JANUARY 2010 NEWS

Welcome to 2010! A Year of Much Anticipated Growth

As the year starts, we are excited to have moved into our new engineering office in the heart of San Francisco. We want to thank you for your support and contributions to the rapidly growing Resin community. This year we plan to introduce new Java EE6 features, management tools, and key performance enhancing technologies. Quercus (Caucho’s implementation of PHP in Java), true interactive HTML5 protocols, Cloud Computing support, and Web Profiling will be major focal points for us. We are also going to change the release cycle to 3 weeks to match Caucho product and service commitments. Stay tuned to learn about our new and upcoming developments.

Resin 4.0.2 Release – Versioned and Staged Remote Deployment

Like many other lightweight Servlet containers and Java EE application servers, Resin’s deployment model has been file-system based. This deployment model is very simple, effective and popular. However, file-system based deployment has a few weaknesses that can arise in environments with very stringent availability and reliability requirements. It is very difficult to do deployment in a clustered environment because the same file must be deployed simultaneously to all servers in the cluster. The remote deployment model introduced in Resin 4.0 goes a long way in solving these particular problems by supporting clustered, versioned and staged deployment. In this recent blog post, Reza Rahman describes the practical aspects of Resin 4.0's new deployment model and how to start using it today.

Read more about Versioned and Staged Remote Deployment

NEW FEATURES

Real-Time WebSockets Available in Resin 4.0.2

We are excited to announce WebSocket as one of Caucho’s new features for Resin 4.0.2. It is a new browser capability being developed for HTML 5 browsers, enabling fully interactive applications. With WebSockets, both the browser and the server can send asynchronous messages over a single TCP socket dynamically, without resorting to long polling or comet. This means increases in fast and spontaneous I/O while reducing bandwidth.

A WebSocket is essentially a standard bi-directional TCP socket between the client and the server. The socket starts out as a HTTP connection and then "Upgrades" to a TCP socket after a HTTP handshake. After the handshake, both sides can send and receive data simultaneously.

WebSocket will give browsers full bi-directional asynchronous messaging capabilities. Current server mechanisms such as Comet, Long-poll, AJAX and Keep-alive sockets will soon be replaced with WebSocket technology.

Read Caucho’s WebSocket Overview.
Read W3C’s The Web Sockets API.

QUERCUS CORNER

The Power of PHP backed by Java

Quercus is Caucho’s PHP implementation completely written in Java. Statistically speaking PHP powers:

• Roughly one-third of the web according to Nexen, 2008
• 1/2 of the top ten websites according to Alexa.com, 2009

From an architectural standpoint the AMP of LAMP stack inherently limits performance and scalability of PHP applications forcing companies to invest heavily in hardware and clustering technologies. Quercus was created not only to overcome these limitations but also to leverage the security and integration benefits of Java.

For example, in our benchmarks PHP was 20% to 100% faster than PHP with op-code optimization and a whopping 80% to 700% faster than the base PHP found in many distributions. More importantly organizations that run both PHP and Java applications can reduce costs by consolidating these applications on one platform as Quercus is 100% written in Java.

Here are several options to conduct your own benchmark:

• Resin users - Put your PHP application or download WordPress (the most popular PHP application) in your public webapps directory.
• Tomcat or other servlet users - Download either the Quercus Pro or Quercus Open Source .war files and put in the Tomcat directory or launch in Tomcat.

For questions or an evaluation license, please contact sales@caucho.com or call (858)456-0300.

For more details about our benchmarks, read Quercus white paper.

UPCOMING EVENTS

Caucho to Present Quercus at Silicon Valley Google Technology User Group (GTUG)

Caucho engineer, Emil Ong, will present Quercus (Caucho’s PHP engine) at GTUG next month on Feb. 10th. GTUG is a users group for Google developers to learn about Google technology initiatives and methodology. At next month's meeting, Emil will discuss the benefits of Quercus on the Google App Engine and the unique issues and opportunities that arise in this unique environment. After a tutorial on how to get PHP up and running in the App Engine, Emil will present several demos including running WordPress and mixing GWT and PHP.

What is Google Technology User Group?
Silicon Valley Google Technology User Group.

Resin Administration Training Course for 2010

Caucho’s Resin Administration training course designed for system administrators and system architects will be held in San Francisco and London. On-site training is available for groups of 10 or more participants. Please contact us for a quote. The class is taught by senior Caucho engineers and provides participants with a broad understanding of Resin application server intricacies and some of the latest developments in Java programming. Lectures are accompanied by lab exercises.

Resin administration training includes these valuable skills:

• Installing Resin
• Resin Directories
• Resin Architecture and Configuration
• Deploying Web Applications
• Deploying PHP Applications with Quercus
• Java Web Applications
• Database Connectivity
• Resin Administration Application
• Resin Security
• Performance Tuning
• Improving Reliability
• Setting up a Resin Cluster
• Using Resin with Apache and IIS
• Advanced Topics
• Discussions on WebSocket, Web Profile, PHP in Java and Cloud Support

Last chance! Register by January 31 to get your 10% discount for the London location class. For onsite training, please contact us sales@caucho.com.

TheServerSide Java Symposium 2010

TSSJS will be held in Las Vegas at Caesar's Palace on March 17-19, 2010. This is where a large number of Java experts will be gathering this March. With over 40 sessions, the tracks will be focused on: Frameworks, Architecture and SOA, Language, Tools & Techniques, and Cloud. Caucho CEO & Co-Founder, Steve Montal, Caucho’s Chief Evangelist, Emil Ong, and Director of Sales & Marketing, Theresa Nguyen, will be present to share the benefits and technology design of Caucho products with the attending Java professionals. Caucho Engineer Reza Rahman will also be in attendance, presenting talks on Java EE 6 and Java CDI. Please contact us to set up a meeting during these dates if you are based in Vegas or are attending the conference.

Read more about TheServerSide Java Symposium

TIP OF THE MONTH

Keeping Your Code Clean by Replacing <env-entry> with CanDI @Named

Implementing the Java EE 6 Web Profile will be our main focus for the next few months. Our code clean up will span our resource and environment configuration and injection including new Java EE 6 JNDI system. These changes to the spec are more low-level and have not gotten the kind of attention that other portions have in the press, but they can be extremely helpful to developers. Scott Ferguson presents a blog on the type-safe registration and configuration capabilities of CanDI that can help you not only create safer, less error-prone code, but also cleaner code.

See an example of clean code using CanDI