Byteman project goes live on jboss.org

Just in time for my talk at Jazoon I have set up a JBoss project for Byteman -- that's the new, official name for TOAST the fault injection tool we have been using to test Web Services Transactions crash recovery. The project page is pretty minimal at the moment, containing only a welcome and downloads page. However, we will very soon have a user forum and JIRA for the project and will be moving the code from its current temporary location in the JBossTS repository.

I want to to make it as easy as possible for people to try out Byteman and provide feedback on problems encountered, contributions to the code base or new ideas for how to improve or extend its functionality. If you have a Java program you want to test, or even just trace its execution, then take a look at Byteman and see how it can help you.

RESTful transactions brings out the crowds

We gave a session on the RESTful transactions work at JavaOne. It was well attended and there was a lot of good discussion afterwards. Then a separate discussion kicked off on the REST-discuss mailing list, followed by some InfoQ article comments. At that point I got a serious case of deja vu (or maybe there's a glitch in the Matrix?)

I've spent many years working in various groups, companies, books and articles on explaining this. I really don't want to have to do it all again! It doesn't matter if you're living in the Land of WS-*, or REST World, or the SOA Nation, we all know that ACID transactions aren't suitable for loosely coupled interactions. We all know that there are problems with forcing atomicity, consistency, isolation and maybe even durability. As they say, we've been there done that and bought the T-shirt! Move along. This is not the argument you're looking for. Move along.

Another REST+transactions protocol

During discussions on REST and transactions, Alexadros pointed us at some work they've been doing. Very interesting. Once we get a chance to look through each others approaches I intend to start a discussion on our design forums. If you're interested then join in.