Ross Mason is the founder of Mule, an open source enterprise service bus that implements the Gregor and Hohpe Enterprise Integration Patterns.  Easy to install and configure, Mule does not place heavy demands on developers - there is no required canonical form, services can be expressed in a number of ways, and it supports a wide range of scripting languages, from Groovy to JRuby and beyond.

 

Chariot integration specialist Rod Biresch and I sat down to chat with Ross recently to talk about Mule, the version 3 release, other related topics.  Chariot is a MuleSoft partner.

 

More show notes to come.

 

This week's Dev News is brought to you by the letter 'M', as in 'WebM'.  Google has announced that future releases of the Chrome browser will no longer support H.264, instead moving to the new WebM and VP8 codec/format.  So we riff on that for a while.  If you want a really good analysis from people who know Google and video really well, check out the latest episode of This Week in Google from the TWIT network.

We also discuss the App Store trend - both of us have used the Apple Mac App Store, and kinda like it, from a consumer perspective.

Big news in JRuby-land, a big release, we have it covered.  Also we talk about a very nice little feature in Spring's property placeholder configuration that enables default values, right in the XML.  And we follow up with a discussion on Rich Hickey's decision to close financial donations to the Clojure project.

Show notes (until it dies) are currently available on delicious.com/developernews/29.  Ken apologizes for the audio quality as he recorded it on his Macbook Air's internal mic, forgetting to bring his mics back from a recording session with 'da band' this weekend.

Have a good week.

Ken & Eric

 

 

Eric Snyder discusses MongoDB, a document-oriented NoSQL database.

Show Notes

  • MongoDB is built and supported by 10gen
  • Information on BSON, a Binary format similar to JSON: http://bsonspec.org/
  • Document oriented datastore. Documents are JSON-like. Storage is really BSON, a binary representation of JSON. 
  •  Supports ad-hoc querying (like relational)
  • Queries are expressed as BSON documents. You can reference deeply nested attributes and there are a robust collection of query operators.
  • MongoDB query optimizer is not cost based. MongoDB tries all query plans simultaneously until it one completes, then it terminates the others. It then reuses that plan for the query until it begins to perform poorly
  • Document attributes can be indexed similarly to a relational db column.
  • Map/reduce is available for more complex data analysis.
  • MongoDB has built-in replication and auto-sharding.
  • Uses a native binary over-the-wire protocol implemented by various drivers. There are drivers available for many languages/environments.

=== Sponsor Note ===

Philadelphia Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise Conference - April 27-28 2011 - is now taking registrations.  We have an amazing array of speakers on a wide range of topics, including NodeJS, Ruby, Rails, Scala, Spring, Agile, and more.  Visit the site today and take advantage of early bird registration.

 

Eric and Ken talk about Amazon's new DNS server, Route 53, discuss Matt Raible's excellent web frameworks comparison study, discuss resources for Scala from the Basement Coders, talk about a new mixin feature request around the Ruby language, and more.

Disclaimers: Chariot is a SpringSource partner, and uses Amazon and Google services. The opinions of Eric and Ken do not reflect anything other than their viewpoints. Enjoy.

James Ward has been a guest on numerous podcasts (ETE Evening Podcast - 2010, Episode 34, Episode 18).

He is here this week to give us the state of the state in Adobe's Flash-based RIA technologies, including Flex 4, Flash Catalyst, Air 2.5, and Adobe's support for HTML 5 and CSS 3.  We discuss mobile platform technologies as well, including how Air is being targeted as the mobile flash platform for Android, the Blackberry tablet, and iOS.

Links: