I feel the need, the need for speed

The site navigation is built up from a hierarchy of data stored in a relational database.

Every user is presented with the same navigation, based on their group memberships.

The navigation hierarchy is updated relatively infrequently.

This sounds like a classic candidate for data caching.

The implementation should result in:
- fewer trips to the database
- less short-lived objects
- less duplicate objects

Which all lead to faster performance.

Deploying Java into the cloud

At last week's Spring Source Forum in London I found myself thinking that being able to deploy Java applications into the cloud directly from SpringSource Tool Suite isn't that different to what can already be achieved for Google App Engine with their Eclipse plugin.

Less than a week later, I see Rod Johnson has blogged that VMWare have been collaborating with Google engineers for a while, and have now announced a collaboration.

I've only had a very brief skim-read, but I like what I see.

Are we there yet?

Today I tried the delegation technique for getting things done in a team.

It didn't work anywhere near as well as I had hoped, as the updates that I expected 2 people to take a couple of hours at the most didn't get completed until the end of the working day.

As a result I had the office to myself to deploy the latest version of the current system onto the production servers from around 6 til 10:30pm - again. So, maybe today wasn't the best day to arrive into the office before 8am.

S2G Forum London

A couple of months ago I booked today off work to attend the Spring Source S2G forum.

Unfortunately due to a looming deadline and issues arising back at the office, I felt compelled to miss the last couple of sessions but I still felt that I learnt enough from the day to make it worthwhile.

Mark Thomas did a good job of outlining some of the new features to be expected in Apache Tomcat 7.0.

Rod Johnson was good value with some self-deprecating humour when his live demonstration of Roo struck a couple of hiccups.

I was impressed with Roo's approach to round-trip code generation via AspectJ.

The main disappointment from the day was the thought that my currently planned projects are dependent on a third party - so I can't simply pick up Spring 3.0, Roo and Tomcat 7 for the next green-ish field development.

Mac for Java development

I've been stuck in the world of Windows as my desktop development environment for my entire professional career thus far (11+ years).

In the last couple of companies that I have worked at several of the developers have been successfully using a Mac for their day to day development.

It seems to be the case that "Once you go Mac, you never go back".

There are a couple of Macbook Pro laptops sitting around unused at my current work, so I'm wondering whether I should make the move.

Given that I seem to be spending quite a bit of time configuring *nix servers, it would make sense for me to have a unix-based operating system.