It was a good week. I finally got all of the automated TC Spring tests to pass for Spring 2.5.4, so I was able to mark that issue done. Terracotta now clusters Spring 2.0.x through 2.5.x. That code base is due for a refactoring, though. Our code for clustering Spring uses AspectWerkz to define join points all over the Spring source code, not just the public API. What this means, as I’ve ranted about before, is that even minor changes to Spring’s source code (as occur even between minor releases such as 2.0.5 and 2.0.8) have broken our clustering code. What I’d like to do, when time permits, is see if we can rewrite our aspects to only use methods of the public Spring API as join points. That should give us a whole lot more stability.

My boss Alex is prepping me to help him do some more performance testing. He recently wrote some great blog entries about that here and here. We met with the product management team this week to brainstorm what sort of testing we want to do, what sort of data they might want to have from a marketing/sales perspective, etc. As Alex pointed out, it’s a tricky thing - this sort of testing always leads to finding bugs, which leads to bug fixes, which invalidates any prior testing and so you have to start over. Luckily, we already have a very capable distributed testing framework, developed in-house by Alex, in which we can pretty easily script tests with Groovy. We can have agents on multiple machines (i.e. L1 nodes, talking to a TC L2 server) and have the agents start workers to run tests. The agents can do things like kill and restart workers, to test having to repartition a distributed cache. Sounds like the first thing we’re going to measure is the load time and then the TPS (transactions per second) for a couple different kinds of distributed caches: ConcurrentHashMap and Ehcache.

We found out this week our next big company-wide gathering in San Francisco will be the week of Oct. 13-18. I’ve already book my flight and hotel room. I’m excited - these trips have so far been a lot of fun.

I did a phone interview for a candidate to join my team. Probably shouldn’t elaborate on that yet, but I will say that Terracotta is very thorough with candidates. When I interviewed back in January, I did five phone interviews, four of them with other engineers, before being invited to come out in person. When I did fly out, I was interviewed by another five people, including the CEO and CTO! Honestly, although it was exhausting, I had a great time! I loved being challenged by, and having conversations with, some very smart and talented people who have produced some amazing software.

New software this week: OmniGraffle, which I’ve heard from everyone is the only graphics editing software you need on a Mac. I’ve got a copy now which I will hopefully be using in the not-too-distant-future to write some more technical blog entries about Terracotta. Also, Alex encouraged us to try out FindBugs, including it’s Eclipse plugin here (update site). I’ve added both of these to my list of essential Mac software for the Terracotta developer.