JavaBlackbelt.com: i got the yellow one

After my past carrier as judoka (stopped in 2002) i found myself fighting for gold again..
okay not medals but belts which are the graduation symbols for Judo and for exams on the JavaBlackbelt.com website.
After just two exams called "OO for Java - Basic" and "Java SE - basic" i graduated to the yellow belt stage. Sure not rocket science but educational fun on a sunday.. well..

Software is (often) written by humans

As i mentioned yesterday i am currently reading the book "Java - Concurrency in practice".
Well, i am just on page 100 so this blog whill not review the book yet.
But i just encountered a small section that is about reasoning of concurrency practice in 3rd party code. The author nicely calls for better documentation (of cause, we all do a lot!..) of the implemented policy (implicit locking, GuardedBy annotations, overall strategy and threadsafety at all). If there is no such documentation we have to reason about it.
But in my opion this just the best approach of you are on an academia trip (which is not bad).
There is a much more relieable, efficient and economic approach: ask humans!
Even the "worst & most commercial" oriented companies are building communities and often invest into open source environments (not neccessarily open source code but the comminity intention behind it): so if you start guessing things try to digest your thoughts so long and put it on (the correct) mailinglist or newsgroup.
What are the benefits?
well,

1. people with similar guessing find it on google
2. people with wrong guessing find the correct answer on google (more important perhaps)
3. the authors get the point and could pin it to their upcoming releases (better docs)
4. you do something good to the world
   

Just a word about the passed chapters i already read: very,very,very recommendable book! I am going to reject all osgi-bundles authored by people not reading this book (or having a reasonable past about concurrency). Damn.. thats so currious.
More on concurrency later!

ongoing news: domain and new book

hey folks, just do stay in action here are the news of the week:
1. OSGIfy.com
My recently registered domain osgify.com linked to a root server will present a vendor independent OSGi place. There are things comming down the roads, so stay tuned!
I talked with Peter Neugebauer and Niclas Hedhman from Jayway about it (these are the guys from ops4j.org by the way) and it turns out that i am not alone with the common neat for a better toolchain for OSGi technology. ("OSGi is a success, now we have to deal with it" was a nice description Richard gave in his presentation about the OBR2)

2. New book
Recommended by some OSGi people at munich recently, i ordered the book "Concurrency in Practice" by Brian Goetz and it just arrived today. So this is the one i am reading currently. If it is very good or very bad or it does worth to talk about then i will write about it of cause.
I am not sure if Peter is reading but i think he summed about about it with: "i didn't know that there is so much to say about concurrency before".. so we will see.


Some more things happened this week but this deserves another blog entry ;-)

OSGi getting publicity

Last week on the OSGi Community event in munich we spoke about a grassroot technologies and called ourselves grasroot-adopters..
But today i found the latest issue of the german Java-Magazin
headlining "OSGi - Die Zukunft Javas?" which can be translated as "OSGI - the future of java?".
This is good publicity for this emerging technology!
(btw. havn't read the magazine yet.. but i think they don't bash OSGi too much;-)

They subtitled tutorial using the Eclipse Equinox implementation - sure because they publish a sister magazine called "Eclipse-Magazine", too..

it has beed a long time..

Yes, i know! My last entry is long ago.
So first i just update my vita because some things have changed meanwhile:

I am studying computer science in hannover, germany.
But this blog won't be much about this academic stuff.
This is because my main interest keeps on software develelopment.
I am working now since 6 years as a freelance developer in an J2EE related environment.

Since i attended the JAOO 2006 in aahrus (as a student volunteer) i am a strong believer in the osgi technology.
Talking abouut conferences i attended to more events as of today:
QCon 2007 in London (watch here for pictures)
and the OSGi Community Event in munich

Specially the last one was very dedicated to the osgi topic which made up the special success for me (compared to the other - more enterprise related - conferences)

As i promise this blog will gain more attention by myself i will write about those things and new projects next time.

So long,
have fun!
Toni

PS: if you want to track my latest Open Source efforts just join the ops4j.org mailinglist or/and bugtracker.