Pacific Northwest Software Symposium
September 21 - 23, 2007 - Seattle, WA
Ron Bodkin
Chief Software Architect, Quantcast
Ron Bodkin is the chief software architect of Quantcast, an open ratings service for Web sites. Ron is also the founder of New Aspects of Software, which provides consulting and training on aspect-oriented software development and effective architectures for Java. Ron is also the leader of the open source Glassbox application performance troubleshooting project.
Previously, Ron led the first implementation projects and training efforts for customers of the AspectJ group at Xerox PARC. Prior to that, Ron was a founder and the CTO of C-bridge, a consultancy that delivered enterprise applications using Java frameworks.
Presentations
Using Aspects to Work with Annotations
In this session, you will learn how to use Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) as a tool to avoid annotation hell by working effectively with Java 5 annotations (such as @Remote ). You will see simple and more advanced techniques to process custom annotations in a higher-level Java-like language, and how this compares to lower-level approaches like the Java Annotation Processing Tool. You will also see techniques for simplifying annotations, by providing application-specific default values and by deriving standard annotations used by frameworks like EJB 3, JAX-WS, and the Spring Framework from higher-level domain-specific annotations using AOP.
The session includes a short refresher on AspectJ, Spring AOP, and JBoss AOP and what AOP does more generally as an introduction to how it is useful when working with annotations, even with Java 1.4. It also concludes with an analysis of where and how you can use annotations with and without AOP.
Glassbox: Open Source Monitoring and Troubleshooting
In this session, you will learn how the Glassbox open source troubleshooting and monitoring agent supports low overhead monitoring and troubleshooting without needing to "bake in" instrumentation up front. Glassbox provides an easy to use AJAX interface, an automated installer, and concise summaries of common problems such as database failures, and slow operations caused by thread contention and excessive distributed calls. Glassbox also supports customization and detailed analysis for deeper investigation.
Under the covers, Glassbox uses JMX and aspect-oriented programming to discover applications, track performance, and automatically diagnose common problems in Java applications. You will see how Glassbox can be extended easily with XML, AspectJ, and Spring AOP, providing a useful foundation for customized application monitoring. See also http://www.glassbox.com/ for more information.
You will learn: Common failure scenarios for Java applications, Techniques to quickly diagnose problems, How to build custom Glassbox monitors to gather new data, How to plug in new operations and analysis concepts with Glassbox, How to use Glassbox to plug into existing systems monitoring infrastructures, A foundation to effectively incorporate Glassbox into solutions.
