Enterprise Architect 7.5

Enterprise Architect is the weapon of choice for any major modelling work I need to do (Visio is better for small beer) and it is wonderful to see such an abundant set of features in the new release. I am especially interested in the scripting functionality, as I would like to model with EA but then feed that model into my own template engine for code generation.

Will of course need to look at the MDG stuff, but last time I looked, trying to jump through the hoops to create the templates that I wanted for EA MDG was too much of a hassle. Matching the model with the templates and handling that complexity is enough without the stiffness of MDG.

Also the business rule and process modelling stuff sounds interesting as well as the Strategic Modelling functionality, will need delve deep into those. Here’s the Enterprise Architect link.

VMware Fault Tolerance

Incredible news from VMworld 2008 outlines a completely new way of building fault tolerant systems, using VMware virtual machines in such a way that you actually run two instances of the same server at the same time, the other instance is just not connected to the network.
Check out this great blog entry outlining the functionality (and some caveats). Seems like a treat if it Actually Works[tm], will need to check it out.

VisualVM

So Oracle (née BEA) JRockit has Mission Control, anyone with rapstar money to use has CA Wily Introscope and everyone else had Sun JConsole, which did not console (sorry) much the developer wanting to profile their application during runtime.

Therefore I was very happy to notice (belatedly) VisualVM tool from Sun, which will obviously replace the monitoring functionality of JConsole. Looks nice and is extendible, let’s see where they will go with it.