Yesterday's news, today
It's nice that BEA has caught up with something I've been doing to this server for years, and that Smalltalk has been capable of for decades. Note the breathless "first ever" tone:
BEA Systems plans to release a new version of its flagship application server that will allow upgrades on the fly to mission-critical applications, the company said Tuesday. "Upgrades are now on the fly," CEO Alfred Chuang told approximately 2,000 delegates at the company's users' conference in Santa Clara, Calif. "This is the world's first hot-swappable application server in production. Imagine changing the engine of a race car during the race...this is what we are doing.
Hey Alfred - I've been there and done that for years. Congratulations for making it all the way into the mid 80's, technology wise.
Comments
Re. Yesterday's News
[Steve] September 28, 2005 13:39:43.568
Actually I doubt BEA is doing anything like you've been bragging about. Probably it's just the usual marketing hype, not to be confused with real software ;)
Prediction
[Vincent Foley] September 28, 2005 14:26:06.302
I'll try to make a prediction. Right now, most of the Java users to whom I tell about Smalltalk's ability to modify running code tell me that "it musn't be safe" or that "it probably breaks the application." If this thing works and becomes something more common in Java, I'm sure they will have a different story ;)
Huh?
[] September 28, 2005 14:43:46.059
Sybase's Jaguar Server has done this for years. Tomcat can do this. I'm confused about this one.
still a good thing
[Stu Charlton] September 28, 2005 22:25:23.582
It's not exactly unique to BEA to claim "first evers" that really can be traced back to Lisp or Smalltalk. Just a common industry oversight, and an unfortunate one. Having said that, I do not believe that most existing application servers (whether .NET, Java, or scripting) or Tomcat can do this. WIth WLS 9, you can apply service packs & patches to a cluster one-node at a time, or for your web applications, perform side-by-side deployment, smoke-testing of the new version, and gradual HttpSession migration to the new version, with full transactional change control on resources (connection pools, queues, etc) and rollback capabilities of things go bad. It's a big win for infrastructure operators. I don't know the details about WebLogic Server Real Time Edition, but I assume it is extending this feature to beyond web applications.
application server
[Isaac Gouy] September 30, 2005 11:15:10.866
James something I've been doing to this server for years, and that Smalltalk has been capable of for decades
I understand that someone could build an application server with Smalltalk (just as BEA built an application server with Java, just as someone could build an application server with Tcl).
Which Smalltalk application server are you talking about?
This one
[ James Robertson] September 30, 2005 11:27:15.553
Comment by James Robertson
The blog server running this site is an application server.