As part of a Java Technology India Group event called “Java week 2011″ – I was asked to participate in an interview with the experts series. The resulting video interview is linked above. If you want to see a bit more about the entire event, check out the main page.

I need to thank my co-worker Lee for bringing in his camera and also asking the questions on the video.  We did it late on a Friday in one take, so it is very casual.

Here is the list of questions asked:

• Q. Thank you for granting us this interview. Please introduce yourself and let us know a little about your background and the work you are currently involved in.
• Q. What has impressed you in monitoring developments in Java technology?
• Q. What is IBM’s stake and investment in Java Technologies ?
• Q. What are the technology focus areas for IBM in Java?
• Q. Do you see any challenges with Java scaling up in leveraging multi-core systems ?
• Q. While Java (and the JVM) approaches memory management as an internal matter, there are efforts towards moving parts of memory outside Java heap – for instance, look at GigaSpaces, Terracota (and their eCache) etc. What are your thoughts on how this is going to shape up? More specifically, will the Garbage Collection technology become optimal for specific use-cases like caching for instance?
• Q.  Lately, there is an appliance based delivery of Java (Azul). That approach has compelling technical claims – be it ‘pauseless garbage collection’ or the simplicity in attaining elasticity (Zing). Can you compare and contrast in terms of the overall cost, usability and scalabilty of IBM’s approach versus the appliance based approach?
• Q.  Any advice for our readers and young developers who aspire to pursue their career in Java ?

My favorite part of the interview is at the 10min mark, where the final question is asked.  If you manage to make it through all 11:20 of the video and feel I didn’t give enough of answer to any of the questions, feel free to comment and I’ll reply with expanded detail.

The IBM Support Assistant (ISA) is free (cost) software from IBM that helps with problem determination for IBM software. From my point of view it is most useful for being a gateway to some of the tools for looking into Java problems. Two of particular note are the Health Center and Garbage Collector and Memory Visualizer – great tools for checking into Java performance.

The software is available for Linux, but in RPM format. It is quite easy to transform an RPM file for use with a Debian based system such as Ubuntu. I’m running Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx (LTS).

1. Install Alien
   sudo apt-get install alien
2. Convert the RPM into a deb package (including scripts)
   sudo alien -d --scripts support-assistant-4.1.2.00-20101123_1610.i386.rpm
3. Install resulting deb package
   sudo dpkg -i support-assistant_4.1.2.00-20101124_i386.deb

As far as I can tell, a Java runtime is included in the download. My system already had Java installed, and as these are tools for analyzing Java you will probably want Java installed. I’d suggest you get a copy of the IBM JDK 6, but I’m a bit biased. (you may get a chuckle out of the fact that getting the IBM JDK on Ubuntu will require you to do some additional installation tricks).

Once installed you just have the workbench. To get the tools you’ll need to add them. The first launch should guide you through this process. If not, you can get there via the Workbench menus:

It may take some digging here as there are lots of options, but you want the “IBM Monitoring and Diagnostic Tools for Java – Health Center” and “IBM Monitoring and Diagnostic Tools for Java – Garbage Collection and Memory Visualizer” which should be in the “JVM Based Tools” category.

A brief post where I will simply encourage you to visit Ken’s blog and read about this new Samsung cell phone that has some of our software in it.  It seems Engadget covered this same phone just last week, but they didn’t pick up on the fact that IBM’s J9 is inside as Linux for Devices managed to do.

The teams are composed of 3 students focused on technical work, and 1 MBA who handles the business side of things.  Their goal is to take a concept and create a compelling business case for further investment (by IBM).  Think of this as a Start-Up on steroids – they’ve got less than 4 months to do it all.

This week all of the extreme blue students are gathered in Armonk, N.Y. where they will deliver their finely tuned pitches.  The audience will be composed of their fellow students, IBM mentors and most importantly IBM Executives.  Sam Palmisano is usually able to find time to take a brief tour of the booths that the students have setup, with a special stop at one of them for a deeper dive.

The Ottawa J9 team hosted an extreme blue project this year.  We used this to help take one of our prototype concepts further towards a complete business case.  I have to confess this is a bit of a teaser post – since I can’t disclose very much about the project.  You’ll have to speculate wildly based on the following image:

You may want to check out the video clip from the local news station that talks about the IBM Ottawa Extreme Blue expo.

Our team has a long history of hiring our COOP students, its a great deal both ways.  The students know what they are walking into, and we’re got a better idea of what they are capable of.  Even I was a COOP student for the VM team way back when.  Each of the names involved with this project are top notch students -whoever manages to hire them will be lucky (and yes, we’ll be trying to).

Good luck in N.Y. this week guys!

Here is the summary:

The Java™ Native Interface (JNI) is a standard Java API that enables Java code to integrate with code written in other programming languages. JNI can be a key element in your toolkit if you want to leverage existing code assets — for example, in a service-oriented architecture (SOA) or a cloud-based system. But when used without due care, JNI can quickly lead to poorly performing and unstable applications. This article identifies the top 10 JNI programming pitfalls, provides best practices for avoiding them, and introduces the tools available for implementing these practices.

Many kudos to Michael Dawson for his wordsmithing and persistence to make this article happen, he really deserves the lion’s share of the credit.

Ron calls out his favorite pitfall as using the wrong JNIEnv.  I’ll pick the one that makes me laugh because it is sad but true:  Choosing the wrong boundary between native and Java code – believe it or not there was a real world example that motivated the sample code.  The customer had decided to go for a “pure java” solution for their embedded application, so the minimal amount of native code was written – two functions that could read or write individual bits (not bytes).  While the example is outlandish, many times the integration of legacy code via JNI is done without thinking of the cost of the boundary.

Let’s discuss the picking the right side of the JNI boundary for a minute.  The NIO implementation is a good example of trying to fix file performance by keeping the data on the “right” side of the JNI boundary.  While NIO provides other functions allowing for tighter OS integration, one key performance win is due to the file data is kept in native buffers.   If you’re trying to get the data into java objects to be manipulated, you are likely defeating the performance win of NIO by forcing all that file data across the JNI boundary.  Where NIO will excel is needing to pull a bunch of data from a file and put it in another file – if you don’t need to hoist that data up into the java object space, you’ll get close to pure native performance.

Please check out the article, or at least bookmark it and send it to people who write JNI code.   Maybe we’ll see fewer false JVM bugs that turn out to be JNI related problems.

I won’t be attending this year, but my friend and colleague Trent Gray-Donald will be there presenting a session titled “Under the Hood: Inside a High-Performance JVM™ Machine” on Friday June 5th, 10:50am – 11:50am.  While you won’t find him on the Rock Star Wall of Fame, he was did earn that title back in 2007 – his sessions are usually well attended so if you want to see him in action go early for a good seat.  This year his presentation discloses more details about the IBM JVM technology than have been previously made available, expect to see assembly code snippets on screen during the presentation along with lots of technical detail.  His presentation should be a reasonably good primer in what it takes to be a “state of the art” JVM in today’s competitive market – and it will be presented by someone who has hands on experience creating the technology.

If you can’t make it in person, JavaOne has a pretty good track record of making past sessions available online. Of course you can also follow along on Twitter, and there appear to be two hashtags (#JavaOne and #JavaOneConf) being used to help track tweets.

As for what to expect from JavaOne this year, I’ll shy away from trying to make any firm predictions – but it has been announced there will be more details on the Java App Store.  The Oracle/Sun deal will certainly be one of the topics that can’t be avoided.  Java7 should get some sort of announcement along with some benchmarking fun I’m sure.  One camp to keep an eye on is the Microsoft keynote – the 1st time they’ve done one for JavaOne.  Last, but not least – IBM is a general session cosponsor thus Craig Hayman will be giving a talk as well (Thursday, June 4th, 5:30 – 6:15 p.m), one I’d recommend people attend if they can.