Do you need a gaurdian angle?

Couple of months ago I was invited, thanks to my professor Nir Shavit, for a one week seminar in Germany.

There in the middle of an amazing forest, sits an amazing castle taken from a fairytale.

So, on a green grass near a fresh cold water river we discussed for a week about Transactional Memory.


Transactional Memory is one of those things that the first time you hear about your eyes are opened and you start to believe all your problems are over…

Finally I found my guardian angle!

But then you start to think “how the hell are they going to implement it?”, will it crawl?, and all the semantic issues…


For those who are not familiar with the term Transactional Memory™, the idea is release the programmer from all his concurrency worries.

No more deadlocks, no more bottlenecks and no more thinking about locks/synchronized/volatile semantic.

All you need to do is to mark a block of your code as an “atomic” and your thread will feel as if runs alone.


For more details and interesting see Wikipedia: Software transactional memory


We started working on a Java implementation couple of weeks ago. To prove that the idea is feasible.

We even choose an appropriate name for it – Deuce

So, stay tuned! we're about to release Software Transactional Memory for Java™ in the next couple of weeks.

Do you need to build it yourself?

I’ve worked in many organisations and one thing that never ceases to amaze me is how often teams build unnecessary tools and frameworks.

Yet again, I have to use a bespoke defect tracking system. This is the third one I’ve come across and none of them are as good as a Commercial off the Shelf (COTS) solution and definitely cost more to develop than to buy.

In the past, I’ve also seen in-house developed: IDEs, email clients, database admin tools, UML tools etc. Perhaps it’s more fun to write tools than the boring, business functionality your client/users needs but does it offer any value?

As a software/systems architect it’s your job to deliver value to the business you work for. Whenever someone suggests creating a bespoke tool ask yourself the following:

• Can I buy something to do this?
• Can I use or tailor an open source product?
• Can I use or create a template for a standard tool like Eclipse, Word or Excel?

Be pragmatic in your decision and avoid wasting your limited time and resources on things you don’t need to do!

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Do you always need index on WHERE column ?

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Poll – Do You Need Distributed JUnits?

Junits (or unit tests in general) is embarrassingly parallel problem that begs to be grid enabled. We have seen countless projects where builds take 30 mins and more just because hundreds of JUnits are running sequentially on a single box. By simple grid enabling this process you can cut your build time in times and have much quicker turn around on QA making the whole development process instantly more agile.  

The question is:    do you really need it? 

 

Here is how you can distribute unit testing with GridGain's upcoming JUnit and TestNG integration (we are about to ship it in GridGain 1.6 release). 

 

   1. Just start couple of grid nodes (as many as you like or have); nodes can be anywhere in the world for that matter as long as GridGain is properly configured:

 

     
  

 

   2. Use    GridJunit3TestSuite (for JUnit3) instead of regular test suite and then use your favorite Java IDE and its JUnit integration as you usually do. Following example shows that tests A and B will be executed sequentially as a group and test C will be executed in parallel with A and B. Both A and B group and test C will be executed on remote nodes (i.e. on the grid):

 

  

 

Note that the entire semantic of running JUnits from Java IDE is fully preserved as well as all UI toolling works as before.

 

THAT'S ALL!

 

   Leave a comment if you like the idea and would like to see it in our product.