JavaWorld's Java Technology Insider

On the eve of JavaOne, Terracotta Founder and CTO Ari Zilka talks with Andrew Glover about how they are integrating Terracotta with VMware, as well as cross-application data sharing and other new features in the recently released version 3 of Terracotta. (27:32)

Jetty is a lightweight Java and Web application server that has been making waves since turning 12 in the first months of 2009.  In this talk with Andrew Glover, Jetty engineers Greg Wilkins and Jan Bartel discuss core aspects of Jetty that have made it a popular choice for Web application deployment in Web 2.0 environments. Topics include Jetty's early adoption of Comet-style "server push" interactions, its use in Android and other mobile application environments, its lightweight, embeddable component model, and its recent adoption as an Eclipse Foundation project. Webtide CEO Adam Lieber joins in to discuss the open source business strategy behind Jetty and other Webtide initiatives.

Alex Miller is a respected Java concurrency and scalability enthusiast  who works on Terracotta, an open source, Java-based clustering system. In this talk with Andrew Glover, Alex demystifies Terracotta, explaining the programming magic that enables enterprise customers to run 50 to 100 JVMs on a single application server instance. Alex also talks about Terracotta's "sweet spot" -- storing session data off of the database -- and Terracotta 3.0, which promises new features that he says will eliminate certain scalability barriers.

Recent controversies have eroded confidence in the Java Community Process  and left some leaders in the developer community calling for reform. In this conversation with JCP Chair Patrick Curran, Andrew Glover gets an overview of the structure and inner workings of the process. He learns first-hand where the JCP has historically fallen apart and gets Curran's view on what can be done to reform it. While candid about Sun's ambivalent relationship to open source, and about the predominance of corporate interests on the JCP Executive Committee, Curran ultimately places responsibility for reform in the hands of developers. Anyone can join the JCP, he says, and participation is key to democracy.

With Grails 1.1 due for release in late February 2009, Andrew Glover  sat down for a chat with Grails founder and creator Graeme Rocher. Get a preview of what to expect from the next iteration of Grails, including performance improvements based on changes in Groovy 1.6; upgrades to the Grails plugin ecosystem; support for Maven and Ant Ivy; and the exciting, unexpected liberation of GORM.

After some years of relative stability, Java-based Web application development  is in a season of innovation. In this JavaWorld podcast, Andrew Glover talks with Sun Microsystems' Director of Web Technologies Tim Bray about forces for change in the Web development and deployment space. Tune in for Bray's inside perspective on current trends in Java Web development, including the long-term outlook for dynamic languages on the JVM, new ideas about data persistence and storage, the "outrageously, obscenely hard" problem of concurrency, and what Bray calls the "sweet spot" of cloud computing: platform as service.

In late November 2008, SpringSource acquired G2One,  solidifying the bond between three of the most popular and disruptive technologies for Java-based development: the Spring Framework, Groovy, and Grails. Now, in this JavaWorld podcast, SpringSource CEO Rod Johnson and G2One co-founder Graeme Rocher discuss what the acquisition means for Groovy, Grails, and Spring-based developers. Learn what motivated the companies to come together, what you don't need to fear about the merge, and what developers can expect from Groovy and Grails, now that they're backed by Spring.

As Java-based Web developers have learned to take JavaScript seriously,  the rush is on for tools that enrich the Ajax-development experience. In this JavaWorld podcast, Foundations of Ajax co-author Nate Schutta talks with Andrew Glover about the component libraries, debuggers, and frameworks he uses for Ajax. Nate also discusses projects and trends that reveal new directions for Ajax as a foundation technology for Web 2.0.

JavaFX 1.0 makes its debut today amid high hopes and a sea of doubt. Some in the Java community believe JavaFX could become "the application environment for the Java platform," while others say Sun has made nothing but mistakes on the client side, and JFX is too little, too late. In this talk with Sun Microsystems Senior Director of Java Marketing Param Singh, and JavaFX Architect John Burkey, Andrew Glover addresses both the concerns associated with JavaFX 1.0 and its potential. Get the developer's perspective on what you'll be able to do with JavaFX 1.0. Also hear Sun's answer to the question: What does JavaFX 1.0 mean for Swing?

Todd Hoff's High Scalability Blog is a destination  for developers tasked with building Web apps that scale. One of the blog's best features is its extensive list of site profiles, which reveal the architectural decisions (and revisions) that support Web 2.0 success stories like Amazon, eBay, and Twitter. In this podcast Andrew Glover picks Hoff's brain about scalability tactics like sharding, parallelization, and caching. The two also discuss the challenge of building scalable Web sites that support cloud computing, or service-level architectures, where traffic comes in over APIs. In the end, Hoff gives his insight into why Java isn't necessarily first choice for building sites that scale big, and tips for what to do if you -- like LinkedIn and Fotolog -- decide to use Java anyway.

The recently announced SpringSource Enterprise Maintenance Policy came as a surprise to many Java developers, in some circles sparking anger and calls for a Spring fork. One factor in the controversy may be the relationship between the lesser known commercial vendor, SpringSource, and its widely popular open source product, the Spring framework. In this discussion with Andrew Glover, SpringSource CEO Rod Johnson talks about how his company walks the line between commercial success and its driving role in open source projects such as the Spring framework and Tomcat. Similarly, he explains what factors might cause developers to migrate from Spring's strictly free and open source products to the commercial, and costly, SpringSource Enterprise package. Johnson also discusses the new, OSGi-based SpringSource Application Platform, which he says is designed not for where the Java enterprise market has been, but for where it is going.

Groovy Project Manager Guillaume Laforge  talks with Andrew Glover about what's new in the Groovy 1.6 beta release. Learn about the complexity that has slowed Groovy down in the past and find out what's been done to greatly improve benchmark results in Groovy 1.6. Guillaume also shares tips for optimizing Groovy-based applications and talks about the recent burst of tools support for Groovy; current challenges for the Groovy development team, and what we can expect from upcoming releases such as Groovy 1.7 and 2.0.

Max Ross is the Google engineer who spends his days working on the Google App Engine data store. On the side he works on Hibernate Shards, another scalability-obsessed project that is open source. In this talk with Andrew Glover, Max explains sharding, which is the strategy of storing application data on multiple databases. As Max explains, sharding may not be popular but it is a necessary for some applications dealing with a high volume of data. In those cases, Hibernate Shards provides a unified view into any number of databases, making huge amounts of data manageable even as the system evolves.

Released in January 2008 , Mule Galaxy is an open-source, REST-based SOA governance platform that sidesteps the UDDI standard in favor of ATOM. Positioned as the everyman's SOA registry and repository, Mule Galaxy represents a major shift in SOA, toward a more lightweight, open-source approach to service-oriented development. In this talk with Andrew Glover, Galaxy's chief architect Dan Diephouse talks about his own move away from Web services (after creating the XFire project) and Galaxy's RESTful approach to service-oriented architecture.

Brian Sletten is a regular speaker on the No Fluff Just Stuff tour and an established expert on REST and RESTful Web application development. In this talk with Andy Glover, Brian demystifies REST as an application protocol, not a transport protocol, and describes the series of interactions that define REST. As he explains, REST is best used for managing information and information spaces without revealing back-end implementation. What it is not about, he says, is hijacking the GET verb and abusing it badly.