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How are you handling messaging in your thin client, thick client, fat client, RIA, or mobile client?

I use PostgreSQL 8.3 - highly recommended by the way - and I just updated an application to 8.4. The application is built principally using Spring, Hibernate, and JMS. Naturally, some level of cooperation among transactions is required, so I use an XA provider - Bitronix. Everything was working swimmingly with PostgreSQL 8.3, but the application buckled on startup with errors when I upgrade PostgreSQL to 8.4:

Spring 3.0's out (you didn't get the memo?), and there's a lot of interesting stuff. This release has been long in coming due in no small part to the specifications it tracks and to the intense furvor and emphasis placed on quality assurance and testing. One target platform - JEE6 (and with it the final versions of JSR330) - also just recently went final, and you'll find support for these technologies, as well, where appropriate. Now that it's out, you can start certifying applications in production on it. I've found that - aside from dealing with the new Maven imports - the upgrade process has been flawless. I've taken complex applications and merely fixed the jars and they continue to work. You will find, however, that there are a lot of reasons to go through and start selectively enabling new features, and namespaces.

Waiting for a long running process to finish up. Started screwing around on the internet and found a useful little application called TweetCloud. It generates a neat looking image-based cloud of your tweets. Here's my tweet cloud. I'm @starbuxman, if you're on that busy network and wanna chat.

If you've ever had to do batch processing, then you know how tedious it can be to write all the infrastructure code surrounding retries and error recovery and usefully handling long running processing and all the other tedium that surrounds a typical batch application. For these types of applications, I use Spring Batch, a batch processing framework from Dave Syer and the fine people at SpringSource.

I have a lot to be thankful for. This year I moved back to Los Angeles, where I've been well received in a new job and by family. I've experienced success speaking at various conferences, and this year saw the publication of my first book, Apress' "Spring Enterprise Recipes." Recently, I was in a pretty bad accident (a big-rig rear-ended me) and I emerged alive. I have made good friends. I am thankful for the readers of my blogs. I am thankful for my loving friends and family.

Warning: Shameless Plug I am pleased to announce that, after a long time and a lot of work, my first book Spring Enterprise Recipes (which I co-authored with the indefatigable, epic and extraordinary Mr. Gary Mak, author of - among many other things, Apress' Spring Recipes) has been released and is now purchasable. It should be hitting book stores soon, but in the meantime, you can buy the e-book at Apress.com, or you can pre-order it on Amazon.com.

Go, a new language from Google, has created quite a stir. It has a great pedigree, owing to renowned experts like Rob Pike (a member of the Unix team, and a creator of the Plan 9 OS from Bell Labs.) The language is a procedural language (like C, or Python) which offers a strongly typed, but flexible type system (not centered around object-oriented facilities as we know them from languages like Java and Ruby). The syntax is a strange mix of C and Python. Honestly, it feels like C when you read it, but it writes more like Python - lots of features in the syntax that are designed to be consistent, predictable.

What a busy couple of months!

I was really glad to see Udi Dahan's, "Don't Delete. Just Don't." I wholely agree with the main premise - that deletion is rarely, if ever, a valid business state and that care should be taken in dealing with it. He cites various examples, saying, "The real world doesn't cascade." His example is of a marketing department that deletes an item from the catalog. Should all orders containing that item then be unlinked? Should they redo the company's profit and loss statments?

I've recently been playing with jBPM 4.1 and, while I haven't quite gotten into it, I did manage to break an Eclipse setup of my "old" jBPM 4.0 code. This is definitely a user error. So, trying to ensure I have a reproduciable baseline, I start setting everything up again (I don't have the jBPM plugins or anything installed -- I keep it mean and lean, if possible. )

It started with a Tweet from Miguel De Icaza. Miguel's the leader of the Mono project, whose goal's to bring .NET to Linux. He's also the former leader of the Gnome project. Generally, he's whip smart and not usually prone to flame baits. So, I tend to read his words carefully, as it usually pays off. He said: "I wish Java tried to compete with .NET, but they seemed to have given up a long time ago: http://tinyurl.com/mfxmqm"