, web service invocation, etc.)
Auto-resume of failure activities
User and profile management
Activities can be written in Java or using any supported scripting language such as Javascript and Ruby
Integration via Java APIs or WebService

Search on Freshmeat

2009-12-22T10:52:00.009+01:00

After I've posted the last release 2.1.0 of Roma Meta Framework on Source Forge I tried to search the project by typing "Roma" in the search field of Freshmeat home page:

0 search results for: roma

What???? If I type "Roma Framework": the result is always 0 (zero) results but with the result table filled:

Maybe they require an exact search? Not properly, since if I try to search for "framework":

1941 search results for: framework

What kind of search is it?

Terracotta as distributed DBMS? Bad idea!

2009-10-01T10:09:00.010+02:00

Some months ago I have had a fucking genius idea about a new application. In order to start working to my idea I need to distributed at large tons of objects in several nodes around the Internet. After a deep research about all the best solutions available now I decided to try Terracotta.

Basically I need a real distributed Object repository so why don't create a simple Object DBMS virtually all in RAM and let to Terracotta most of the hard work?

Handle the cache on nodes
Manage the object/page fault in a transparent way for the application
Share the load among nodes
And obviously: read/write objects in persistent way

So I've developed a very simple library that uses the JDK 1.6+ TreeMap to collect data and to query them. I was surprised to discover how much terracotta makes a good job in hiding the dirty work and complexity of data distribution.

But before to think to use this piece of code in a production system I need to be sure that the objects became really persistent in ACID way. For this reason I developed some Test Cases as microbenchmarks to see the real throughtput and if data are written in synchronous way to the disk. This was my test using the library I wrote:

UserDatabase db = ServerNode.getInstance().connect("petshop", null, null);
clazz = db.getClazz("Animal");

for( int i = 0; i < 100000; ++i ){
UserObjectTransient object = clazz.createObject();

object.setValue("name", "Gaudi");
object.setValue("description", "My crazy ferret!");
object.setValue("from", "Barcelona, Spain");
object.create();
}

Pretty nice, don't you? The Terracotta server instance was on a remote server with 1GB of heap and enought bandwitch available and the client runned on my laptop. Yes I know, this is a microbenchmark and can't tell to me the performance in all the scenarios. But to go on on my experiments I needed to know if I was totally crazy or if there was a way to build a robust & scalable solution to satisfy my needs.

Well, in this test my library + Terracotta (after some tuning by reading the documentation and the forum) are able to write around 190 objects per second. Not really bad for the first release and in comparison to a RDBMS solution. But I've stored just a dynabean with two properties... I remember in the past (about 8 years ago!) when I tried a real ODBMS (Orient ODBMS) it was able to store 100x of this solution using a 8-years-old hardware!

But the really bad news is another one: When the "for cycle 100.000" was finished and the application seemed to be succesfully ended I noted that the console had no control. The test was still running! After 10 seconds I killed the java process and counted the objects created (using the Terracotta console): 99.345!

Where are the 655 objects missed? Ok, probably I got wrong about ACID features. No, the Terracotta documentation tells ACID! But how it can be ACID if the client sends the objects to the server in asynchronous way?

I'm pretty confident that it would be exist in any point of configuration the real synchronous mode but even though it exists what about the performance? If this ASYNCHRONOUS solution was able for 190 obejcts/sec as throughtput the synchronous one must be much more slow!

These are the reasons why I abandoned this path. Terracotta surely fits well in traditional replication contexts and the product is really good on documentation, presentation, APIs, etc. But for my needs I have to continue in searching...

Remove the persistence layer at all to scale up?

2009-09-21T10:00:00.010+02:00

In these days I'm working for a brand new idea that need to scale out (close to the infinite?) and after a lot of thoughts about its architecture I'm seriously evaluating to remove the persistence layer using a distributed in-memory cache, obviously with the "fail-over" feature: Terracotta.

Terracorra, under the hood, records all changes happened to the objects using BerkeleyDB. All is transparent to the application and on crash the server swaps to another one configured without interruption and leaving all objects consistent. Or, at least, it seems to be so.

Does anyone have never used Terracotta in a real-world application without a DBMS to store data?

Roma Framework and the Virtual Objects

2009-09-17T09:08:00.012+02:00

Yesterday night I've committed in the Roma's SVN (revision: 4479) source repository the first version of Virtual Objects. Virtual Objects are like POJO, but built dinamically just using a descriptor, in this case a XML file. The XSD is the same of Roma XML annotations but now allows to specify the field type and in future declaring inheritance and other stuff.

Action implementation can be written using any scripting language is supported by JSR 223, Javascript in primis.

Roma treats Virtual Objects in the same way of POJO, so you can define an Employee at the fly in this way:


<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"?>

<class xmlns="http://www.romaframework.org/xml/roma" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"

    xsd:schemaLocation="http://www.romaframework.org/xml/roma http://www.romaframework.org/schema/v2/roma.xsd">

    <aspects>

        <view>

            <form>

                <area name="main" type="column">

                    <area name="fields" size="2" type="grid" />

                    <area name="actions" type="row" />

                </area>

            </form>

        </view>

    </aspects>

    <fields>

        <field name="id" type="Integer" />

        <field name="name" type="String" />

        <field name="surname" type="String" />

        <field name="born" type="Date" />

        <field name="age" type="Integer">

            <aspects>

                <view enabled="false" />

            </aspects>

        </field>

        <field name="salary" type="Float" />

    </fields>

    <actions>

        <action name="refresh">

            <aspects>

                <scripting>

                    org.romaframework.core.Roma.objectChanged(me);

                </scripting>

            </aspects>

        </action>

        <action name="print">

            <aspects>

                <scripting>

                    print(age);

                </scripting>

            </aspects>

        </action>

        <action name="login">

            <aspects>

                <scripting>

                    print('Login...');

                    org.romaframework.frontend.RomaFrontend.flow().forward("ProjectLogin");

                </scripting>

            </aspects>

        </action>

    </actions>

    <events>

        <event name="show">

            <aspects>

                <scripting>

                <![CDATA[

                    age=32;

                    Roma.fieldChanged(me, ["age"]);

                ]]>

                </scripting>

            </aspects>

        </event>

    </events>

</class>

And this is the result:
Note that changes to the XML files are loaded in real-time enabling a real productive development (and production why not) environment.

New Google Wave account

2009-08-24T16:44:00.006+02:00

Yesterday I've received my Google Wave account as developer.

I've played for some minutes and it's really awesome even though I don't know no one that own it as well to play together with all the features!

Once returned from holidays I'll try to go deep to the APIs in order to know how to integrate it inside Roma Meta Framework and Romulus.

At leat one good reason to use Linux

2009-06-03T22:49:00.004+02:00

With this picture someone convinced me to pass to the Linux OS ;-)

Taken from http://slashweb.org.

Scripting RAD tools such as Ruby on Rails and Grails can be really slow?

2009-05-27T23:55:00.004+02:00

Tiago Fernandez in his blog reported some results about benchmarks using Java, JRuby, Groovy and Scala. I know: we can talk about benchmarks for days but in the Internet there are a lot of them and the performance problems of the scripting language is not a news.

Results show that Groovy is very slow in comparison to the pure Java and the Scala scripting language. This could be a serious reason to be worried when your application created with Grails or RoR goes in production...

So, why don't you use a real Java RAD tool like Roma Meta Framework? :-)

You can develop shortly without using a scripting language with the benefits of great refactoring support (Eclipse, Netbeans and IntelliJ are master on it) and performance and scalability!

The source: http://tiagofernandez.blogspot.com/2009/05/java-integration-with-groovy-jruby-and.html

Romulus at the Internet of Services 2009 conference

2009-05-25T18:07:00.004+02:00

On June, 10th 2009 I will be in Brussels to present the Romulus demo at the "Internet of Services 2009" conference. Romulus project is scheduled in the afternoon. Below the agenda.

Group 2: June 10, 13:30 - 17:30

• Semantically enhanced SLA Negotiation (BREIN)
• Automated Service Level Agreement Management Framework - Adhoc Demonstrator (SLA@SOI)
• TEAM: Knowledge management in distributed software communities by applying semantic technologies (TEAM)
• Decentralized transactional collaborative drawing (SELFMAN)
• Romulus: your answer to improving productivity in Java Web Applications (ROMULUS)
• Edutain@Grid: A Service-Oriented Infrastructure for Future Real-Time Interactive Internet Applications (edutain@grid)

Luca in the first page of Google searching for "Java JSR"

2009-05-19T12:22:00.004+02:00

Today Mara told me that searching "Java JSR" in Google (at least in the Italian version), in the first page compares my face and this blog... I've tried and is real! What nice thing :-)

Transparent DataNucleus enhancement at run-time

2009-05-06T22:43:00.007+02:00

Today it has worked! In the last days I was working to avoid the enhancement phase in the building of Roma Framework projects. Yes. Until yesterday you needed to invoke the "persistence-compile" task in your Roma project and all the projects that contained persistent classes.

Furthermore pre-packaged modules such as ADMIN, USERS, MESSAGING and SCHEDULER-QUARTZ needed to self-execute the enhancement in order to put persistence capable classes inside the JAR. This was a mess if you needed to change the ORM binding since anything resided inside the JAR.

I have to check yet if run-time changes to the entity POJOs are auto-enhanced at the fly... If works the productivity would be speedup over and over again.

Thanks to Andy Jefferson of DataNucleus team in supporting my crazy requestes :-) The work tomorrow will be in changing all the wizards to support the new configuration. In few words the change consist in:

Let to the PersistenceAspect to invoke the Enhancer at startup
Create the file persistence.xml inside the src/META-INF folder.

Once everything works I'll commit in to the SVN trunk for the upcoming release 2.0.

Romulus technical meeting in Madrid

2009-04-25T00:20:00.005+02:00

Today has finished the 3-days technical meeting of Romulus. In the first day we've worked in the UPM (Universitad Politecnica de Madrid) class room.

For the second day Carlos Iglesias has organized the entire working day in Segovia, a beautiful city at about one hour from Madrid. We've worked inside a agritourism and eaten a lot of home made food. In the afternoon we have had the social roundtrip in the Segovia city. If you're in Madrid you can't not to visit Segovia! There are a lot of monuments in a so small city. The catedral, the Fortress and the Roman waterworks, all in perfect state. It seems they was built in the past year.

This morning we went back to the UPM class room in order to finish the last pending works and give the new action points. Asset Data is envolved in almost all the activities and I know that when I'm back to Italy a huge work expects me and my company for the next months.

Am I Tired? Not at all. Instead, I'm very excited to go back to work to the new Roma Meta Framework version 2.0 and contributing to the growth of Romulus consortium & technology.

Tomorrow is the last day. Luigi will take the flight in the early morning. Giordano and me, instead, will go to the Toledo city for a fast trip. Just the time to see the centre of the city, buy a tipical medieval sword for my house, having lunch with "Pulpo a la Gallega" and go back to Madrid for the our flight.

Bye bye Spain!

Released Roma Meta Framework 1.2.0: the latest 1.x version!

2009-03-25T23:37:00.005+01:00

Today I've released the version 1.2.0 of Roma Meta Framework. This is the last 1.x version since starting by tomorrow I'll work to the next 2.0 implementing a lot of new ideas born in the last year.

Roma 2.0 will be not more compatible with 1.x but someone will provide a migration tool that will help to port current/old applications to the new one. Soon a presentation of the main new ideas.

A huge work is waiting for me. For this reason let me enjoy the 1.2.0, just for today!

Below the main addictions and improvements of the 1.2.0:

CORE module:
- Created CollectionWrapper domain classes to display collections in better way. Now there are two implementations: TableWrapper<> and MasterDetailWrapper<>. See the Handbook.pdf to know more
- Disable the class checking for hot-updates. Useful in production
- New refresh of multiple fields in one shot or the entire object
- Resolved bug on the session management under WebLogic AppServer

VIEW module:
- New "URL" rendering mode to embed static and dynamic content in forms. Now you can embed HTML files, JSP files and Web sites at all
- Managed render of collections and arrays using the "OBJECTEMBEDDED" mode
- Resolved a bug on table ordering
- Improved Echo2 Table component in order to support the change of the color of the column headers
- Updated to the stable version 2.1.0 of Echo2

DATANUCLEUS module:
- Updated to the stable version 1.1.0 of DataNucleus

ADMIN module:
- Fixed management of Info and InfoCategory instances
- Created CRUD of GenericValue

JETTY module:
- Integrated new release of Jetty 6.1.5
- The script under the user project script/start-jetty.sh (and .bat) now works

CRUD wizard module:
- CRUD now generate also: factory class (DDD), repository class (DDD) and an entry in the package.jdo file if any

Luca, Roma e Romulus: tre amici su Mokabyte

2009-03-12T11:51:00.008+01:00

Se non hai proprio nulla da fare, magari perchè stai usando Roma e quindi hai finito prima il tuo lavoro :-), leggiti questa intervista fatta dalla rivista Java più letta in italia: Mokabyte

JavaDay III edition

2009-01-27T12:00:00.009+01:00

The 3rd edition of the JavaDay is gone. 1.400 visitors: 1225 workers, 363 student, 74 unemployeed.

The AssetData's stand has received more than 300 curricula. For this reason I've take the decision to build from stratch an application to collect all them using Roma Meta Framework. After 1 hour it worked, but the GUI is not yet very intuitive...

During the event I encounter Paolo, a very old collegue of about 12 years ago in my second project for the IRI group. I have seen again a lot of other past collegues and friends...

I love the JavaDay also for this reason :-)

(photo by Valerio Casale)

Recupero crediti? Non ho il fisico

2009-01-07T10:15:00.002+01:00

Da quando sono diventato uno pseudo-commerciale e seguo i clienti direttamente mi capita, ahimè, di occuparmi anche di RECUPERO CREDITI. Eggià. Clienti che chiedono servizi, consulenze, prodotti e poi dopo mesi arrancano sempre le solite scuse. Le 5 migliori del 2008 sono state:

La nostra banca si è fusa in un gruppo più grande e non riusciamo a fare i bonifici!
La società è in ottima salute...Ma abbiamo problemi di cassa
I nostri clienti non ci hanno pagato...
La fattura è stata smarrita (fu consegnata a mano!)
Abbiamo deciso che vi pagheremo solo se riusciamo a rivenderlo al cliente finale (dopo 3 mesi dalla consegna)

Diciamo che non ho propriamente il fisico per fare "recupero crediti". E quindi ecco il motivetto che mi accompagnerà nel 2009:

"Soffro lo strees
io soffro lo stress
sono stanco e fuori forma
vado in giro per clienti
a recuperare i pagamenti
ci deve essere un errore!!!"

Roma JavaDay III edition in Rome

2008-12-22T13:06:00.007+01:00

Today, 3 years after its inception, the JavaDay in Rome is the technical reference event for Java technology in Italy. It boasts a terrific turnout and the participation of the most eminent speakers of the community.

The Rome JavaDay takes place at Università Roma TRE with the purpose of establishing a privileged channel with university students. It has a highly technical connotation and is a joint-effort of three Italian Java communities, namely Java User Group Roma, Java Italian Portal e Java Italian Association.

Attendance is free of charge.

IMHO the most interesting talk is: ROMULUS. Java Web Development made productive

1° Trofeo di Texas Hold'em "All in Asset"

2008-12-17T11:45:00.007+01:00

Ieri sera si è tenuto in Asset Data il primo trofeo di Texas Hold'em:

"All in Asset"

Il vincitore è stato Alfonso, secondo classificato Molins.

Alfonso ha vinto praticamente la maggior parte delle mani. Quelle in cui non ha vinto è perchè è uscito in corsa per timore, ma alla fine i punti in mano suoi erano sempre vincenti su tutti!

Che spettacolo vederlo con tutte quelle torri di fiches... Sembrava Rupert Murdoch!

Con tutta la fortuna che si è ritrovato...Gli è stato consigliato di chiamare subito a casa per controllare La Donna! ;-)

Java Pretty code II

2008-12-05T17:50:00.007+01:00

Another piece of pretty code:


public class MyClass{
 public MyClass() {
 }

 public MyClass(String iClass, String projectPath) {
  /* Instantiates MyClass */
  MyClass obj = new MyClass();
  obj.create(iClass, projectPath);
 }
}

Why to create an object of the same class to call the method on it?

To the next piece of pretty code!

Java Pretty code

2008-12-05T16:50:00.005+01:00

Today, between a debug and another one I found this nice thing:


private VectorString> extractFields(Class classObj) {
 String className = classObj.toString();
 className = className.substring(6, className.length());

 Class obj = null;
 try {
  obj = Class.forName(className);
 } catch (ClassNotFoundException e1) {
  e1.printStackTrace();
 }

 ...
}

1) Please note the toString() call and then the extraction of the result cutting from the 6th character... But why don't simply to use the getName() method?
2) And at the end... Why to extract the name of the class and then reload the class by the extracted name to obtain...always the Class taken as parameter!

These are pearls folks!

Roma Meta Framework: plug-ins management

2008-11-27T14:48:00.011+01:00

Starting from release 1.0.0 Roma allows to be updated by using the new wizard commands:

check
install
update

If you've downloaded the 1.0.0 from SourceForge type:

> roma check

* admin... version 1.0.1 (25-11-2008)
* core... version 1.0.1 (25-11-2008)
* persistence-jpox... version 1.0.1 (25-11-2008)
  project-web... updated
* project-webready... version 1.0.1 (26-11-2008)
  scheduler-quartz... updated
* users... version 1.0.1 (25-11-2008)
* view-echo2... version 1.0.2 (26-11-2008)
  web-jetty... updated

You can install the new module you want just typing:

> roma install core

core... Installing version 1.0.1
Extracting directory: lib/
Extracting: lib/roma-core.jar
Module core installed correctly: version 1.0.1 (25-11-2008)

To know new plug-ins released by the community type:

> roma check new

To update the installed module ('core' in example above) to your project use:

> roma update core

That's all folks. No more pain with roma upgrade ;-)

Finally the official release 1.0 of Roma Framework is up

2008-11-10T18:46:00.011+01:00

I'm tired out but happy! :-)

After about one year I've released the official release 1.0 of Roma Meta Framework in Source Forge.

So many news from the last 1.0rc4 version: several new plug-ins, thirdy parties contributions, the free PDF manual, better module management and performance improvements.

Download the last release of Roma Meta Framework

Below the main changes:

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
VERSION 1.0.0 (November, 10th 2008)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Main addictions and improvements:

CORE module:
- New modules management. Now you can check for new modules, new releases of them and install it over the air. Dependencies are well considered
- New Logging aspect to abstract logging and to use logging facilities such as @LoggingAction() to log any POJO action
- Support for new View Aspect that works with XHTML 1.0, CSS2 and JSP
- Support for new Semantic Aspect available via Romulus project using Open Source Jena framework

CHART-JFREECHART module:
- New module to create graphs using the popular JGraph library

ETL-XPATH module:
- Strong refactoring of the engine
- New JDBC Extractor and Importer modules
- New Wizard to let to the user the importing phase

PERSISTENCE-DATANUCLEUS module:
- New Persistence Aspect implementation using the new DataNucleus technology. Supports JDO 2.1 and JPA 1.0

PERSISTENCE-JPOX module:
- Default like operator works like before, but it considers the presence of the special character "*". If found treats it as the "%" of SQL like syntax. This allow to execute searches with wildcards
- New "optimistic" transaction mode

SCHEDULER-QUARTZ module:
- New UI
- New wizard to build simple expression without the knowledge of CRON syntax

USERS module:
- Deep changes to the USERS module: new realm entity to group accounts, profiles, infocategory and other entities in a common "realm". New "Anonymous" profile to allow to profile for the non-authenticated user
- BaseAccount and BaseProfile now extends the common AbstractAccount abstract class in order to reference accounts or profile in the same manner just declaring as reference type the AbstractAccount

SCHEDULER-QUARTZ module:
- Calendar view

SCRIPTING-JAVA6 module:
- New module implementing the Scripting facilities of Java6. By separating all scripting features in Roma in only this module we have gained the Java5 compliance for all but this module, obviously

SERVICE-CXF module:
- New module to expose a POJO as a Web Service using Apache CXF framework

VIEW-ECHO2 module:
- Strong refactoring of components. Now ComponentFactory is obsolete and now anything is responsability of the Rendering implementation
- Management of multiple Echo2 stylesheets
- Sensible faster execution

WORKFLOW-TEVERE module:
- New Workflow module with transactional engine and Web GUI. It covers most common workflow patterns

WIZARDS:
- New 'check' wizard to check for new modules or new version of installed modules
- New 'install' wizard to install new modules or new version of installed modules
- New 'update' wizard to update Roma user projects with new version of modules installed
- CRUD now generates the Repository classes for each entity.
- Support for environment variables like "author". You can set/get variables in Roma. Set the "author" variable to have all generated sources with you as author

TEST-PRESENTATION app:
- Changed layout of Test Presentation application

OTHERS:
- Resolved a lot of issues (see SourceForge tracker)
- Tons of minor improvements.

Back to work: Roma Meta Framework updates

2008-09-23T11:36:00.004+02:00

After some days since last post I'd like to share latest more relevant news about the Roma Meta Framework project:

New Web Site in replace of the older one made using XWiki. Take a look: http://www.romaframework.org
Finally we have the new Roma Handbook manual available in PDF and updated at weekly basis.
We're at good point (together with Gesfor company in Spain) on development of the new view aspect that will join side by side the Echo2 View Aspect. The new Aspect generates pure XHTML 1.0 strict & CSS2. Furthermore supports partial/total use of JSP template. Very cool.
Imola Informatica, member of Romulus consortium, has developed the Eclpise plugin for Roma. Now it's in alpha status yet but very soon it will be published.
We've a new guy as Committer of Roma: Marco De Stefano. Welcome aboard!
New Semantic Aspect. It's full working and exports all or piece of your application domain in to RDF format.
The community is developing 2 new wizards for Roma: upgrade and update. The first one will upgrade your Roma installation with the latest one (or only the modules you want). The second one will update a Roma project with the new module. Each module will work for the transparent migration between releases. Planned for the end of October 2008.
Realm support. Now you can deploy a single Web Application but supporting multiple realms as separate environment, each one with own users, profiles, etc.

Tevere Flow project

2008-06-27T13:21:00.005+02:00

Finally I decided to create the Tevere Flow project starting from the Tevere Workflow module of Roma Meta Framework. In the next days I'll move the sources from Roma repository to the Tevere space hosted in Source Forge.

The idea is to provide a complete Open Source Workflow product with a Web User Interface. Tevere module is already used in production in several systems and it's appreciated for the easy to use and the Web front end: no other products can offer it!

The domain for Tevere Flow is: http://www.tevereflow.org. The web site will be active in few days with a web 2.0 look and feel. The project (still pending) in Source Forge is available here: https://sourceforge.net/projects/tevere.

Do you like the logo? It was created by Giordano Maestro (one of main committers of the Tevere Workflow module). On top of the hills you can see the colosseum (part of Roma Meta Framework logo) and the Tevere river in the middle of their. Tevere ("Tiber" in english) is the river that divide the Roma city in two parts. You can find a history of it on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiber

Stay tuned for the official launch!

Lost in translation: birra Miller

2008-06-19T17:22:00.005+02:00

Galway, Irlanda.

16 giugno 2008. Un lunedì sera. Dopo 4 ore di meeting in inglese Giovanni ci porta in un ristopub al centro di Galway. Enorme con un albero al centro! Talmente grande che quando sono uscito (la cena si era fermata a metà dello stomaco) per ritrovare la sala ho chiesto indicazioni... Non sto scherzando.

Dopo un ottimo antipasto, un paio di birre e una bistecca (ovviamente) Irlandese allungo il braccio e prendo in mano quella di Giordano seduto accanto a me. Vedo l'origine americana. Ma che ci fa una birra americana in Irlanda? Cmq girando la bottiglia vedo che c'è scritto qualcosa dietro all'etichetta:

"America's Quality Beer
CONTAINS NO ADDITIVES
OR PRESERVATIVES"

Preservati-che? Ah... in inglese deve essere la traduzione di "conservanti".

Comunque sia sono taaanto contento che in quella birra non c'erano preservativi ;-)
.

Last day of Ireland

2008-06-18T01:13:00.005+02:00

Around Galway city on the West Coast of Ireland. This picture was shooted by Luigi.

The meeting is finished and this evening the Romulus staff had the dinner in a restaurant very close to the sea. Excellent Oysters! It's quite cold to be June and sometimes it rainings, but the colors of the sea are wonderful. Don't you?

Tomorrow I'll go back in Italy! Bye bye Ireland. See you soon.

Saper aspettare

2008-06-11T10:16:00.004+02:00

"Chiedi quello che vuoi e dai all'universo il tempo ragionevole di muovere i miliardi di ingranaggi per arrivare a te"

- Lvc@
.

GMail: is really so secure?

2008-05-05T12:12:00.003+02:00

About 15 days ago someone entered in my GMail account sending one spam email to all my contacts about an asian site of ecommerce. I apologize with all my contacts about the SPAM.

The very strange thing happened is that my password was quite strong: upper case letters, numbers and special character. So I exclude a brute-force attack in favor of a GMail leak.

By a quick look to the Internet I did'nt found any similar attack to other GMail users, so I could be one of first victims before Google patched the leak or the victim was expressely me. But in this case why don't change the password once in? And why don't delete messages to make greater damnages?

I don't know. However I'll continue to use GMail for my private mail since the service is really amazing and fits very well for my needs. I just hope my case was, and will be, pretty isolated.

Registered mark

2008-04-02T09:41:00.010+02:00

The Italian office for marks and patents is called "Ufficio Marchi e Brevetti". Yesterday I wondered its database is on-line and available for free to search registered patents and marks: http://www.uibm.gov.it/UIbmDev/codice.aspx. After a bounche of attempts in error (timeouts and internal errors) I found my registered mark: Orient! This is the logo:
Request number: RM2000C002881 of May, 9th 2000
Registration number: 0000899116 of June, 24th 2003

It's true: I registered it on May 9th 2000 and there is my very old address where I lived. By the way: what is the future of Orient ODBMS? I don't know. I've no time to work on it anymore and I need a help in order to restart the project again. Any volunteers? :-)

Wednesday in Bruxelles

2008-03-05T15:05:00.006+01:00

Today I was attendeed in Bruxelles in order to discover interesting projects financed by the European Commission. The aim is finding projects with some relationships with the Romulus requirements and goals.

At 12:00pm Carlos shortly explained the Romuus project to each other partecipants. The presentation resume is available here.

The room is very big, a WiFi connection is available to all the partecipants, big projector, audio/video room and a microphone every 2 places. There is also the translation room, but is empty since the meeting is in english language. Unfortunately I can't shoot it since my notebook's webcam is burn and my Nokia's phone camera idem...

My flight will take off tomorrow afternoon so I'd like to catch a glimpse of the centre of the city this night. I'm trying to communicate with Francesco (He started working in Bruxelles some days ago) but his belgium phone number seems to be wrong!

I hope Francesco will read my blog feed before to leave Bruxelles ;-)

JDO versus JPA

2008-03-01T23:54:00.006+01:00

Very often someone ask me what to use for persistence in modern JEE applications: JPA or JDO? Well, JPA is born after JDO and seems to be official supported by Sun since it's part of EJB 3 specification.

But my response is always the same: use a JDO implementation if you want a more powerful tool. JDO 2.1 is a superset of JPA 1 standard.

A feature matrix is available here: http://db.apache.org/jdo/jdo_v_jpa.html

Java IDE Day: gli IDE Java più utilizzati si confrontano

2008-02-27T12:43:00.019+01:00

Cos’è?
Arriva per la prima volta in Italia l'evento internazionale che mette a confronto gli IDE Java più utilizzati e le loro community. JDeveloper (Oracle), NetBeans (Sun Microsystems), IntelliJ IDEA (JetBrains), invieranno un evangelist del loro core di sviluppo internazionale per confrontarsi a vicenda.

Speaker presenti:

Roman Strobl (Sun Microsystems)
Paolo Ramasso (Oracle)
Vaclav Pech (JetBrains)

Purtroppo nonostante l’impegno da entrambe le parti, non è stato possibile avere la presenza di Eclipse.

Come?
Uno slot di tempo a disposizione per ogni IDE per mostrare le potenzialità del proprio ambiente rispetto agli altri. Ruolo fondamentale sarà giocato dal pubblico in quanto sono previsti appostiti spazi per porre domande direttamente agli evangelist internazionali. La parte finale dell’ evento sarà dedicata ad un dibattito ragionato sul futuro degli ambienti di sviluppo. L’evento sarà in lingua inglese.

Costo:
L’evento è gratuito, ma è gradita la registrazione.

Organizzazione:
L’IDE Day è organizzato dal Jug Genova e Jug Roma

Quando e dove:
Sono previste due date: Genova, 10 marzo e Roma, 12 marzo. L’evento si svolgerà nel pomeriggio, all'interno delle Università. Per gli orari, agenda e informazioni logistiche si rimanda al sito dell’ evento.

Sito di riferimento: http://www.ideday.org/

Comparison between Roma Framework and Grails, Ruby on Rails, Trails, etc

2008-02-25T11:08:00.006+01:00

The Romulus project is started and the very first task is to write requirements. Romulus wants, between the other, improve the Roma Meta Framework with the state-of-the-art of ideas and technologies available around.

Today, in AssetData, we will start to write down a comparison matrix between Roma Framework and other famous frameworks (Grails, Ruby on Rails, Trails, etc) in order to find interesting points to import in Roma.

Yes these frameworks have the main goal to speed up the development and testing processes. Good, but this is only the second one for Roma. Roma is a Meta framework. This is the first Roma's goal: break coupling between domain code and other tools and frameworks.

For this reason the comparison will cover only the rapid development concerns between all these frameworks. If you know quite well one of these please send me a feedback with the pro/cons you found or just your opinion.

Grails will be the first one to be examined. Grails promises to increase productivity using main ideas taken by Ruby on Rails. Grails is 100% based on the Groovy language.

Which are the most interesting features Grails owns and can be imported in Roma? Stay tuned ;-)

Open Source non si traduce gratis

2008-02-01T14:51:00.000+01:00

Oggi è uscito un mio articolo sui nuovi modelli di business che ha introdotto la filosofia Open Source. L'articolo è stato pubblicato su TechNet, giovane mensile tecnologico italiano edito da Axia Multimedia.

Per leggere l'articolo potete:

- andare in edicola fino a fine febbraio 2008
- ordinarlo come arretrato
- leggerlo online in formato PDF ;-)

Will 2008 be the year of the return of the Roman Empire?

2008-01-14T07:17:00.001+01:00

Will 2008 be the year of the return of Roman empire?

No, I'm not talking about politic. Just software. Or better software development ;-)

The new year comes with the kickoff of Romulus project in Madrid, Spain. Today I'm here, in the center of the Spain's capital city.

But what is Romulus and what means with Roma? Because formerly the Romulus mission is:

"Domain Driven Design and Mashup Oriented Development based on Open Source Java Meta Framework for pragmatic, reliable and secure web development".

The main concept of Romulus is researching on novel methods for increasing productivity and reliability of web software development, in particularly, focused on Java web development.

In order to have a serious impact, the project does not start from scratch, it is based on two mature open source projects, Roma and LIFERAY, which will be extended according to this proposal needs and following an open source project development methodology, in order to disseminate and exploit the results of the project. The idea of using these projects is to solve the former problems, with Roma will get to make Java application development easy, integrate frameworks and tools using a meta framework and decreasing the implementation time. While with LIFERAY, we are integrating the leading enterprise open source portal framework, with relevant industrial references.

Asset Data company is part of the Romulus Consortium. If you want know more about the project visit the Romulus Home Page.

Below all the participants:

Asset Data, as the company with the biggest skill in Roma Meta Framework and where most of the committers are working (Italy)
Liferay company (Germany)
Gesfor group (Spain)
Imola Group company (Italy)
DERI University (Ireland)
Universidad Pòlitecnica de Madrid (Spain)
National Institute for research and development in informatics (Romania)

Does 2008 will be the year of the Roman empire? I hope yes, but what I know very well is that the Meta Framework revolution is already started!

Blessed and damned @Override annotation in JDK6!

2007-12-13T10:03:00.000+01:00

When I've started to play with Java5 new features I'm surprised there no was a way to static check (at compile time) that a method is implementing a method of an interface. There is the @Override annotation but it's only useful to tell to the Java compiler I'm overriding a super class method, nor an abstract one neither an interface method.

Now I discovered Sun staff covered the gap in Java6 just extending the behavior of @Override annotation also to extend abstract methods or to implement interface methods. Great, apart there is no mention on public JDK 6 JavaDocs!!!

Someone raised a bug on Sun's tracker to correct it: http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=6399361

My Eclipse IDE 3.3.1.1 recognizes the new feature and add the @Override annotation every time I override a method or implement an interface method. Cool.

But now I've the big problem that Roma Framework's sources are full of them and many users reported me they won't compile under Java5! Yes, because Roma needs JDK 5 to compile (but some additional modules that require Java6 in order to use Scripting facilities. The modules now are just Workflow Tevere and ETL).

The fastest solution is to set JDK 5 as compliance level in every single projects don't use Scripting. It works. Blessed and damned @Override...

Interviewee by JavaStaff (in Italian)

2007-12-11T12:33:00.000+01:00

Today was published the interview about me on JavaStaff portal. The interview is in Italian language:

http://www.javastaff.com/article.php?story=20071211103706919

Finally released Roma Meta Framework 1.0 rc4

2007-12-11T12:20:00.000+01:00

This should be the last one before the official 1.0, but I repeat to myself this period from a long. Not that Roma is not mature yet, but I'd like to have a release where the Roma committers don't put so many improvements and news in general.

First of all I've changed the way to release it on SourceForge. Now there are:

The Web Wizard distribution containing all startup modules and the most used (as form of sources and binaries)
Plug-ins as individual packages such as Workflow, Monitoring, ETL, Scheduler, etc.

The main news of 1.0 rc4 are:

New Designer module to customize your application using the Drag&Drop GUI. It allows to change any configured annotations plus to layout screen and form areas
Deep refactoring of ETL-XPath module. Now allows to use scripting to define record and field transformers. Plus a new GUI in form of wizard to configure the ETL process. ETL supports extraction from CSV and SQL sources and import on POJO and CSV.
New Reporting JR module to generate dynamically reports using Jasper Reports. Report can be in form of PDF, CSV and MS Excel. Now you can display the report of any GUI at the fly
New "Web Ready" project type to start from a ready-for-the-web application
Enhanced all CRUD inserting "report" button
Resolved a lot of issues (see SourceForge tracker)
Minor improvements

Does Eclipse Europa crash over and over again?

2007-11-19T13:06:00.000+01:00

If even the changes described in my previous post you have problems with Eclipse 3.3 (Europa), then probably you're using the same workspace from a long. Create a brand new workspace and re-import anything.

Remember you had to re-set all code formatting rules (if they are different by Eclipse built-in) as long as Run/Debug configurations.

Why Eclipse Europa 3.3 crashes

2007-11-15T22:37:00.001+01:00

If you're using the latest release of famous IDE you've surely experienced a lot of problems: every 10 minutes it crashes! Time depends by the projects opened and plug-ins installed.

Today my Eclipse crashed at least 15 times. So it was come the time to fix the problem. After some research I discovered the problem. For a well known bug you had to change the way you launch the IDE.

Change your eclipse.ini in the Eclipse's installation directory to:

-showsplash org.eclipse.platform
-vmargs
-XX:MaxPermSize=128m
-Xms40m
-Xmx256m

If you've a lot of memory try my configuration:

-showsplash org.eclipse.platform
-vmargs
-XX:MaxPermSize=128m
-Xms256m
-Xmx1024m

Your productivity will thanks ;-)

In Memory of Dave Morse, Amiga Co-Founder, 1943-2007

2007-11-13T01:41:00.000+01:00

"David Morse, Amiga Computer's co-founder passed away last week. I will remember him always". This is the news found on http://www.rebol.com/article/0345.html.

I never met David. We're part of different generations. But he worked to create one of best my partner of ever: Amiga computer. I started to play with Commodore 16 when I was about 10 years old. It was the holy communion gift of Diego, one of my best friend. I was amazed how can be easy to instruct a machine to make tasks. Then after so much efforts my mother bought me the first Commodore 64. I spent so much time on it... Playing and programming with the bundled Basic and just 48Kb of RAM.

After some year I was captivated by Amiga 500 computer. At that time I was living in Grosseto, a small town in Tuscany, Italy. So much powerful, so beautiful, so much forward than competitors: 4096 colors, true preemptive multitasking operative system, unix-like shell... So I decided to sold my C64 and all stuffs (games, applications, devices, etc.) to have enough money to buy my Amiga 500. I can remember yet the day my mother, my brother and me went back home with the enormous boxes containing Amiga 500 and the Philips monitor 8833 II. Full afternoons up my keyboard after the school. Amiga was my partner for many years until my last Amiga: the Amiga 1200 model equiped with M68030 50Mhz (a monster at that time).

Thank you again Dave, thanks to your wife Lorraine that surely doesn't know how Dave's creation charmed our generation.

RIP,
Luca

1 Dicembre 2007: JavaDay a Roma

2007-11-09T09:47:00.000+01:00

Anche quest'anno la macchina del JavaDay si è messa in moto: sabato 1° dicembre 2007 ci sarà la seconda edizione del JavaDay a Roma. Molti i talk interessanti di cui uno su Roma Meta Framework. Questa volta ho intenzione di partire quasi da subito con una demo, mostrare il designer e il funzionamento "interno" del framework aiutandomi con qualche slide.

Sito ufficiale Javaday di Roma: http://roma.javaday.it/roma/index.vm.

Ci vediamo li no? ;-)

Programma completo:

	Next generation Web	Java Open Source		Core Java, what's hot	Java enterprise
09.00 - 9.40	Second Life e Java: prospettive di comunicazione	Tapestry In Action , nuovi modi di sviluppare applicazioni web		Introduzione alla tecnologia Sun SPOT	Magic Box project: Effective K .I .S .S . with SpringFramework
09.50 - 10.30	JSF Integration in JViews - intervento in lingua inglese	Sviluppo rapido di applicazioni utilizzando DDD e Roma Meta Framework		Sessioni Multimediali Voce Video, IM e Presence con i nuovi standard IMS/SIP [SipWork]	SpagoBI: la piattaforma open source di Business Intelligence
10.40 - 11.20	Il Web del Futuro: Enterprise e Web Semantico	Sviluppare applicazioni basate su BPEL utilizzando NetBeans e JBI	NASA World Wind for Java: come integrare mappe geografiche tridimensionali nelle applicazioni Java per il desktop	Java e i linguaggi dinamici: come incrementare le potenzialità espressive di Java	Domain Driven Design, agilità e patterns, architettura e test first
11.40 - 12.20	Rich Internet Application con Java e Flex	Skype4Java		Programmazione Orientata agli Aspetti: cos’è, quando e come applicarla	Terracotta DSO, una soluzione innovativa per software enterprise
12.30 - 13.10	Usare Google Web Toolkit per costruire potenti applicazioni AJAX in Java con tanto di gestione offline dei dati	Parancoe: usare i DAO senza implementarli		JRuby e DSL	Clustering a Real World Enterprise Application with Terracotta :Atlassian Jira
13.20 - 14.00	Grails, sviluppo rapido di applicazioni web in Groovy + Java	Testing di sistemi enterprise utilizzando strumenti FLOSS		Ruby On Rails	Progettazione di un sistema di Single SignOn che permette l'accesso tramite tipi diversi di credenziali

Gnocchi on Wednesday

2007-10-24T15:46:00.000+02:00

Today is Wednesday. In Italy is not the classic day to eat Gnocchi (it should be Thursday), but today Luigi and Alessandra made an exception.

In the interview Luigi told about your Gnocchi recipe: "I simply apply the design patterns on cooking".

Sun Tech Days Italy - Rome

2007-09-26T00:09:00.000+02:00

Today I attended the Sun Tech Days Italy event in Rome. By a fast look at the agenda speeches seem to be pretty interesting but in general in this kind of events IMHO the quality is very poor, maybe also for the very short time available for every single talk.

I was wrong. The afternoon was flighted since all talks was very interesting! In the morning, instead, I was in the JUG stand along with Mara Marzocchi. JUG Roma staff is working for the next upcoming Java Day 2007 event in Rome as well.

Below the agenda I attended today:

	Java Scripting: JavaFX Script and JRuby - Sridhar Reddy Much more deeper than the talk listened at Jazoon '07. Today Sridhar talked about the JavaFX syntax language. JavaFX contains very interesting features. One for all the bind keyword that allow to listen changes in chain.
	Java Persistence API: Simplifying Persistence - Sang Shin Sang is a veteran speaker, nice and never predictable. What a shame for no one words about JDO specification!
	Ajax and Web 2.0 Related Frameworks and Toolkits - Sang Shin Sang explained in detail all kinds of Ajax frameworks (Dojo, DRW, GWT, etc.) with some slides and a working demo for every single one!
	Building Rich Web Applications using jMaki and Phobos - Doris Chen Doris fired me the interest for jMaki, what Jazoon's talk didn't! Very cool tool. I'd like to spend a little more time on investigating about the integration with Roma Meta Framework.

Here the full agenda: http://it.sun.com/sunnews/events/2007/sept/jc07

And in conclusion:
- I note down some improvements in Roma based on frameworks seen today.
- I forced me to give a chance to the NetBeans IDE. When? After the release of final 1.0 of Roma Framework, of course :-)

Preview of Release 1.0rc2

2007-09-07T11:35:00.000+02:00

For most of you August is a "dead month". Roma staff, instead, worked hardly to complete the release of 1.0rc2. Now you can taste a preview by downloading it from the SVN repository.

Take care to read information about compatibilities issues and migration here:

http://romaframework.xwiki.com/xwiki/bin/view/Main/PreviewOfRelease10rc2

Ruby on Rails and its Database Driver Approach: back to the past?

2007-08-29T17:51:00.000+02:00

I admit Ruby on Rails (RoR by now) contributed to know the convention-over-configuration pattern and now a lot of tools and frameworks are adopting it.

But I continue to hate the RoR's Database Driven approach: Where is the OO model? It seems to be back on PHP/Visual Basic!

Using Roma Meta Framework you start from your pure OO model following the DDD approach. The persistence aspect will convert the model to database. Dot. Let's think OO and the Aspect implementation will do the rest.

SourceForge renamed SubVersion URL of all projects

2007-07-16T02:08:00.000+02:00

Just today I discovered the reason RomaFramework's SubVersion repository wan't work anymore since 4 days: SourceForge renamed the SVN URL of all projects inserting the project as prefix.

Before:
https://svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/romaframework/trunk

Now:
https://romaframework.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/romaframework/trunk

The great thing is that you can't find any news about it in the SF.net homepage!

Come fareste senza Messenger?

2007-07-13T01:53:00.000+02:00

Che succederebbe se qualcuno togliesse Messenger dal vostro PC? Questa è la breve trama del colossal "L'ultima Trillata" in uscita nelle sale tra pochissimo. Qui sotto potete vedere il trailer:

Eclipse 3.3 Europa sucks!

2007-07-06T20:02:00.000+02:00

Three days ago I installed Eclipse 3.3, called also as "Europa". Today I'm back to use the previous one since it's much more stable and fast! Moreover the new Eclipse Update Manager works bad since it alerts me about new updates but I can't download and install its from the IDE cause unknown error!

Eclipse 3.3 Europa sucks (for now)!

Luca discovered the holy drink for Java Developers

2007-07-04T18:06:00.003+02:00

I discovered the holy drink for Java Developers: The Java Green Tea. Today at 5:00 pm o'clock I'll try it and for the rest of the week. In the next days I will be able to write if the Java Green Tea improves the performances of a Java Developer.

Resoconto Jazoon 2007 - Zurich Switzerland

2007-07-03T15:55:00.000+02:00

Eccoci qua,
a pochi giorni dalla fine della conferenza Jazoon 2007 posso fare un resoconto della manifestazione. Sarò sintetico come al solito :-)

Cominciamo con le impressioni iniziali. All'inizio ammetto che non mi aspettavo gran che dall'evento. Sarà perchè era alla sua prima "release", sarà che pochi nel giro avevano interesse a parteciparvi. Comunque per me era un'opportunità per dare un'occhiata a quella che sarebbe potuta diventare una conference di riferimento per l'europa, cosi come oggi è il Javapolis.

Organizzo il viaggio, trovo l'albergo non proprio a buon prezzo ma si sa che a Zurigo la vita è cara. Per il volo non riesco a sfruttare la convenzione del Jazoon perchè il codice convenzione non viene accettato dalla prenotazione online della Swiss Air. Per fortuna il biglietto è stato omaggiato dal JUG Roma anche perchè ho appreso solo dopo che sarebbe costato oltre € 1.200,00!

Sapevo che della capitale saremo stati solamente in 2: Davide Cerbo e io. Di certo non avrei mai immaginato quanto forte sarebbe stata la partecipazione italiana all'evento. Eggià, perchè tra JUG Padova (ne ho contati 3), JUG Milano (2), JUG Sardegna (credo 3) e il JUG Torino (2) in tutto i suonatori di mandolino ammontavano almeno a una dozzina, quella sporca dozzina...

Zurigo è bella. Tutto ordinato e funzionante come gli ingranaggi di un orologio (Svizzero appunto...). La gente è cordiale ma forse sorride poco per i miei gusti. Dappertutto ci sono ristoranti e caffè italiani, anche se la lingua ufficiale è il tedesco. Qualche stranezza l'ho trovata come gente in giacca e cravatta che gira in Monopattino (si, hai letto bene!) e altre cosette che ho pubblicato in quest'altro post. Toccherebbe scendere più a sud per trovare il cantone Italiano.

Il tempo non è stato gran che clemente, e gli unici 2 giorni di sole me li sono goduti tutti. Sopratutto il giovedì pomeriggio con Davide ci siamo girati 1/2 Zurich (Il centro, il giardino cinese, ecc.). Qualche foto l'ho pubblicata su Flickr.

Passiamo alla conferenza vera e propria.

La location devo dire che mi è piaciuta molto. Tutta l'organizzazione, i notebook disponibili per navigare, la registrazione nonchè il guardaroba erano in un locale davvero fashion, il Platins. Nel Platins sono stati organizzati anche tutti i pranzi, l'after hour del lunedì e il party di mercoledi notte. Invece le sessioni e gli sponsor erano tutti nel'edificio adiacente, un vero e proprio cinema multisala. Tutto fa parte del nuovo centro commerciale Silhcity inaugurato qualche mese fa.

L'organizzazione è stata davvero impeccabile. Sono o non sono svizzeri? :-) Proiezioni animate, Jingle a chiusura degli interventi, messaggi in broadcast a tutte le sale, fotografi, ecc.

Prima ho parlato di pranzi. Ebbene la scelta non era molto vasta, ma complessivamente non è stato malaccio e c'erano sempre drink gratis a volontà.

La maggior parte degli sponsor erano società di consulenza o man power svizzere che cercavano come segugi consulenti da arruolare nelle proprie file promettendo cifre da capogiro. Ebbene si, in Svizzera ci sono moltissime banche e i lavori sono ben pagati. A occhio e croce potrei dire che i compensi lordi sono il doppio di quelli italiani e anche di più. Poi calcolando che il regime fiscale è meno "pressante" che nel Bel Paese. Ok, lo ammetto, un pensierino c'è stato ;-)

Per quanto riguarda i talk non c'è ne è stato nessuno che mi ha incuriosito particolarmente: nessuna tecnologia, framework o tool che puzzasse di nuovo.

Quello di cui sono davvero contento è l'aver conosciuto di persona gli altri ragazzi dei JUG italiani e in particolare: Fabrizio Gianneschi, Fabrizio Giudici, Emmanuele Sordini, Lucio Benfante, Enrico Giurin, Paolo Foletto, Luisa, Marcello Teodori, Giancarlo Pace

Filippo Diotalevi, Bruno Bossola e Davide Cerbo li conoscevo già (Filippo un mio ex-collega, Bruno al JavaDay e Davide è del JUG Roma).

Martedi pomeriggio ho partecipato al BOF (Birds of a feather) session JUG Leaders Panel dove abbiamo parlato di JUG, Java, Sun, cooperazione, strumenti per gli eventi e altro. Anche questa è stata una buona occasione per socializzare. A proposito... Devo ancora reperire la foto di gruppo. Vatti a ricordare chi l'ha scattata...

Consiglierei il Jazoon ad amici e colleghi? Direi di si, a parte il prezzo altissimo. € 1,245 (la early registration costava la metà) sono davvero tanti. Sicuramente troppi per una partecipazione individuale e comunque non trascurabile per la piccola-media azienda. Comunque c'è stato anche una breve dritta a fine conferenza su come non pagare per il prossimo Jazoon 2008: proporre uno speach o essere un JUG Leader. Non è forse un ottimo modo per spingere a fare sempre di più? ;-)

Comunque una cosa è sicura: il prossimo anno mi armerò con almeno uno speach su Roma Framework e una sessione dimostrativa "sul pezzo".

Come conclusione lancio anche un razzo segnaletico sperando che Sun Italia e qualche sponsor interessato colga quello che sto per dire:

E se facessimo una Java Conference non più in Italiano ma in Inglese?

Se fosse organizzata con uno spirito internazionale? Ultimamente l'interesse verso il Java Conference sembra scemato dato il successo nel 2006 dei JavaDay. Ditemi cosa ne pensate.

Ora è davvero tutto: ci vediamo al JavaPolis ;-)

Jazoon 2007 conference: my photos

2007-06-29T14:10:00.000+02:00

I've just published my photos about the Jazoon event: http://flickr.com/photos/lvca/sets/72157600539746765/show/

Live from Jazoon 2007

2007-06-28T11:36:00.000+02:00

If you want to know about Jazoon conference details look at:

Jazoon 2007, 3rd and last day preview

2007-06-28T10:53:00.000+02:00

Here we are,
yesterday afternoon Davide and me taked a look to Zurich city after the only "Social Event" we consumed, the 5D Cinema: Cool but the 4D Cinema in Las Vegas was more realistic IMHO. Anyway Zurich has very beautiful places, anything is in order, people continues to walk smootly: no one run! So much different by Rome...

I've so many photo in my Nikon, but I missed to take the cable with me, so I'll publish once home (It's time I open a Flickr or similar account).

After these three days in Zurich I can make a face-to-face between Zurich and Rome:

Zurich	Rome
Business men cross the city using the mono pattino	Only children use it
Trams are always on time and never full, trains too	Few trams but bus and metro are often full and overdue
So few cars around, probably since public transportation works fine and other people use cycle (and mono pattino, see above)	Too much cars and moto cycles!
Vey few people smile, in public they are very formal, maybe in private no? (I look very strange shops in the city...)	You can hear laugh and see smiles in most faces
Everything is in its place and in order	Unordered impression, much more "lived"
Many Italian places such as restaurants and bars	I don't know any swiss restaurant in Rome!

I also enjoyed the party in the night, where Bruno Bossola sang as a real singer!

Jazoon 2007 conference: 3rd day

2007-06-27T12:23:00.000+02:00

Yesterday I was attendeed to JUG Leaders Panel BOF and we've talked about the JUG cooperation in tools and initiatives.

The third day of Jazoon 2007 Conference is not finished but the feedback on today is much positive. Surely the most interesting conference day until now. I selected the following sessions:

Effective Java Heap Memory Analysis on Enterprise-Scale

JavaFX Script - Declarative GUI Programming Language for the Java Platform

Spring 2.1: Dependency Injection and AOP in a Java EE 5 World

This afternoon there will not be technical session but "Social Events". We have not yet take a decision on what to do...

Note: Picture from Fabrizio Gianneschi

Jazoon 2007, 2nd day

2007-06-26T14:09:00.000+02:00

First impressions about the Jazoon 2007 are quite positive. The location is very beautiful, the environment much more "fashion" than I thought. I like Zurich, no one goes running. Anything is at your place. Maybe too much!

The average level of sessions is quite lower than I expected. Maybe 40-50 minutes are too few to present something in deeper. But it should be so: a way to discover interesting points to look in deep once home.

I can't find a cool solution against Roma Meta Framework, nothing of really innovative! This gives me a lot of reasons to go forward with my job.

Tonight or tomorrow I'll post comments about the second day.

Just arrived in Jazoon 2007

2007-06-25T14:36:00.000+02:00

After a lot of troubles I arrived in Zurich, Switzerland! My flight was at 9:40 am but I had to reach the check-in about a couple of hours before. This morning all trains from Roma city to the Fiumicino Airport was suspended for a non planned public protest.

After some minutes of panic a girl I never seen before, come in Parco Leonardo station and invite the hostess sat near me to go along with her to the airport. Since the hostess and me are talking to get a taxi together, that girls seems to come from the sky!

In the car I've discovered that we all togheter are neightbour.

So my trip was saved as much as my conference. The picture you see was shooted by Davide Cerbo, a JUG Roma member while we're waiting to the first one talk: Me as member of Simpson family!

First one AssetData Go-Kart contest

2007-06-15T14:41:00.000+02:00

Today, friday June 15th 2007 there will be the first one AssetData Go-Kart contest: an event organized by me some days ago. There will be a bounche of AssetData people and some friends that will challange on the road.

I think a little bit of sane competition on the road would improve also the reflexes on writing down code :-)

SourceForge project nomination

2007-06-11T23:48:00.000+02:00

If you're using Roma in your project or you think Roma Framework is the most innovative project in the Java market, then why don't vote it at the SourceForge 2007 Community Choice Awards?

Click on the banner and select your vote. You can express the vote for Roma in multiple areas such as: Best Project, Best New Project and Best Tool or Utility for Developers

Jazoon conference

2007-05-25T15:13:00.000+02:00

Starting from June, 25th 2007 until June, 28th 2007 I'll be attended to the Jazoon conference in Zurich, Switzerland. It's a technical conference on Java technologies and directions.

Anyone will be present?

Roma framework validation

2007-05-04T18:48:00.000+02:00

Today I've successfull integrated the Validation Rules inside Roma Meta Framework.

(1) New annotation attribute to validate against RegExp rule:

Example:

public class Account{
...
@ViewField(match="^[_a-z0-9-]+(\\.?[_a-z0-9-]*)*@?[a-z0-9-]*(\\.?[a-z0-9-]*)*$")
private String email;
...
}

(2) Integrated the Informagen-Components Component library written by Will Gilbert.

Now Roma uses:

- IntegerTextField for int/Integer attributes
- NumericTextField for float/double/Float/Double attributes
- RegExpTextField for String attributes with "match" annotation (via Java5 annotation or Xml Annotation)

(3) New mean for min/max annotations

Now Roma uses:
- In String fields min/max are the minimum/maximum length
- In number fields min/max are the minimum/maximum value

Example:

public class Account{
...
@ViewField(min=3, max=32)
private String name;

@ViewField(min=18, max=130)
private String age;
...
}

OW2 Election of Individual Members Board of Directors

2007-05-03T10:54:00.000+02:00

Some days ago I candidated me as individual member representative in OW2. OW2 born from the merge between ObjectWeb and Orientware. For most people ObjectWeb is the European Apache, for other is the French Apache! :-)

"The OW2 Consortium was initiated on January 1, 2007 through the merger of ObjectWeb and Orientware, two leading open source middleware communities of renown industry players, innovative start-ups, prominent academic organizations and individuals from across the world." - Cut&Paste words from official http://www.ow2.org site.

Yesterday the election was finished and François LETELLIER collected higher votes, 49.1%, against my second place with 34.0% votes.

My congratulations to François!

I hope to see OW2 to gain the developers interest as much as Apache.

Integrating Terracotta in Roma

2007-04-11T17:17:00.000+02:00

I'm working to integrate Terracotta with Roma Framework. The problem I encountered until now are due to Echo2 framework. It stores in HttpSession references to internal components and HttpSession itself.

This is the reason because Terracotta Session Configuraor asks me to insert in the tc-config.xml so many classes and boot-classes!

What I'd like to try is to store only user domain objects. If will work, the clustering workload will be much more light and the user (programmer) will not worry anymore about to assure any frameworks he's using to be terracotta compatible.

Good luck to myself!

Released version 1.0 rc 1

2007-04-03T12:52:00.000+02:00

Yesterday I've released Roma Framework version 1.0 release candidate 1 after about 4 months from last official 0.9.9. I hope to close the release candidate phase for April 2007.

There are again few more things to resolve before final 1.0:

- PersistenceAspect mode: define a better way to declare it
- Portlet support: areas are rendered not in order mode
- Tree component support
- #1693538 Divide Spring file in multiple sub-files

Resolve known bugs:

- #1684653 portlet

Terracotta presentation

2007-03-30T13:19:00.000+02:00

Yesterday I met Jonas Boner, one of Terracotta people. His presentation and demo show to me again the powerful of this tool.

Terracotta allows to cluster any application acting on single POJO by enhancement (byte code changing).

I've planned to integrate in Roma Framework for the next week!

2007-03-30T13:06:00.000+02:00

Working on Roma's PersistenceAspect

2007-03-25T18:42:00.000+02:00

After the last application developed using Roma Meta Framework I spent much time to refactor and optimize the performance of PersistenceAspect module. Until now Roma always used the JDO detaching mode. It works very well for the most cases, but when you had to execute many operations inside the same transaction or when you don't need to have the objects writeable.

JDO Detaching consumes a lot of CPU resources since the objects are copied and memory since for the same reason. For normal CRUD operation the difference is trascurable, but in long transactions is very sensible.

For this reason I've refactored the PersistenceAspect to have 3 implementations:
- AtomicPersistenceAspect: operations are always atomic and it continue to uses the "classic" detach mode.
- TxPersistenceAspect: operations share the same transaction (you had to call commit/rollback methods!) and you can access to the objects also after the commit/rollback in read-only mode
- NoTxPersistenceAspect: No transaction is used and you can access to the objects also after the commit/rollback in read-only mode

Furthermore you can select the strategy also when you retrieve the object by:
- PersistenceAspect.loadObject()
- Query.setStrategy()

In the next week I'll migrate all CRUD operations to use the NoTx Strategy.

I started also to write a detailed HowTo about the Persistence Strategy.

Stay tuned!

New logo for Roma [Meta] Framework

2007-03-25T18:23:00.000+02:00

Luca Bianconi is the author of the new Logo of Roma [Meta] Framework. It's online starting from friday 23 March 2007.

The logo is very simple and was inspired by Roma city (Roma is the original and current name in Italian of Rome city!). The "O" of Roma was replaced by the Colosseum, maybe the most famous symbol of my city. The author of the Colosseum image is Stefano Linguerri; some time ago he created it for the JUG Roma logo.

The selected font for the Logo is, obviousy, the Times New Roman ;-)

Do you like it?

Comments about the Logo are welcome in this post.

Roma supports portlets!

2007-03-19T15:25:00.000+01:00

Roma Framework support the Portlets! They are not JSR-168 portlets but just POJO that are rendered as seperated-independent boxes. You can move the portlets around your desktop ala Google Personalized Homepage. Each box lives independently from others. Very cool!

I've adjusted the Roma Test Presentation demo application to use this feature.

Below a screenshot:

From Jakarta Common Logging to SLF4J: NDC is missed?

2007-03-13T19:46:00.000+01:00

Reading the Sergio's blog I wrote down to avoid to use Jakarta Common Logging APIs (JCL) in favour of Simple Logging Facade For Java (SLF4J)

I decided to refactor all Roma Framework in support of SLF4J, but I'm surprised to not find an interface for Log4J Nested Diagnostics Contexts (NDC)!!! NDC is a static class that allows to track user session information in Log4J.

So now Roma Echo2 module will depend by SLF4J and Log4J directly. Tomorrow I'll write a generic interface to abstract NDC behaviour + Log4J implementation. Does SLF4J guys will appreciate this contribute? We'll see ;-)

Web 2.0

2007-02-06T21:46:00.000+01:00

What is the Web 2.0? Just another buzzword? Maybe!

But take a look to the video below. It shows the social and technological changement of "that" buzzword in our life. Cool!

Waiting for Roma 1.0 apha

2007-01-26T02:27:00.000+01:00

While Roma project staff is working to release the first alpha version of 1.0 many things are changed in SVN repository:

USERS module was splitted (refactored) in USERS + ADMIN following responsability rules
New Xml Desktop to render component in dynamic desktop described in XML form
New JPOX libraries that resolve some bugs
Much other

Following this link you'll find more details about integration with old projects based on Roma:

Waiting for Roma 1.0 alpha

Next upcoming JUG Roma meeting

2007-01-23T12:37:00.000+01:00

On the next Thursday 25th January 2007 there will be the ninth JUG meeting in Rome. For the first time the location will be my company: AssetData. To reach the meeting see the offical site: www.jugroma.it.

On Tomorrow morning I'll leave Rome to follow a customer in Milan. If the air company will not make the usual delay I should came back on Thursday 4:30 PM to the Leonardo Da Vinci Airport. Just in time to reach AssetData before the starting of meeting!!! ;-)

Below the agenda, in italian:

Primo talk (non tecnico): 18.00-18.40

Titolo: JavaPolis: io c'ero! Cosa è successo e di cosa si è parlato
Relatori: Alessio Pace, Paolo Argangeli, Simone Federici

Jug Session 8.40-19.20

Brindisi per il primo compleanno del Jug Roma
restyling di www.jugroma.it (chi si offre? Come? raccolta idee e formazione di un gruppo di lavoro per il nuovo sito)
creazione di corsi java under 18 a cura dei membri del jug (idea fattibile? Come?)
proposte JugRoma 2007
acquisto di un VirtualServer per il Jug (valutazione)

Secondo talk(tecnico):19.20-20.20

Titolo: Antipatterns: se li conosci, li eviti!
Relatori: Simone Federici e Giorgio Vinci

The Roma Project

2007-01-22T15:07:00.000+01:00

On past Friday I've changed the logo from "Roma Meta Framework" to "The Roma Project". The reason resides to avoid confusing people about Roma goals and mission. I'd like people speaks of "Roma" and not of "Roma Framework".

However the first release 1.0 alpha is very close to been published. The main change with 0.9.9 is the dynamic desktop management. You can define the desktop composition in a desktop.xml file. This feature allow to create very complex application without write any Echo2 code.

Microsoft Vista? No thanx, but...

2007-01-08T01:36:00.000+01:00

Yesterday I've installed a tiny tool called Vista Inspirat. It changes the look & feel of your Microsoft Windows XP Operative System with the look of the latest Windows OS version. Cool!

The GUI is very nice and seems to me more usable. The general speed of the user interface seems faster, too. I don't know why, but the difference is sensible on my Notebook Acer Aspire 5670...

I never seen Vista before now, but with Vista Inspirat the layout results optimized and much more user friendly. I'm talking about all windows in general, the Explorer application and Internet Explorer. Also the new taskbar is very similar to the MacOs X.

Why I use MS Windows? Simply: because IMHO Windows is much more productive than Linux distributions I tested until now. Although I started using Linux since the Red Hat 5.x on my wonderful Amiga 1200 (with some expansions) 8-9 years ago, I find Windows XP the best OS for client/desktop tasks.

On the other hand I'll never try to install Microsoft Windows on a server machine. Unix/Linux OS on production Server wins to hand down.

My 0,02 €

Very close the next release 0.9.9 of Roma Framework

2006-12-05T23:24:00.000+01:00

After about 3 months of work I'm ready to release the new release 0.9.9 of Roma Meta Framework Project.

This will be the last version before the official 1.0. Until now I always preferred to not sacrifice the refactoring of Roma sources to mantain compatibility with previous release. Starting from 1.0 I'm conscious I'll cannot change the sources in a rough manner as now!

I want to give thanks to all Roma users and developers for the patience to adapt their application sources after every SVN update command :-D

What are the news of the version 0.9.9?

New ETL aspect to import POJO from CSV files defining mapping rules by XPath
New rendering components (Accordion, ImageButton, Image, TableEdit) and enhanced existents
Integrated JSP module to use JSP along with Echo2 components
New Roma Test Presentation demo application
New IN operator in PersistenceAspect
Cache in database operations
Support for JDO2 Fetch Group to speed up queries
Enhanced USERS module with Active Sessions, Info Categories, and more
Tons of bugs fixed
Much other

Roma Framework: New XPath ETL Aspect

2006-11-28T13:07:00.000+01:00

Finally in the Roma Framework's SVN repository there is the first ETL aspect implementation for Roma Framework. It allows to import data from CSV files and map content to object properties. Anything is declared in a XML file with XPath rules for mapping.

Easy and cool as usual! ;-)

Roma Framework vs JBoss Seam

2006-11-20T15:08:00.000+01:00

After the last JUG Roma event, I've translated the Feature matrix of the match "Roma Meta Framework vs JBoss Seam" in a PDF document available here.

This comparison shows the different approaches of these two frameworks:

Roma wins as features for the very fast development: Automatic GUI generation, Much more powerful CRUDs, Users module, etc.
JBoss Seam wins for integration of Remoting (EJB 3.0) and for its jBPM and Drolls modules integrated.

By this match I've catched some interesting features of JBoss Seam to implement in Roma Meta Framework. Stay tuned! ;-)

Ciao, LG

JPA vs JDO

2006-11-11T23:53:00.000+01:00

Many people think that the newest JPA is always the best choice now that first EJB 3.0 implementations are released.

JPA is a subset of Sun Microsystem JDO 2.0 standard. JPOX team published a matrix to compare their.

JPA vs JDO 2.0

Today Freshmeat wakes up my email account with the new version of JPOX 1.1.4. I'll try it tonight to release it in the next RomaFramework distribution.

Congratulation JPOX team, the best ORM tool I never used. If you cannot use a pure ODBMS, JPOX is the best choice to work with objects and a Relational DBMS. With no doubts!

Roma Framework big refactoring

2006-09-29T18:05:00.000+02:00

Hi,
yesterday night a great idea light my mind... A new way to define desktop in View Aspect. It was too much simple to catch before...

Below a default desktop (I replaced open/close characted with []):

[desktop]
[area name="main" render="column"\]
[area name="top" /]
[area name="body" render="grid"/]
[area name="bottom" /]
[/area]
[/desktop]

By using XML to define the desktop assure cross View Aspect portability. The idea is very simple: to define, by area tags, a way to create containers ala Swing. Each area has a name that can be used as layout foreach POJO fields and actions. Furthermore area tag allow optionally the render to use. Available renders are:

- Null (Empty container)
- Row
- Column
- Grid
- Tab (TabbedPane)

I'm working for a XmlDesktop working with Echo2 implementation. Thanks to this feature users will be able to build complex and nice pages without effort!

Echo2 XML stylesheet will make the rest changing colors, images, fonts, spacing, etc.

Cool!

The most strange bug in the Java Virtual Machine!

2006-09-26T11:42:00.000+02:00

Rome, Italy. Yesterday night. My clock displays 1:23 AM.

Finally I found the bug that affects the CRUDSelect of RomaFramework project. Some users reported me a strange behaviour: the "select" button of CRUDSelect won't appear when the application is launched non in debug mode.

Initially I've leave out that report in favor of more concrete enhancements and problems. But some days ago I've catched the strange behaviour reported by the users.

How can the JVM hide my "select" button and show it when I launch the same application in debug mode? This is a case for the detective Luca. Since I cannot debug the application (in debug doesn't appears the bug), I've enabled the logging for the internal API of RomaFramework (just changing the log4j.xml file). It was not enought. So I've inserted much more logging and finally I saw the problem:

Java Reflection doesn't return the method public void select(). Much of Roma Framework working depends by Java Reflection. In a deeper analysis I've isolated the problem:

CRUDSelect class contains, between the others, these two methods:

public void select();
public void select(boolean iForceWindowClosing);

For a strange reason the first one is not returned when the JVM is in non-debug mode!!! Probably a bug in the HotSpot on method with the same name. I've renamed the second one method in:

public void selectAndForceClosing(boolean iForceWindowClosing);

And now anythings work!!! Now I submit the update in SVN repository, but tomorrow I'll open a bug report to Sun.com sending a test case that show the problem.

This time again, another case was resolved by detective Luca ;-)

Greetings ProNetics

2006-09-07T11:21:00.000+02:00

Today is the last day in ProNetics company. After about 2 years in ProNetics I leave my role to work as C.T.O. in AssetData. AssetData is a small-young private company specialized in the vertical market of Human Resources and E-Learning.

My mission will be to make the company more "horizontal" to the Software Development and System Integration. All new projects will use the Open Source RomaFramework technology to develop Java application in short time guaranteing good Time To Market. A small area will cover the PHP technology by using and customizing DOCEBO E-Learning software.

I want to give thanks to ProNetics people, specially to Mario Lanzillotta and Gianugo Rabellino to have instilled in me the Open Source culture. In the ProNetics period I've released my pearl Orient ODBMS as open source project on Source Forge community. Moreover in the last months I've created the RomaFramework project too...

I want to give thanks to other collegues, someone become a friend in my private life too... And I want to take advantage of this greeting to relaunch the challenge to tear away my gold medal in the Go-Kart competion!!! ;-)

So... Bye and Let's start!

Roma Framework: finally the Users Module working

2006-08-22T22:56:00.000+02:00

Today I've finished the first tests about the new Users module in ROMA Framework. What is the Users Module? It contains all domain POJO to manage login, accounts and profiles in the most classic fashion.

Yes, since most often applications handle User and authentication in the same way, why don't implement a flexible POJOs in ROMA? That is the Users Module. It depends by JPOX persistence module (JDO 2.0) to store user information in the database.

The most powerful thing, IMHO, is the profiling system. I tried to implement the most flexible system to define profiles:

Each profile defines the mode, namely the way functions play:

allow all but: you can define the exception. Use this when exception are less than all functionalities
deny all but: you can define only what the profile can access. Use this when functions are much less than the total.

Each profile can define a parent profile where to inherit the functionalities allowed and denied.
Functionalities are expressed as a simple name in the format below:

ClassName
ClassName.field
ClassName.action

In this way you can profile from the Class level until each field/action!

How to use it?

If you want to disable the Control Panel item from the main menu, just insert the function with name "MainMenu.controlPanel" (that is the action name that call the submenu) and with allow equals to false.

If you'd like to hide the employee's salary field to the "Visitor" profile, then set it with mode "Allow all but" and insert the function "Employee.salary" with allow equals to false. That is.

Roma controller will check for each POJO's fields and actions if the current user profile is allowed to display.

Simple, powerful and easy!

Users module contain also an Activity Log manager, a default implementation for the AuthenticationAspect using BaseAccount and BaseProfile POJOs, generic useful objects such as Info and GenericValue, and more.

To use it download the latest SVN revision and type:
roma addModule domain-users

Follow the link to know more: http://romaframework.xwiki.com/xwiki/bin/view/Doc/Domain+Users

Back to my PC

2006-08-21T12:31:00.000+02:00

Holidays ended and I'm in Rome again in front to my PC to resolve some issues about Roma Framework and to implement some new cool features.

Rome city is too much beautiful on August, since there is zero traffic and very few people around the city. Yesterday it was a very hot day, but in the evening I've tested my brand new Roller Blade on bicycle path near Rome. Very cool!

Roma Framework community and vacation

2006-08-10T11:04:00.000+02:00

After a while I write on my tech blog... Now I'm on vacation (Tuscany, Italy) but sometime I connect to the Internet to read mails and messages. I'm very happy to see the community reply to the Roma Framework forum in my absence! ;-)

I'll return in the mid of august with a lot of feature requests and some (!) bugs to resolve.

And in the air I can feel a wind of changes...

Ciao, Luca

Very Glad...

2006-07-25T22:10:00.000+02:00

I'm very glad when people thank to me and Roma's developers for the Roma Framework Project.

The bigger satisfaction is when developers say: "Developing a web application with Roma is incredible!", and then enlist all benefits to develop an application using only POJOs.

Roma Framework is much more than a web tool, also if most people use it to create Java Web Applications in short time...