devnulled: A stream for software developers and engineers

Hey look, the public beta of ColdFusion 8 is now available for download at Adobe Labs. This is the beta you have been looking for.

Fillp Hanik recently posted a blog entry about a load test comparison he did using Glassfish, Jetty, and Tomcat 6 using the new NIO (non-blocking io) connectors in which Tomcat 6 was able to handle 16,000 connections. As always load tests should always be taken with a grain of salt, but it certainly did produce some interesting results (especially when compared to other servlet containers).

I’ve been working on a sizable project at work that uses NIO under the hood, but luckily I’m using a 3rd party library which provides the network connectivity for me. It seems that NIO is very hard to implement correctly, but if you can, the performance advantages are definitely worth the effort. I’m only a few days away from starting to do some load testing on my work, so I’ll be interested in seeing the performance improvement over the section of code I’m replacing which uses standard IO (not to mention the various synchronization and thread consumption problems I’ll be fixing).

Being able to quickly handle a large number of concurrent connections is definitely a requirement for today’s AJAX applications, and it’s good to see an NIO based connector from someone other than Jetty.

I’ve been meaning to start turning the content of this site into a fairly focused software development blog for awhile, and finally got one of the first major steps done. As I mentioned earlier, I’ve finally moved all of my personal stuff to a new blog which is tentatively titled blog.bharper, and will start judiciously deleting old personal content from this site as it slowly morphs into a more generic software development site. My new blog is a fairly informal place for me to post stuff that I’m interested in outside of the general geekery posted about here, and also gives me a place to share trivial events with family and friends while also not intending to alienate people with LiveJournal type drivel. Anyhow, there isn’t much new content there that you haven’t already seen at the moment, but if you’re more interested in me rather than the geek stuff I write, you might want to start checking the new blog instead. I don’t plan on linking to it directly from this site again, so now is your chance to grab the url.

Surprisingly enough out of over almost 4 years of writing (600+ posts) on this site, about half of them were not software related. So of course that means I’ll have to spend hours going though this site as well to delete non-programming related posts. Good times. Look for some fairly dramatic changes coming to this site as well in the upcoming weeks.

Today is pretty much the wrong weather for my Datsun 280Z here in Colorado, but it made Autoblog’s Readers Ride of the Day! Judging by the comments, there are plenty of people who also still love the old Z’s too.

I haven’t much touched the car since I bought it other than typical old car maintenance items (for the most part, I like doing all of my own work), so I’ll be kind of interested to see the comments it generates on it’s current state. Sometimes I want to leave it alone, other times I’m ready to do a few minor things to it.

For a little more about Autoblog, as far as I know it’s one of the most popular blogs about cars out there (each entry seems to generate tons of comments) and most gearheads who are also interweb nerds seem to read it. As for me, I’ve loved cars as long as I can remember and have owned at least two at a time for the past 8 years or so.

Sorry for the spam on the ColdFusion feed, but I had to share.

I came across a blog entry which shows you how to create an IRC bot from scratch in only a few lines of Python, which honestly kind of amazed me even being somewhat fluent with Python. I’ve seen a number of other Python IRC bot packages but have yet to try them out (such as Supybot, Phenny, and Pynfo), but a quick example like that is pretty impressive to me.

Greg Stein announced on the Google Code Updates Blog that they’ve added downloads and a simple wiki. Examples of the new download functionality, and a wiki are also provided.

This makes me happy; it’s just in time for my “I’m not working the rest of the year” vacation so I can finally write up some documentation for CFAkismet, provide a zipped download of it, and finally give it the 1.0 stamp between the other 900 things I have planned during my time off.

Java 6 Standard Edition has been released and can be downloaded here. The long winded version of what’s new can be read here, while the summary of new features and changes can be found here.

Personally I don’t know if I’ll be working on anything in 1.6 anytime soon as 1.5 is still the current standard for non-J2EE Java, but I wouldn’t be surprised to be using it in production by next Summer or so. Although I still think “wtf” about them including Derby as part of the standard release.

Of the things that should be in there from Apache rather than Derby would be most everything which is currently in Apache Commons as it seems like pretty much every Java project needs a good 4-5 Apache Commons libraries.

Now I’m sure all of my Java RSS feeds will be populated with Sun employees talking about how cool NetBeans and Java 6 is, which of course only further motivates me to stick with Eclipse and Java 5.

I must say I work with a really amazing team at work, and there is rarely a day we don’t get into complex technical discussions about anything from “what algorithm is the best to do x” to getting into deep geeky details about how certain platforms work such as the Hotspot compiler in Java. Granted we aren’t a typical CF development shop (I’ve actually been working exclusively in Java for the past couple of months for instance), so we have a wide variety of programmers and skill sets and so forth on the team. In general we’d rather hire smart people with solid backgrounds than someone who has 80 years of experience in Ajax.Net and RubyGroovyFlex 2.0 on their resume, and over time I think it’s proved to be a very valuable asset.

We’ve talked about how CF translates into Java many times over the past couple of years and some of the inherent performance problems with weak typing (at some point it still has to be converted back to static typing– this is a basic theoretical problem that any dynamically typed language has). I showed my co-worker (and primarily Java programmer) Rod the “what is wrong with the ColdFusion compiler” post, and he has a very well written response to how ColdFusion translates its own dynamically typed tag based syntax down to statically typed Java code. Of course the high level Computer Science answer would just be “it translates CFML to Java using a parser generator then recompiles it, duh”, but instead he goes into the details of the implementation of the parser generator as to how it types the dynamic variables at the Java level. He doesn’t really ever do any ColdFusion, so be easy on him in the comments if you have a bone to pick on the CF side.

A related thing to note that he doesn’t cover is how much faster it is to instantiate objects in cfscript rather than CFML on a percentage basis. Just some food for thought. I can do a follow-up post on this in particular topic if anyone is interested.

I cover a slightly similar topic to this in an upcoming CFDJ article, so stay tuned.

BarDiver, a Django powered site which is essentially a social site for Denver, Colorado area bars has been launched. A friend and I discussed doing a project like this after having a frustrating time trying to find happy hour specials before heading to a concert, and this site looks to be a pretty well executed example of how to find bars which are places you’d like to go.

As for myself, I seem to end-up in a lot of old Kerouac haunts for whatever reason.

This blog has obviously turned into one of mostly technical matters. At the moment, I have a pretty strong readership all things considered (about 1,500-2000 unique visitors a day) which mostly seem to be looking for technical content, so that’s what this blog has been for awhile. About half of those look to be subscribed to my RSS feeds which are technical in nature, so I think it’s time to move the personal stuff to a different domain and hone this down to software development and other general Unix and geek type stuff.

I’ve owned other personal domains for quite some time and plan on putting up something a little more personal for friends and so forth looking to keep up with me (using one of said domains). If all goes as planned, look for something new from me on this front before the end of the year.