Mule best practices

I'm using Mule in all last projects and I find it a very good product. As well Mule is protocol aware (you can configure endpoints using all available (many) protocols) I found a very good solution for our needs to configure Mule in this way:

- using the GoF "Command Pattern" to execute remote requests
- using the TCP/IP protocol for communication between distributed components (the fastest)
- using Java serialization to transport complex objects between client and server components by setting the ByteArrayToSerializable and SerializableToByteArray transformers

I found a bug in Mule about serialization of objects sent back as response. To resolve it you can use two transformers instead of these resident in package org.mule.transformers.simple.

I've open the issue on Mule's Jira system. To track it follow this link: http://jira.symphonysoft.com/browse/MULE-498. You'll find the patched transformer classes attached to this Jira issue ;-)

Roma Framework

Roma Framework consists in several components to build an efficent application in very short time.

Roma want to be the "empire of frameworks". This means not develop yet another framework, but rather assembling the best of Open Source products in a ready-to-use-solution that can be customized at the highest level with the minor efforts.

Something like Ruby-on-rails but using pure Java platform.

Mission impossible? Maybe, but the idea is very good and it uses the best open source frameworks and tools available around today:

• Mule Bus (http://mule.codehaus.org) for the intercommunication bus
  
• Apache Cocoon 2.1 (http://cocoon.apache.org/2.1/) for the multi channel front-end
  
• JDO 2.0 using JPOX (http://www.jpox.org) for automatic and transparent persistence
  

Stay tuned for the first one public release. If you want to know more about this initiative please contact me.

Roma framework will be released as Apache 2.0 license.

Pro-Netics Open Community

Pro-Netics company inaugurates the new open community space. At startup the community will be open only to the internal Pro-Netics people. After the first phase it will be open to all universities interested in the shared projects.

The third phase will be the openness to everyone interested in the internet.

Mule success story

Working for an Arabian bank I had to find a very fast way to connect two applications. In this context I tried Mule (http://mule.codehaus.org). Mule is an open source bus tool with the support for a large number of protocols. It's very simple to understand and use. In less than a week the application was ready for tests.

If customer wants to use different or alternative ways to connect their, just add inbound entry point in the configured bus. Dot. Mule supports natively: JMS, SOAP, EJB, TCP/IP Socket, RMI, etc. You can write a custom transport component (called Provider) and plugit.

All transformations will be reused. Transport now is a very small detail ;-)

Unfortunately MULE doesn't provide a CORBA transport, so we moved outbound CORBA calls at Transformers level. The clearest solution was to write a CORBA provider (using OpenORB implementation for example), but time was very short.

In conclusion I'm sure to use Mule in future applications, since transport and transformation concept are very common and with Mule the life is easier ;-)

Rod Johnson about Spring and persistence

Rod, the creator of Spring framework and member of the JDO expert group, has published a presentation about the persistence hot theme and how Spring resolve it in excellent way.

Rod tells that OR-Mapping tools (JDO, Hibernate, TopLink, etc.) can resolve the 90% of use cases. In the others you can use SQL directly by the Spring's JdbcTemplate.

Interesting article ;-)

Here you can follow the thread on TheServerSide.com: http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=35233

Spring framework home: http://www.springframework.org

Why test driven development is so difficult to accept?

This month I'll work in the central project of one of biggest italian bank. The architecture is fully J2EE with large use of EJB :-(

Since my group will touch very sensible part of code, my first one request to the customer was: "Where can I found your test cases and regression tests? I'd like to run their before and after our changes..."

The response was: "We don't have their, but we have planned to write someone..."

I hope to write first-shot-running-code to avoid to hear in the middle of the night the police to knock on my door... :-D

The new EJB 3 Persistence API

Finally after the war between JDO, EJB Entity Beans, Hibernate, TopLink (ant others) the new EJB3 Persistence API promises to make clearness into the O-R Mapping world.

Take a look to the presentation of the new technology ;-)

PS: I need help to write a EJB3 Persistence API implementation based on Orient ODBMS!

Pro-Netics dinner

Photos of latest Pro-Netics dinner in Rome...

Click on the link to browse all photo album ;-)

Test drive of new Pro-Netics gadgets

Test drive of new Pro-netics gadgets for the JavaConference. They are very nice (my boss could read this blog...) blue hats.

My rule in this test case is "crash-test-dummy", so I should beat my head many times against the wall and annotate when the hat will broke... obviously I'll write a test report document with the results...

Daniele's religious conversion

My collegue Daniele was catched with a Windows XP installation running on his laptop.

Is this a religious conversion to the Microsoft world? Or simply...know the enemy to combat him?

Orient ODBMS linux version

Continue the work of refactoring for Orient ODBMS to be fully complied under Linux kernel. I'm using ant to compile all things, Java and C++ core components.

Upon completition sources will be committed in the usual CVS sourceforge's repository.

Stay tuned in the next days to download the first one linux release ;-)

ProNetics Distributed Scheduler solution

ProNetics has developed a distributed scheduler solution based on 100% open source products.

I'd like to release the product inside the Open Symphony Quartz project.

Follow the thread on Quartz forum: http://forums.opensymphony.com/thread.jspa?threadID=3271&tstart=0

ProNetics Distributed Scheduler uses the following products:

• Quartz (the scheduler)
• Atlassian JIRA (Event logging and presentation)
  
• Tomcat (Application Server)
• Ant (Scripting execution engine)
  
• ActiveMQ (JMS engine)
  
• Log4J (Logging)
• MiniContainer (IoC)

JavaConference 2005

June, 22nd and 23rd 2005

Pro-Netics company will be present to the next JavaConference event in Milan, Italy.

We'll present our solutions in a stand inside the conference.

JavaConference event details: http://it.sun.com/eventi/jc05/

Technoblog

This is my first one techno-blog ;-)

Ecco che ho appena inaugurato il mio blog "tecnologico" ;-)