Posted by Mark Bakker at around evening time: June 22nd, 2011
In my current position as Performance Engineer and in my past position as a Middleware Architect I did quite some work with closed source performance monitoring and analysis tools (i.g. CA Wily and later AppDynamics).
These tools are both expensive but also do quite a good job most of the times. In the same field there are more tools, but all in the same price range for as far as I know.
To name some: Foglight, Dynatrace, Newrelic, JXInsight, Tivoli Performance Viewer, Compuware Gomez.
Around 2006 several initiatives to create open source performance monitoring tools for java production environments started to appear.
This was mainly because AOP (Aspect Oriented Programming), the technology used in most of these products, was getting attention in the market and there were quite some developments in that area at the time.
I am interested to see how the open source community around these kind of products is evolving. The outcome is quite surprising…
Posted by Mark Bakker mid-afternoon: March 15th, 2011
Last week I got a presentation for a security device I had never heard about.
Most times this means it is something which is not commodity, or has no real use-case.
But this time I was really impressed. The device is a possible replacement for IBM Datapower XML Security Gateway. But the way they designed the device is totally different.
What CrossCheck networks did was creating a device with just security as main use case. First of all it was an XML gateway, nowadays is does support HTML, XML, SOAP, FTP, JMS and others.
It also translates different flavors of JMS to each other, it can even convert from IBM MQ to JBoss MQ directly.
Posted by Mark Bakker in the early morning: June 1st, 2010
Summary
In the first part of this review (the JavaEE6 back-end) I created a small application which is a JSON REST service to be used as back-end for a JavaFX front-end.
This second part of my review covers a small review of JavaFX, to see if it meats my requirements as front-end for my personal finance application (see previous post).
My conclusion for now is that JavaFX is an interesting new technology, I think it can be used for small applications or forms (think about internet adds). But for serious applications it is not ready yet.
I am really missing Datagrids, the way you have to deal with Session cookies for the Rest service is far to low level. I hope someone can point me to a place where I can find better solutions for those problems (if there are).
Posted by Mark Bakker in the early morning: May 27th, 2010
Summary
In the first part of this review (the JavaEE6 back-end) I tested a small application which is a JSON REST service to be used as back-end for a JavaFX front-end. My conclusion for now is that JavaEE6 has a lot of new features which makes it a lot easier to use Java EE without extra libraries like Spring, Seam or Resteasy. I was able to make a back-end application which was noticeable fast with a low overhead in bandwidth and CPU usage.
Introduction
In a search for the current best technology platform I am building a small real-world application for personal use in different languages and frameworks. First up is Java EE 6 and JavaFX 1.3.
I think this review can be helpful for others as well. If you just want to see the implementation you can skip the functional and technical requirements. If you are interested in the application and want to help creating the new version; please send me a reply:-).
Posted by Mark Bakker in the early morning: December 22nd, 2009
Introduction
Currently I am working at a big Enterprise where they use Tivoli Access Manager as authorization and authentication source for a lot of there applications.
This Enterprise is using JBoss as open source application server platform and is using this more and more. When they began using JBoss they got a TAM plug-in for JBoss from IBM. This plug-in did the complete authorization and authentication by implementing JAAS and registering all the used security roles in TAM. This is done during deployment time.
If you have an application with a lot of roles this is very frustrating because it can take a lot of extra time to start up (think of 30 minutes per application) because TAM is synchronizing all the new roles.
Most applications at this customer are using JAAS but do not have special method level authorizations implemented by using TAM. So only the roles are important.
After realizing this I thought is could be a good idea to create a simpler solution for integration TAM and JBoss. For this I wrote some custom code (only 250 lines).