If you have been here re­cent­ly then you will know al­ready: our new site is fi­nal­ly on­line, live for every­one!

The in­tent was to re­vamp our site into a place that per­fect­ly aligns with both our com­mu­ni­ty and our busi­ness goals, and I think we have suc­ceed­ed at do­ing so - but I will let you be the judge of that.

Thanks to every­body in the team for mak­ing this pos­si­ble. To all our vis­i­tors I would say: en­joy!

It has been tak­ing months since we start­ed it, but our new web­site will be on­line very soon now. We are cur­rent­ly do­ing the last bits of work to get it ready...

What makes our new site in­ter­est­ing is our ge­o­graph­i­cal­ly dis­persed team that has been work­ing on it:

• The con­tent and PDF good­ies were writ­ten in Cana­da
• The over­all site de­sign was done in Bel­gium
• The con­tent man­age­ment sup­port - a wiki plat­form - was (and still is) be­ing done in Ger­many

From the in­cep­tion to the fin­ish, this has been a great deal of fun (and work!) and it is a very ex­cit­ing way of do­ing things! This is yet an­oth­er ex­am­ple of how far you can get with a work track­er (like fog­bugz), a wiki and skype;-)

I was at Devoxx (for­mer­ly Javapo­lis) to­day. Be­sides wan­der­ing around in the lob­by (I pre­fer to talk to peo­ple there rather than lis­ten­ing to talks), the only pre­sen­ta­tion I at­tend­ed was on the SpringSource dm Serv­er. Joris Kuipers did a nice job on ex­plain­ing how the OSGi mod­ules work (I think I got it - more or less;-)

To­mor­row (Thurs­day) I will be there too - so if you are around just make sure to say hi!

A lot of the hype in "Ex­treme Trans­ac­tion Pro­cess­ing (XTP)" is fail-over. When Or­a­cle bought Co­her­ence (a Tan­gosol prod­uct), they es­sen­tial­ly got an XTP so­lu­tion for data­base ac­cess.

As Cameron Pur­dy notes here, this now al­lows Or­a­cle to pro­vide a de­gree of XTP failover.

Now guess what: with Atomikos Trans­ac­tion­sEssen­tials you get:

• Trans­ac­tion­al ro­bust­ness for noth­ing, and
• failover for free

How? Just do the fol­low­ing:

1. queue re­quests in JMS
2. process them by a clus­ter of com­pet­ing con­sumer process­es
3. use Atomikos Trans­ac­tion­sEssen­tials to en­sure that each mes­sage is processed ex­act­ly once, with­out du­pli­cates or mes­sage loss

By the se­man­tics of queues, this ar­chi­tec­ture will give you failover. By the se­man­tics of trans­ac­tions, this will give you ex­act­ly once. Since the re­quests can be queued by any source, this is mul­ti­chan­nel. Every­thing is com­mod­i­ty in­fra­struc­ture. This is very easy to scale: just add an­oth­er process.

In sum­ma­ry, this is XTP of the high­est de­gree:-)

Work­ing for Atomikos, I use two-phase com­mit a lot. While I don't want to claim that it is a so­lu­tion to all prob­lems, I do find it frus­trat­ing to hear peo­ple pro­claim­ing that they don't use it be­cause it doesn't scale (or some oth­er rea­son).

Take, for in­stance, Wern­er Vo­gel's talk about the Ama­zon ar­chi­tec­ture. Once again, two-phase com­mit is re­ject­ed as a vi­able so­lu­tion/tech­nol­o­gy. Once again, I dis­agree.

Let me il­lus­trate my point with an ex­am­ple of what re­al­ly hap­pened to me re­cent­ly - af­ter or­der­ing a book at Ama­zon (iron­i­cal­ly;-). I can give sim­i­lar ex­am­ples with air­line tick­et reser­va­tions but those will have to wait un­til lat­er...

So what hap­pened re­al­ly? Well, I or­dered a book that I re­al­ly want­ed to have. I or­dered it on­line at Ama­zon... All went well, I checked out and paid by VISA. How­ev­er, that is where things start­ed to go wrong: while wait­ing for the book to be de­liv­ered, I sud­den­ly get an email from Ama­zon say­ing that... my or­der has been can­celed!

Canceled? Yes, but not in a way you would think: I still had to pay for the de­liv­ery by DHL (sor­ry, what is that?!). Yes sir, DHL claimed they had found no­body present at the de­liv­ery ad­dress. The de­liv­ery was at our of­fice ad­dress, so it is very un­like­ly that no­body be there in the first place. More­over, any couri­er ser­vice I know will leave a note that they passed by and at least set­tle for an al­ter­na­tive de­liv­ery. Not this time.

My con­clu­sion? DHL did not ar­rive at my place. On the Ama­zon or­der track­ing page, my or­der had not even left Ger­many (to be de­liv­ered where I live, in Bel­gium).

Now what will I re­mem­ber? I will re­mem­ber that Ama­zon let me down, ei­ther di­rect­ly or via DHL. I will also re­mem­ber to be very sus­pi­cious about peo­ple who say they don't need two-phase com­mit. Two-phase com­mit comes down to en­sur­ing agree­ment be­tween the dif­fer­ent par­ties in­volved in a trans­ac­tion. Clear­ly, there was no such thing in my case.