Opensource on

Been there -- a distributed ExecutorService.

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I happened to run across a new open-source project today I had not previously heard about: Hazelcast.

What really piqued my interest was the implementation of a distributed ExecutorService as I wrote something of similar functionality to façade Orbitz’s Jini infrastructure. The design and implementation solved a couple primary objectives:

add timeouts to Jini which is unfortunately lacking such a feature
bound the number of concurrent requests being processed
bound the number of threads created for request processing

The design was elegant, imo, because the exact same code worked either client or service-side – it just mattered which way you twisted your head – and masked the complexities of both Jini and the ExecutorService. The timeouts were managed via the Future and the throttling of requests and threads by configuring the backing Queue and pool size. Spring wiring entirely hid the remote invocation machinery from the caller. In almost every case there were no code changes and the timeout and throttling features could be turned on and tuned entirely through a configuration change.

Amit Singh, questions, answers, Xcoders.

Fri, 12 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I had the good fortune to attend a talk given by Amit Singh at the Seattle Xcoders meeting held in the Google offices in Fremont.

Amit is the author of Mac OS X Internals, a book eclipsing the 1600 page mark (according to Amazon) making it one of the longest technical books I’ve ever seen. He spent some talking about his experience writing:

no editors checked on him because most technical authors give up
eight to nine chapters were cut from the already monstrous book
he claims to not be an author and has no interest in writing another book
he spent months at a time writing most of which he found all-consuming

I didn’t find much value in the technical content of the talk (not because of Amit but because I’m rarely in a position to need details at this level of the OS and I do have some Mach background from NeXT days) but the feedback on authorship was worth attending to confirm what I already suspected. I’ve been approached about book writing before but have balked because of the time commitment and lack of financial reward – I find writing technical articles and blog posts time consuming enough.