Sun Blogs

It depends on how old-school your company is.

Play Framework, while it is still using Java, breaks the old-tradition of getter/setter. Your peers might resist instantly when they saw that part.

If Play Framework is too extreme for your workplace, I'd suggest to give Spring MVC 3.0 or use the latest Java Servlet 3.0 in JEE6.

Java Servlet 3.0 supports annotations (http://blogs.sun.com/swchan/entry/servlet_3_0_annotations) that provides routing capability (might not be as powerful as Rails routing, but still something new and nice to try).

For ORM, either JPA 2.0 (recommended) or Hibernate (Hibernate specific APIs, not Hibernate as JPA 2.0 provider). But as with any ORM: you need to know it well (ActiveRecord is not an exception either).

Additionally, JPA 2.0 provides Level 2 Cache API interface: you can either write your own but conform with the API (the API is very simple) or use the one provided by the JPA provider.

Hibernate (if you use it as the JPA 2.0 provider) supports a variety of L2 caching solutions (SwarmCache, EhCache, OSCache, JBoss Cache, Infinispan, etc). Plug n play baby!

"The decision to go with Microsoft was based on overall value - it was also predicated upon their endorsement of and agreement to help promote MySQL. Stay tuned for more details on what we'll be doing together."

From: http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/winds_of_change_are_blowing

This has always been my favourite example of Shwartz' inability to grasp reality. Perhaps I am interpreting this incorrectly but Microsoft "help[ing] promote MySQL?" This deal didn't sound sane in January 2008 and it looks even more ludicrous to me in 2010.

By early 2008 the company had lost most of its value despite having a strong brand and a talented pool of engineers. What was going on at Sun? Deals to ship dinky browser bars with Java, JavaFX (which stood no chance in a market dominated by Adobe with Microsoft nipping at their ankles), no roadmap for JAVA 7, inability to see the potential benefits of ZFS on Linux - really, we could be here all evening.

You don't "save" a company - You run a company and you should be "saving" it every day with every decision you make.

Without encryption, compression, or deduplication on I don't think there would be very much overheard - more than traditional file systems, definitely, but still relatively very little.

Encryption would require significantly more CPU (http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=9886)

Compression would require moderately more CPU (depends heavily on the compression algorithm) though you can actually speed up disk access with this - which is the real bottleneck (http://blogs.sun.com/observatory/entry/zfs_compression_a_win_win)

Deduplication requires lots of memory (I think I saw 1-2GB per TB of data quoted someplace) and will increase CPU load a bit, but for certain workloads can save a lot of writing and diskspace (think Virtual Images or a dataset like Dropbox's).

I'm not involved in ZFS development (just an avid user) so take this with a grain of salt.

One problem is that in the most lucrative market, enterprise data storage, the woefully out of date benchmarks that are industry standard mainly promote raw throughput on absurdly large working sets, which makes caching of minimal benefit. Besides inertia, there are some established players who have a lot riding on that not changing, also.

Details in this kvetch from Sun engineer Bryan Cantrill (Sun's ZFS-based storage servers do pretty much exactly what you propose, but lose out to NetApp in the SPEC benchmarks): http://blogs.sun.com/bmc/entry/eulogy_for_a_benchmark

I can't find the specific link, but here's the marketing pitch: http://www.sun.com/x64/intel/zfs_solution_brief.pdf

Also, Googling for "sun hybrid storage" without the quotes will give you more information.

Edit: Here's a good explanation of how ZFS incorporates flash in its L2ARC, with benchmarks: http://blogs.sun.com/brendan/entry/test

Edit2: I found a higher-level explanation of flash in ZFS. What I didn't realize is that the software is all free to use commercially, though you'd have to be on open solaris: http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/not_a_flash_in_the

It may not be as flashy in some respects, but things like the time slider are killer

http://blogs.sun.com/erwann/entry/zfs_on_the_desktop_zfs

It they aren't done already, I suppose integrating these parts to newer versions of Gnome is, at least, in the pipeline for *BSD folks (and, once ported to current Gnome, they would be rather easy to adapt it to BtrFS, which is to be fully supported by canned linux distros by the end of the year).

Just now, OpenSolaris is a very cool server OS with a slightly old Gnome desktop on top of it.