Software Engineering Radio

Recording Venue: Phone

Guest: Jeff Frey

System z, or the Mainframe, holds most of us in awe — the ultimate computing platform, referenced in Hollywood as well as by those who thought they were dealing with “legacy” systems — but what does Mainframe really mean? What does its stack look like?

This leading virtualized infrastructure is not just hardware, but advanced sets of operating system, programming, and transaction-processing platforms that are relied-upon worldwide for massive-scale computational and data needs, and that are becoming increasingly applicable to the cloud world. Jeff Frey, IBM fellow and CTO for System z platform speaks with SE-Radio’s Scott Jensen about the history, features, and architecture of one of the world’s largest retail computers.

• System z
• Cluster via Sysplex
• VSAM (virtual storage access method)
• Technical Overview

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Recording Venue: Phone

Guest: Steve Will

IBM i (formerly known as OS/400) is an advanced object-based operating system by IBM that runs thousands of businesses around the world.  Steve Will, the Chief Architect of IBM i speaks with us about the history, technical features, and underlying architecture discussing the concepts of Single Level Store, integrated databases, machine and logical virtualization, and workload management in an operating system and environment that takes an alternative and often kinder look at the role operations systems should play vs. the common programming infrastructure management models.

• IBM i
• Steve Will’s Blog
• Varnish Architecture Notes
• Single Level Store
• PHP on i

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Recording Venue:
Guest(s): Juergen Hoeller
Host(s): Eberhard
Recording Venue:
Guest(s): Juergen Hoeller
Host(s): Eberhard
In this episode Eberhard Wolff speaks with Jürgen Höller, the co-found of the Spring framework. Spring is a tremendously successful Java framework so they discuss the design of large frameworks and the issues that arise in the evolution.
Jürgen explains the management of dependencies in the framework, how to structure such a framework, how to offer compatibility for the existing user base while evolving the framework and the role of metrics during development.

Links:

• The Spring Framework
• JDepend
• SonarJ
• Structure 101

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Recording Venue:
Guest(s): Peter Kriens
BJ Hargrave

Host(s): Martin Bernd
This episode is about OSGi, the dynamic module system for Java. Our guests are Peter Kriens (OSGI’s Technical Director) and BJ Hargrave (OSGI’s CTO). We’ll discuss what OSGi is all about and why and in which contexts it is useful. Additionally we are having a look at the different layers of OSGI and where and how they are used. Other questions discussed are: What means dynamicity in an OSGI environment? Where is OSGI used? What’s the future of OSGI? How does OSGI interact with existing middleware solutions? How can I run several versions of the same JAR at the same time? Where are OSGI’s problems?

Links:

• Part 2 of a webinar series on OSGi – Installing some bundles
• Part 1 of a webinar series on OSGi – Running OSGi
• Peters blog
• Tutorials for OSGi
• Peter’s tools
• Run OSGi inside an App-Server
• The Spring Framework can run on OSGi as well
• The free OSGi Implementation Knopflerfish
• The free OSGi Implementation Apache Felix
• The free OSGi Implementation Equinox
• The Website of the OSGi Alliance
• The OSGi Specification
• A repository of all kinds of different osgi modules
• JSR 291: Dynamic Component Support for Java SE
• Part 3 of a webinar series on OSGi – Running some games
• Part 4 of a webinar series on OSGi – Installing a php wiki on top of OSGi

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Recording Venue: OOPSLA 2006
Guest(s): Brian Goetz
David Holmes

Host(s): Markus
This is another episode on concurrency. We talk to two experts in the field, Brian Goetz and David Holmes about aspects of concurrency we hadn’t really covered before.

We start out by discussing liveness and safety and then continue to talk about synchronizers (latches, barriers, semaphores) as well as the importance of agreeing on protocols when developing concurrent applications. We then talked about thread confinement as a way of building thread-safe programs, as well as using functional programming and immutable data. The next set of topics covers various ways of how compilers can optimize the performance wrt. to concurrency, talking about techniques such as escape analysis as well as lock elision and coarsening. We then covered how to test concurrent programs and the consequences of the Java memory model on concurrency. We then went on to look at some more advanced topics, namely, lock-free programming and atomic variables. We also briefly discussed the idea of transactional memory.

Finally, we looked at how better language support – specifically, a more declarative style of concurrent programming as e.g. in the Fortress language – can aid in improving the quality of concurrent programs.

Links:

• Brian’s Homepage
• The book, Java Concurrency in Practice

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Recording Venue:
Guest(s): Michael Stal

Host(s): Markus
In this Episode, we talk to Michael Stal, a Senior Principal Engineer at Siemens Corporate Technology, POSA 1 and 2 Co-Author and Editor of the german JavaSpetrum magazine. Since Michael’s core focus is middlware, much of our discussion centered around that topic. Webservices and SOA, of course, have also been covered. Other topics include Java vs. .NET as well as Patterns.

Links:

• Pattern Oriented Software Architecture, Volume 2
• Article by Michael on SOA
• A Blog Entry by Michael on SOA
• Michael’s magazine, JavaSpektrum (german)
• Java vs. .NET: at O’Reilly
• Java vs. .NET: at Java World
• Michael’s Homepage
• Pattern Oriented Software Architecture, Volume 1
• Michael’s Pattern Laws

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Recording Venue:
Guest(s):
Host(s): Eberhard Markus
Recording Venue:
Guest(s):
Host(s): Eberhard Markus
A very important area for Java are Enterprise Systems. With the advent of new technologies like Ruby on Rails, Java EE 5 or EJB 3 the landscape for Enterprise Systems appears to be changing a lot at the moment. In this episode Markus talks with Eberhard about what Enterprise Java actually is, why and where it is used. Based on that they discuss what the future might look like and how to make Enterprise Java shine in the future.

Links:

• AppFuse
• Trails
• Grails
• AspectJ
• Spring
• EJB3.0

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