Marakana Blog

Since Java 6 (a.k.a. Java 1.6) has been out for some time now, I decided to give it a try, and see how its claimed performance improvements play out in "real life".

Obviously, the most important factor in switching to Java 6 is going to be the application stability, but I was puzzled by the fact that some people have been experiencing considerable performance gains with just a JVM upgrade.

After "some testing" to ensure that our web application still functioned correctly, I too noticed a drastic change in the startup time of Tomcat (5.5.20), running our app based on Spring 2.0, Hibernate/Annotations 3.2, Acegi, etc.

On one of our test servers (Pentium 4 2.8GHz), the Tomcat startup time was cut down by half! It dropped from 40+ seconds to just 20s. On another (Xeon 2.8GHz), the startup time went from 26s to just 16s. And on my MacBook Pro (Core 2 Duo 2.33GHz), the startup time dropped from 12s to just 8.5s (using only a preview release of Java 6 for Mac OS X).
(more…)

As JavaScript is gaining in popularity due to Ajax, Object-Oriented Programming is becoming more and more important. If you are coming from a language such as Java, you'd have some difficulty grasping the JavaScript object model. Perhaps because there isn't one, really. But there's a way to accomplish most of the design patterns that you are accustomed from a real OOP language.

Let's look at this one item at a time.

(more…)

Her Majesty The Queen, as represented by a federal ministry in Quebec, has retained Marakana Canada to deliver PostgreSQL Administration Training to its entire development team.

This was the first class that Marakana Canada has delivered in French since the opening of our Toronto office a few months back. The world is flat, indeed.

I'm teaching an Advanced Ajax class at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in Toronto. As expected, some students are on the OSX, others on Windows (though more Mac, as usual). Tools, tools, everyone whats to know what to use for light-weight front-end XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript development with a hit of PHP perhaps.

My usual recommendation is:

Mac: vi, Firefox, Firebug, and perhaps TextMate if you are not a vi kinda guy

PC: TextPad or Crimson Editor and Firefox with Firebug

But none of the above mentioned editors provide the true Ajax development environment.

Enter Aptana. It's open source. It's multi-platform. It feels like Eclipse but doesn't suck up all your memory. It's integrated with Firebug. It knows JavaScript, CSS, and XHTML. And the price is right.

Many thanks for Paul Colton for bringing this much-needed tool to the development community. Check out Aptana at http://aptana.com/ and give it a try. It's going to be the standard IDE for all our Web 2.0 Training world-wide.

Marko