Thread Like No Other

All for very different reasons, processor vendors, software developers and industry gurus are engaged in talk frenzies about how to leverage multiple core hardware. Some consider the dangers. Some even fight about it.

Beside the obvious enthusiasm of experimenting such a surge of computing power right under our fingers, exploiting this power requires a skillset that is not widely available, at least not in the world of the ugly enterprise applications where people have to develop for the naturally parallelized environments that are application servers.

In this austere world of server side business applications, which are not CPU intensive but are greedy of external resources like RDBMS, there is not much room for developer hand made parallelizing of tasks: it is usually limited to executing long running operations via decoupling mechanisms like messaging.

This said, there are many ways to hurt your server by developing applications in a careless way. Assessing your skills (or your troops) is essential: this is why, following the model of the great Threading Maturity Model introduced by Alan Zeichick a few days ago, I would like to introduce the Threader Maturity Model, oriented towards people and not organization.

0. Unawareness. Complete rooky who writes a web application that can only accommodate one concurrent user and complains why is the server not working better (do not ask for names).

1. Awareness. Developer who has bumped on concurrency discussions, found them scary and prefers to let a more senior programmer deal with threading and concurrency.

2. Experimentation. Developer who dares playing with threads and concurrency, but still errs on the side of double-checked locking, interruption swallowing and the likes.

3. Hotspot. Developer has read enough on the subject and has crashed into enough walls to decide to program carefully, with still a certain level of insecurity and the fear of thread skeletons hiding in some dark closets.

4. Utilization. Developer has an excellent knowledge of concurrency issues and has a toolbox well fitted with patterns he knows when to apply and for what purpose. He can decide what is worth to parallelize and what is not.

5. Adoption. This is also known as "Being Brian Goetz". At this level, the developer has an intimate knowledge of the memory model, the concurrency mechanisms and all that pesky internal details. He is able to think in all the dimensions of multi-threaded development (time, space and whatnot). Nirvana is nearby.


UPDATE 01/2008: Alexandra Weber Morales has published a great compilation of Alan's, Larry's and my take on this subject. It is on DevX.

Don't Be God Either

Though Google has agreed to work with NGOs to develop a code of conduct, some people keep suspecting the giant of Mountain View to nurture a secret agenda for world domination. Are they getting too suspicious or paranoid? Or are they seeing too small of a plot? After all, for Google, the world is certainly not enough.

I think that if Google was actually bound to drift away from its "Don't Be Evil" motto towards some more cosmic grand plan, the following would inevitably happen:

• Google would buy T.G.I. Friday's but instead of renaming it GoogleRestaurant, as logic suggests, would simply redefine the acronym as "Thanks Google It's Friday",
  
  
• Google would buy Godiva but instead of logically renaming it GoogleChocolate, would rebrand it as Googleiva,
  
  
• Google would become the official sponsor of The Young Gods, but only if they accept the new moniker of The Young Googles.
  

Since none of this has happened yet, we can confidently consider that Google is still faithful to its core values. Isn't this heartening?

Editor's Pick

Today is the Windows Developer Tools Day, as unilaterally proclaimed by the folks at O'Reilly, and everyone is invited to share their best tools on the Windows platform. Having contributed a presentation of NxBRE, an Open Source .NET Business Rules Engine, to their Windows Developer Power Tools book, you could expect me to talk about it, as the selfish nerd I am.

But no, I prefer to share my passion for jEdit, my choice for an all purpose versatile open source editor. Funnily, when discussion comes to editors, geeks just go berserk and try to prove how superior is their favorite tool. I will try to avoid this kind of flame war and will just share what I like most about jEdit:

• It is easily extensible to support new features via an integrated plugin manager. Each plugin could contribute new views that you can dock anywhere and create your own environment. I personally use the XML support plugins a lot and dock them all around the editor window for a great work environment.
  
  
• Adding syntactic coloring for new languages is just a bliss. For example, I created what is called a mode to simplify the edition of WAC files in just a few minutes.
  
  
• The integrated HyperSearch facility just finds things on your hard drive without referring to any particular animal or having to index the terabytes of source code you write on weekends just for fun.
  
  
• It is cross platform, which means I can use it when I work on Linux or Mac. How can this matter to a Windows developer? Well, sooner or later, you will be exposed to an OS that is not a member of the Microsoft galaxy so how cool will it be to just use the same tool everywhere?
  
  
• It can open files not created on Windows systems without stumbling on different flavors of Newline and showing everything on one line. Again, this might seem like unnecessary for an hard core Windows-only-and-the-rest-of-the-universe-can-die developer, but again it happens more often than expected when you start to share files with people in the rest-of-the-universe!
  

So jEdit might not become an editor's pick but it surely is my pick for an editor!

Wanna Jolt?

Then avoid this and try that.

V for Vancouver

I am now entering the final countdown (3 days to go) before my departure to Vancouver, BC where I will start a new job and, hopefully, a new life! When you announce this kind of crazy endeavor, usually people go "wow" and say how great it is and also how so not for them such a thing would be possible.

The most common opposition is: "you know what you are losing but you do not know what you are earning". Well, I am all but an adventurer though, since I still try to start new software projects, I should have a good level of risk taking (or I am just a too naive). Besides, on a pure professional basis, I know what I am leaving behind (a great company with great people) but I also know that I am joining a great company with great people!

On a more personal basis, I hope to find over there a place for my family to call home, which would be a great gain for strangers and sojourners like us.

Sewer 2.0

ZePAG has posted a great entry in his blog that somehow echoes an old rant of mine.

Since he makes some interesting comparisons between IT and different subjects like sewer technologies, I felt like bouncing on the yucky pictures he links to and suggest dubbed image titles:

• Screw pumps: dependency injection,
• Primary screen: welcome page,
• Primary clarifiers: client side validation,
• Aeration tank: O/R mapping,
  
• Secondary clarifier: server side validation,
  
• Final clarifier: database level constraints,
  
• Chlorination tank: garbage collection.
  

Does not this make our job easier to explain?

One Click To Share Them All

Optrata is doubly blessed by a strange moniker (that sounds like patatra, a French onomatopeia for the sound of a thing falling heavily on the ground) and a bold mission statement (to unify all the private life exposing tools of the web behind a unique page).

By the look of their "please bookmark me so I can appear on radar screens" links:



I feel inclined to suggest them to urgently change their goal and work on creating a unified bookmark tool that would submit a page to the numerous sharing systems out there...