Service Oriented Integration Made Easy With Apache Camel

Rob and James have published a great introduction to Apache Camel named SOA Made Easy with Open Source Apache Camel. This is a very light intro but it serves as a good example of how really easy Camel is to understand but how really powerful it can be. Digging into Camel is really quite easy and a lot of fun. In a short amount of time you will be easily routing messages between endpoints. Camel offers integration into a wide range of technologies using Camel URIs. For more information, see the Camel website.

A word of warning: This article is published at SysCon whose website I can hardly bear to open because of all cruft. Luckily I run a hosts file full of URLs for known advertisers that I route to a dead end so I don't see many ads.

Public Training for ActiveMQ and ServiceMix

IONA is offering some public trainings for both Apache ActiveMQ and Apache ServiceMix. The following dates are the first two:

London,UK - March 11-14
Waltham, MA - March 17-20

There's even a pricing break by signing up for both classes. For information, see the Public Training page on the Open.IONA website.

IONA utilizes the products from its FUSE line of products that are based on Apache products for these trainings. But everything from the training transfers without issue to the Apache versions as well.

Anti-Merger Flickr Group Bashing Microsoft

For those who may not be aware of it, Mircosoft has made an offer to acquire Yahoo! recently and the uproar that it has created around the globe has been interesting to say the least. If you haven't already seen this Flickr group yet, you should check it out because it's damn funny. The name of the group is the MICROSOFT: KEEP YOUR EVlL GRUBBY HANDS OFF OF OUR FLICKR. Currently there are over 260 photos and nearly 2700 members of the group. My favorite images is on the left-hand side of this blog post ;-).

In Dublin, Ireland This Week

My third trip to Dublin, Ireland in the last four months and even though I was determined to see some sights this time around, it's just not going to happen. I'm here delivering an internal training to a group of IONA folks this week. Insofar as the training is concerned, I believe things going fairly well. Unfortunately this is no small feat because I arrived on Monday and came down with something. I've had a fever since Monday afternoon and I've felt like death all this week. The upside is that I've only got two days left so hopefully I can plow ahead and complete the training. The downside is that I've got over 12 hours of air travel coming up on Saturday to get back home to Colorado in this condition. Crikey :-(.

Cisco's Newest Switch is 20 Times Faster!!!

How would you like to download every movie Netflix has in 40 seconds?! Well Cisco's Nexus 7000 switch claims to be able to support routing 15 terabits of data per second if you can believe that. Crikey! Cisco is claiming that this new swtich is 20 times faster than anything on the market today. There's a very cool interative 3D model of it here.

Evidently this jump in speed is at least partially due to the consolidation of fibre channel, Infiniband and ethernet into a new, smarter type of ethernet cable. The whole idea is to take the virtualization wave that is sweeping the IT industry to the next level to allow for greater sharing of resources across cities and even timezones - whoa! A bit more information is available in this Forbes article if you're interested.

Using Apple's J2SE Source in Eclipse - Again

This past weekend I had a much larger hard drive installed in my MacBook Pro which required a fresh install of MacOS X on the new drive. This meant I had to manually reinstall the Apple Developer Tools and some other stuff. So today I needed to open some source code from the JDK in Eclipse and it wouldn't resolve. I remembered going through this before and that I had blogged about it so referred back to the old blog entry about using Using Apple's J2SE Source in Eclipse. After a quick check for the src.jar file, I knew what the problem was immediately. However, the installation of Apple's J2SE 5.0 Release 4 Developer Documentation package failed because I now have a newer version of the J2SE installed. Shit.


Pacifist to the Rescue
So I immediately launched Pacifist so that I could pluck the JARs from the package to manually put them in place on disk. Pacifist allowed me to do this in less than a minute and all I had to do was cycle Eclipse. Problem solved ;-).

If you're a MacOS X user and ever need to pluck items from inside of a package, then you need the Pacifist. This is not the first time it has saved me and I hazard a guess it won't be the last.

Understanding the Threads Allocated in Apache ActiveMQ

If you're using Apache ActiveMQ you should really check out this article. Hiram posted this article on entitled Understanding the Threads Allocated in ActiveMQ (updated link on 13 May 2017).

Hiram wastes no time and dives right down into the heart of the matter to look at how threading works in ActiveMQ from the producer VM to broker VM to the consumer VM. As I read the article I realized that it began with the most amount of threads for asynchronous messaging and was slowly working backwards to less and less threading. At that point I wondered if it was going to completely flatten the threading and remove all buffering from the equation. And that's just where the article went :-).

This is a quick read but is very valuable if you're interested in architecture of ActiveMQ.