In essence there is nothing revolutionary about SCA. In my view, it is an effort to standardise how services and their interactions are defined in a technology-agnostic manner. Anyone who has been developing enterpise applications using the Spring Framework or OSGi should be pretty familiar the concepts in SCA.

At the core of SCA are Services. Services are implementated using Components. Components can be composed (Composites) to provide more refined behaviours. All of these components and compositions of components live within a Domain. Interactions between these services are expressed as References. The actual communication between components is left to the responsibily of Bindings, thus isolating the business logic from the underlying remoting technology. The SCA runtime is responsible for dependency injections so services need not concern themselves with locating dependencies. Finally, the use of annotations and xml configurations mean that services/components can be implemented as simple objects.

Besides Fabric3, there’s another open-source SCA implemention from Apache called Tuscani.

I’m quite curious to see how practical/useful this architecture is. Hopefully I’ll find the time to experiment with one of these implementations.

I have been setting up my own dev tool set at home so I can work on my own projects. What I need now is a CI tool. I was looking for comparisons between the various options and I came across this page on the ThoughtWorks wiki:

http://confluence.public.thoughtworks.org/display/CC/CI+Feature+Matrix

It is a very comprehensive comparison matrix and it seems to be updated frequently.

I’m still not sure which one I will go for…answer in the next post.

From the NAS I run an SVN server where I keep my home projects. On the MMS I have installed Tomcat, PostgreSQL and I’ve just deployed Atlassian Confluence (they offer a starter kit for only $10) so I have a central location where I can keep all the information I need.

And by using DynDNS I can have all of this accessible on the internet. I route all the traffic to the MMS and with Apache I proxy the Confluence requests to Tomcat and SVN requests to the NAS.

It’s a pretty cool setup which gives plenty of things to occupy myself with .

]]> http://blog.dreameffect.org/2009/12/06/my-home-setup/feed/ 0 http://blog.dreameffect.org/2009/11/07/how-dependent-are-you-on-the-internet/ http://blog.dreameffect.org/2009/11/07/how-dependent-are-you-on-the-internet/#comments Sat, 07 Nov 2009 20:35:23 +0000 Ludovic http://blog.dreameffect.org/?p=241 Me? Very! It took about 6 weeks for my broadband connection to be set up in my new flat (5 to get a phone line..thank you BT!). Until that I had the Internet through a 3G USB stick. It worked but was pretty flaky. Now, I’m back with a proper connection and it made me realise how dependent I am on the Internet. It’s a bit like you’re unplugged from the world without it. Email has become my primary form of communication. The first thing I do when I get home is switch on the TV and flick my laptop open on my Netvibes homepage. BitTorrent download is gift from the Gods. And I do a lot of shopping online too. So in short I am extremely dependent on the Internet. It’s good to be back online.

Everything is going the cloud way they say. I have to admit it is quite interesting an idea, in theory at least. Hardware as service : you only pay for what you need. Plus, you get easy scalability – well, providing that your software stack scales too -. So if you are a small to medium size company with a few online services, Amazon EC2 would most probably be more cost-effective than having your own data-center. If you are a company with heavy online services then I would imagine your CTO would look twice before agreeing to rely on a third-party company for your entire hardware infrastructure.

On the same topic, Spring Source (now part of VMware) recently announced the availability of an Enterprise Java Cloud. It reminded me of an article I read on The Server Side.  Apart from the dodgy title, the author makes an interesting point about cloud computing solutions with integrated software stacks which seems to be where Spring Source is positioning itself.

We will see how the technology evolves and whether cloud computing is just another buzzword.

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Quite an odd error. So as always I googled it and found some info here: http://www.colinmcnulty.com/blog/2009/03/22/recovering-from-internal-server-errors. Following the detailed solution I’ve quickly brought back the site up. I’ve been fairly satisfied with this provider which I’ve been using for years. In fact it’s really the first time I’ve had such issue so I guess I can’t complain so much. Plus, it’s always a nice feeling to fix something.

First impression is very good. The software installed without a glitch on my MBP and Windows Mediacenter. And it worked just as it says on the tin. I was able to copy new files into my Dropbox folder and I would find them available on the other computer There’s also a public folder with allows you to share files online with anyone, not just other Dropbox users. There’s even support for photo slideshows. Overall it does look very good.

Well, the problem is that about a month ago it suddenly stopped working. It started indicating that both disks had a failure. WHAT??? BOTH DISKS??? I thought I lost all my data (10 years of photos, all my music and personal files). I decided to take a look directly at the disks via a USB enclosing (once I managed to find one). It turned out both disks were just fine (what a relief!!!). It was in fact the UltraMax disk management system which decided to give up all together.

So what was the next move? Well, I decided that a more robust solution was the only way forward so I started looking around for a NAS drive. And at the end of my search I set my sight on the NetGear ReadyNAS NV+.

I’ve had it running for a month and I’m really happy about it. It runs with 4 500GB disks in what NetGear call X-RAID (automatically picks the best RAID configuration based on your disk configuration). It also comes with an iTunes streaming server, BitTorrent client and supports UPnP. That’s really cool because I can then watch videos or listen to music straight from my PS3. It’s obviously more pricey than my old kit but it is definitely worth it.