Trisha's Ramblings

New Blog Post: AngularJS, HTML5, Groovy, Java And MongoDB All Together - What Could Possibly Go Wrong??

New Blog Post: Using Groovy to import XML data into  MongoDB

So... I've been using blogger for a few years now.  I like it because it's really easy just to start typing and get a blog out there, and because it provides simple analytics and easy integration into Google+ (OK, so I never use Google+, but hey, I'm trying to via blogger). But there are a number of things blogger is not so great at, so I'm trying out a new platform at the moment, which I may or may not stick to.  More to come on that when I've got more to report I guess. But for those who read my blog via blogger (or the RSS feed associated with it), I wanted you to know that my latest blog post is over here .  This particular experiment will help me figure out how many people read my stuff directly from here, and how many find it through other channels. Hopefully more to come on the experiment, when I've got something to report.

Last night was the inaugural meeting of the Sevilla MongoDN User Group.  An event organised with just over 48 hours notice, in a city where I don't speak the language and where even my best-connected contacts aren't sure they're fully plugged in to the tech scene. I'll admit, I had some reservations: a lightning talk? Will people come all that way for beer and 15 minutes of presentation? in English? Whilst I'm desperately learning Spanish to get closer to presenting in Spanish, at this point I'm just not ready and have to hope people want to listen to me ramble in a foreign language a MUG? Are people interested in joining a group that's solely focussed on one technology, a technology that might not have adoption here or even interest? two days notice?  Are you kidding?  I know people here like to figure out their plans at the last minute, but surely this is shooting ourselves in the foot before we even start. And then last night...  The peop...

I wrote an article for the latest edition of Java Magazine which is an introduction to MongoDB for Java developers, and a nod to why it's good in the "Big Data" space. Look inside > MongoDB and Big Data

In previous years, JAX London would have been an easy, local conference to go to.  This time it took me most of Sunday to get there, and not because of the Super Storm .  Still, that gave me the day to finish off the tutorial I was running there on Monday morning.  Not that I would be so unprofessional as to leave preparing things until the last minute, oh no.... But as in previous years, the main benefit of this conference for me was meeting most of the usual suspects from the London Java Community.  For example, presenting were: Andy Piper ; Barry Cranford ; Jim Gough ; Peter Lawrey ; Sandro Mancuso ;  Simon Maple ;  Martijn Verburg ;  John Oliver : John Stevenson ; Richard Warburton . The Community Night in particular also drew a lot of LJC members (including some first-timers) to JAX, and it was a really good "networking opportunity" (i.e. chance to have free drinks, catch up with friends and make new ones).  I really enjoyed hanging out wit...

The second in my short series of blogs about the new Java driver is now available for your perusal.  In it, there's some guidance on how to get started using the new driver, whether you want to use the new (unfinished) API, the existing "classic" API, or a blend of both. The post also shows that Gradle is prettier than Maven .  Sorry Maven. If you are going to play with the new driver, please read all the caveats carefully.  I know it looks a bit like the warnings on your prescription medicine, but it serves the same purpose.  Short version: the driver is not finished yet, and should not be used in production. We really want to hear your experiences with the driver - it is an open source project and MongoDB is very much driven by the community, we want to hear from you.  But only if you say nice things.  No, seriously, please tell us if you have problems, if functionality is missing, if your tests fail if you start to use it, etc etc etc. Go play...

Yesterday Stephen Chin , one of Oracle's Java Evangelists and the JavaOne content chair, interviewed me via a live stream about JavaOne , the new MongoDB Java driver , and my plans to Change The World. It was a fun interview to do, and I really like the format of being interviewed over Skype and streaming my desktop.  There's a slight (OK, 25 seconds, not really low latency) lag between the screen and the speaking which means it's not a great platform for doing live demos, but I think I'd like to do more code demos in this way, if I can find a suitable platform.

I feel slightly like a traitor to my own blog, as I've written a blog post for Somewhere Else.  I've written about the design goals for the 3.0 MongoDB Java Driver in the official MongoDB blog (seems sensible, right?).  I'm not sure how I feel about cross-posting the entire contents, so I'm just linking you to them instead. Anyone who's been to my Backwards Compatibility presentation this year might notice something familiar about the content.  The talk covers the design goals of the new driver, and this blog post will let you read them in your own time rather than having me fire them at you at 100mph.

So, like one of my presentations, I have a question for you.  Actually, I have more than one question for you.  I'm not going to bother with survey monkey or whatever, I want to share the answers so please, answers in the comments: Are you using the Java driver for MongoDB in your application? Are you using the Java driver directly, or are you using a third party library like Morphia, Spring Data, the Scala driver, your own abstraction layer, etc? If you're using a third party library, why did you choose that over using the Java driver directly? If you're using the Java driver directly, what do you like about it?  If you're using the Java driver directly, are there any areas that give you pain?  Areas for improvement? Which version of Java are you using? Feel free to leave additional information if you have it.  And this is a public blog, so if you're really mean I'll just delete your comment.  So there.

Last Tuesday I went to a London Java Community talk which promised to debunk the hype around NoSQL.  Whether you're already bought into a NoSQL technology, or you're just wondering what all the noise is about, it's worth an hour out of your day to see Akmal Chaudhri's comprehensive summary of the technologies out there. Skillsmatter recorded the whole thing, as usual, so you can watch the presentation for yourself .  I promise neither I nor anyone else from 10gen paid him to mention MongoDB so much.

Don't you hate it when you ask a perfectly good question, and someone comes back with the answer "it depends"? It's so frustrating to think that in a world of ones and zeros, people can't give absolute answers and you can't rely on "best practice". It's an answer I've given so many times, especially when someone asks about performance.  Well, I've had my comeuppance.  The entire exercise of designing the new Java driver for MongoDB has been nothing but a series of questions where the answer is "it depends": Which Java version are our users, um, using? Do people want an asynchronous driver? How will they want to work with async? Will they want to use async and synchronous method calls from the same application? Do people typically use the Java driver directly, or do they use something that wraps it, like Morphia or Spring Data ? What's most important for users in terms of performance?  Throughput? Latency? Consis...

Hot on the heels of my very first MongoDB webinar,  I was... encouraged... to do another.  Here at 10gen we've been running a series of webinars around using MongoDB in the financial services domain.  Yesterday was the last in the series, and was presented in association with C24  - John Davies , their CTO, did most of the talking, and demonstrated their product for automatically turning financial messages from one format into another. video platform video management video solutions video player (Slides and webinar available here - and you're not going deaf, the sound doesn't start until about 3:44 into the video) It was a fun webinar to do, actually - I didn't know anything about C24's iO tool, so I learnt quite a lot as I watched John navigate the demo.  My background in trying to debug raw FIX messages probably skewed my questions, I was definitely more interested in how to use it as a developer and what it could give me if I were doing productio...

Yesterday I had the nerve-wracking dubious alarming  great pleasure of presenting my first official MongoDB -shaped talk.  This was in the form of a webinar, which is an interesting and different format. I naïvely assumed it would be like a presentation but without the visible hand-waving, but it isn't really.  For a start, you can't easily poll the audience to find out what their level of experience is, and taking questions is quite tricky, even with the technology to support it.  Also, because you're not standing in front of people, I think the "rules" around making sure your slides don't distract from you are a little different - it strikes me that webinars are more like a set of slides with a narrator and a fixed time, than a presenter with a set of slides to emphasise points.  This puts the medium in an awkward position between an infodeck and a talk (yes, I am reading Presentation Patterns at the moment, and it's making me very conscious...

Devoxx topped off a crazy two months of conferences. I've heard people talk about the conference season in the past, and been slightly (OK, very) jealous of all that jet-setting.  I'll admit, however, to a slight feeling of relief that my focus until Christmas is pretty much going to be coding.  I hope. Neal Ford's When Geek Leaks So, how was Devoxx?  Well for starters, the calibre of the speakers and talks was excellent.  I learnt things in every one I went to - either something I could put into practice at work, or something I could do to improve my own presentations.  My favourite was Neal Ford's When Geek Leaks - Neal is a great speaker, and this talk was entertaining and informative. I'm also currently reading his Presentation Patterns book, which is extremely useful.  Although obviously I give a bunch of presentations and have found some very handy tips in here, it's dead handy for everyone, even if you're just presenting to your boss or ...

So, I've finished my first full week in the new job and I've learnt lots of new stuff. Which is great, because that's usually why you change jobs. I'm learning a lot about these new-fangled NoSQL database thingies. The LMAX architecture was based on keeping everything in memory and reducing the waits for IO - messages were journalled to disk, and reads and writes to the MySQL database were off the critical path. Therefore doing anything radical to the storage side of the architecture was just not high on the list of priorities. Everything I knew about NoSQL I learnt from the various conferences I've been going to in the last year, and even then that's limited - without a business reason to pursue knowledge I know it'll just leak out of my brain, so I avoid sessions with no immediate applicability to me. Let's summarise what I knew about NoSQL databases before last week: They don't use SQL. Who knew?  There are different flavour...