Miles to go ...

Running in the streets of Rome

arungupta — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 06:05:41 +0000

During my overnight stay in Rome 2 days back, the hotel’s wifi network was down and the fitness center was closed for renovation. An old grumpy guy at the front desk, who was humming songs and had absolutely no concept of greeting / smile, checked me in. The "world class buffet" was pretty mediocre with limited selections and was advertised on the incorrect floor. Really ancient, not antique, just old & worn out, faucets in the shower made me wonder.

But anyway, the good thing was that the stairs to the 7th floor were outside the hotel so I got a good workout by climbing them 5 times.

And of course, I created my running course around the hotel. Please click on the interactive map below:

Running 15 of these loops gave me somewhat hill repeats because of the elevation involved.

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JFall 2009 Trip Report

arungupta — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 20:30:57 +0000

Attended and presented at my first NLJUG’s JFall conference earlier today.

NLJUG is the Java User Group of Netherlands. It’s a non-profit organization that try to get out the maximum out of content sharing with all of its members. An annual subscription to the JUG is 35.50 Euros and allows the members to attend its two annual conferences – JSpring and JFall and also provide a year long subscription to a local Java magazine.

The conference itself started with 200 attendees in 2004 and has grown up to 1250 attendees last year. This year they had to cap the limit at 1000 because of the cost control measures. NLJUG rely upon subscriptions from business partners for funding and in turn profile them within the Dutch community and offer them high-bandwidth networking opportunities at conferences like this. If you are interested in being their partner, send an email to info@nljug.org.

This year, the selection committee had to review 100+ submissions to pick the top 32 sessions and 2 hands-on-labs sessions. The conference focus has certainly expanded from Java language to the Java platform and had a few talks even on Scala, Android, and HTML 5.

The slides from my "Java EE 6 and GlassFish v3: Paving the path for future" are available below:

Java EE 6 and GlassFish v3: Paving the path for future

Several demos shown (or not because of time shortage) during the talk are available at:

TOTD #91: Applying Servlet 3.0 "web-fragment.xml" to Apache Wicket
TOTD #101: Applying Servlet 3.0 "web-fragment.xml" to Lift
TOTD #95: EJB 3.1 Simplified packaging
TOTD #93: Getting started with GlassFish v3 and NetBeans 6.8: Simple Servlet 3.0 + JPA 2.0 app
TOTD #94: JSF 2.0 + JPA 2.0 application using GlassFish v3 and NetBeans 6.8
TOTD #81: Getting Started with Servlet 3.0 using NetBeans 6.x
TOTD #102: Java EE 6 wizards (Servlet 3.0 and EJB 3.1) in Eclipse
Session preservation & Deploy-on-save using NetBeans and Eclipse
Screencast #26: Deploy, Run, Debug Rails applications using NetBeans and GlassFish

Most of the English-speaking sessions are by Sun speakers so could not attend other sessions that I wanted to.

Here are some pictures from the event:

It was certainly a pleasure to meet Bert Ertman, Klaasjan Tukker, Bert Breeman and other folks involved behind NLJUG and JFall 2009. The complete photo album is available:

Now to Rome for delivering an all-day GlassFish workshop at a partner’s location. And then finally home … phew!

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Running in Bussum, The Netherlands

arungupta — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 15:29:17 +0000

JFall 2009 is organized in the beautiful city of Bussum, The Netherlands – a 20 minutes train ride from Amsterdam. I checked into the hotel yesterday and, as always, found a good running trail right by the hotel.

Here is the clickable map if you are interested:

It took about 36 minutes to complete this 4.1 miles route because of two reasons. Firstly I was enjoying the landscape, color of fall trees and the typical architecture of homes on the trail. And secondly I kinda got lost and it started becoming dark … but anyway managed back to the hotel by asking around.

Even though Dutch is the primary language but everybody (at least every one I talked to) speaks English so language was not an issue

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TOTD #113: JavaFX front-end for GlassFish v3 Administration – Using REST interface

arungupta — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 12:15:33 +0000

GlassFish v3 provides a REST interface to management and monitoring information as discussed in TOTD #96. As mentioned in that blog "the REST interface is a lower level API that enables toolkit developers and IT administrators to write their custom scripts/clients using language of their choice". This blog introduces a tool that uses the REST API to provide management and monitoring of GlassFish v3 and is written using JavaFX.

This tool is only a proof-of-concept that demonstrates that GlassFish v3 REST interface is functionally very rich and can indeed be used to write third-party administration tools. The tool uses a subset of the REST interface and exposes only a limited amount of management and monitoring capabilities otherwise exposed. After all this is a proof-of-concept

A screencast of this tool in action along with a downloadable JNLP version will soon be available. For now, here is a snapshot of the main window of this tool:

The main screen allows you to enter a URL for the GlassFish administration. Then the GlassFish instance can be stopped/restarted from the main window using the buttons on top right. There is an animation at the bottom of the screen where the glassfish is swimming in the ocean and is directly related to the state of server running in the background. If the server is running, the animation works. If the server is not running then the animation stops as well.

The main screen has three main buttons:

"List Applications" – list all the applications deployed on the running instance
"Show Monitoring Levels" – show/Update all the monitoring levels
"Server Stats" – show statistics of the running server

Clicking on "List Applications" shows the list of applications deployed on this particular instance. Here is how a snapshot looks like for an instance running on my localhost at port 4848:

As shown in the screen, it shows a radio-bulleted list of all the applications. Each bullet is also accompanied by an image indicating the type of application – Web or Rails for now. Select the application and click on "Monitor" button to monitor that particular application. The REST API exposes a vast amount of monitoring data but a subset of monitoring data is displayed for Web and Rails application for now. Here is a snapshot of the monitoring data published for a Web application:

As evident by the list of engines, this web application has EJBs bundled as well. It also shows total number of Servlets/JSPs loaded, number of requests made to this web application and some other monitoring data.

Here is a snapshot of the monitoring data published for a Rails application:

It shows number of JRuby runtimes configured for the application, number of requests sent to the application, number of responses with different HTTP access codes and some other data.

The monitoring levels of different containers can be easily updated by clicking on "Show Monitoring Levels" as shown below:

And finally some server statistics are shown by clicking on "Server Stats" as shown below:

It shows when the server was started, host/port information, version and finally how long the server has been running for. The dials are an animation that shows the server up time.

Here are other related JavaFX and GlassFish related blogs published earlier:

How are you going to use the REST interface exposed by GlassFish v3 in your environment ?

Are you using JavaFX with GlassFish together in any way ?

Java EE 6 & GlassFish v3 swimming to Amsterdam – JFall 2009

arungupta — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 18:53:20 +0000

JFall is the annual conference of NL JUG – the 11 year old JUG of Netherlands. This year its happening on Nov 11 at SPANT!

I’ll be speaking on Java EE 6 & GlassFish v3 (14:20 – 15:10) there and have lots of cool demos to show through out the talk. And also stay tuned for a brand new demo that shows JavaFX and GlassFish v3 integration.

With over 1000 attendees, the conference is already sold out so if you have not registered yet then you have to wait until next year

Here is the list of several Sun sessions:

Here are the sessions that I’d like to attend:

9:00 0 -9:15: Opening
9:15 – 10:00: Keynote – Enterprise 2.0: New Technologies, Innovations and Communities
10:25-11:15
- Migrating your Java EE 5 applications to Java EE 6
- Writing Asynchronous Web Application (Comet) using the Atmosphere Framework
11:20 – 12:10 Scaling Out with Hadoop and NoSql
14:20 – 15:10: Java EE 6 and GlassFish v3: Paving the path for future (of course this one
15:45 – 16:35:
- The future of Enterprise Dependency Injection – JSR 299
- JDK7: What’s In and What’s Not
16:40 – 17:30:
- Eclipse e4: a new beginning
- Java and JavaFX Technology and the Nintendo Wiimote: Just How Much Fun Can You Have?

Most of the sessions are in Dutch so may have to fall back on English speaking sessions

Here are some quick data points …

Complete list of sessions and schedule
Archive of previous conferences: JFall 2004, JFall 2005, JFall 2006, JFall 2007, JFall 2008
Archive of all NL JUG Events

Also trying to arrange a slot in the local Amsterdam Ruby Meetup to talk about JRuby/Rails/GlassFish, lets see if it works out. Otherwise we might somewhere in the hotel lobby

And as always, I’m looking for running trails in Amsterdam & Bussum. Any body interested in running together ?

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Right Scale User Meetup Trip Report

arungupta — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 21:59:48 +0000

With a variety of public cloud hosting solutions available in the market such as Amazon, Rackspace and GoGrid and private solutions like Eucalyptus, Terremark, and VMWare, Right Scale offers a cloud management platform that operates on most of them. Using Right Scale’s platform, you don’t need to write scripts to launch EC2 instances, or think about plugging your own monitoring / management mechanisms for health check, or worry about lock-in to a particular cloud provider. Ease-of-use and a faster on-ramp for going production on a cloud are other key reasons amongst several other benefits offered by Right Scale.

Right Scale’s mantra "Real customers, Real deployments, Real benefits" was truly evident in their first ever user meetup. Other than discussing the trends, product road map and services offered by Right Scale, the most interesting part was the customer testimonials.

Greg Taylor from Sony Music uses Right Scale to manage it’s artists fan sites. Their main reasons for using Right Scale are largest choice of Operating System & AMI, multiple redundant data center reduce risk, and server templates/scripts versioning into portal. They are very happy with MySQL master/slave configuration server templates and have been able to scale to millions of users in a day (e.g. with michaeljackson.com). Michael Dosik from FanSnap (ticket search engine) leverage RightScale for automation instead of adding staff. Auto-scaling, RightScripts, Dashboard/monitoring and ease-of-use are other features specific that brings them to RightScale. Sam Ramji from Sonoa Systems (visibility, management, and control for Cloud services) talked about cutting down their configuration time from 3-4 days on EC2 to hours on RightScale platform and reduced concerns around portability as the main reasons for picking this platform. Read a more complete report about the meetup here.

Here are some other data points …

Scalable Web Sites, Test & Dev, Business Intelligence, Backup & Recovery, Mobile Services, and Grid Computing are the highest usage areas by Right Scale users
Fast on-ramp, Ease of setup, Ease of maintenance, IT visibility & control, Retain best practices, Productivity, Agility, Reliability, Predictability, and Portability are are some of the key benefits to Right Scale users.
100% production usage on EC2 for now
Ubuntu 9.10, CentOS 5.4, Windows 2003, Windows 2008 support coming (Ubuntu 8.04 used internally)
RHEL is the most often requested platform
Chef integration is the future direction, most new features like Machine Tags are targeted at Chef only
Right Scale’s CEO recommended to use the free version for 2 servers and the commercial version for 6-8+ servers
Monitoring features: monit integration, CPU/Disk/Network/MySQL/Apache/others, Auto-scaling based on alerts, 7-day free monitoring

The meetup very much lived to it’s promise of "NO! HYPE" buttons which were distributed to all the attendees. Each attendee was given a tee-shirt which had "707,007+" printed in big letters in the front. This is the number of servers launched by Right Scale so far. The "NO! HYPE" promise became much more evident after attending some sessions at SYS-CON Cloud Computing Expo which were still talking about philosophies / theories. The cocktail party in the evening provided a great atmosphere to mingle with the folks behind Right Scale.

So far no pictures from the meetup are available on flickr but hopefully they will show up here.

Over all, I really enjoyed the presentations at the meetup, meeting the Right Scale folks, and food/drinks at the cocktail party

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Comparing GlassFish and JBoss: Helping you decide!

arungupta — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 17:27:52 +0000

The majority of developers building Java applications will find that the GlassFish application server offers distinct advantages compared with JBoss. This paper summarizes the features and capabilities that make GlassFish a superior choice for building, deploying, and managing enterprise-class Java applications and Web services.

Here are some other recently published GlassFish white papers:

A list of white papers & webinars published earlier this year is available here. An updated list is always available in the Resources section of GlassFish Portfolio.

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MacBook Pro Cycle Count – Too High ?

arungupta — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 22:27:45 +0000

MacBook Pro Cycle Count means the number of times a battery’s entire power is used up. It’s formally defined as:

A charge cycle means using all of the battery’s power, but that doesn’t necessarily mean a single charge. For instance, you could use your notebook for an hour or more one day, using half its power, and then recharge it fully. If you did the same thing the next day, it would count as one charge cycle, not two, so you may take several days to complete a cycle.

It can be easily determined by clicking on "Apple", "About This Mac", "More Info…", "Hardware", "Power", "Health Information:". MacBook Pro with a replaceable battery retains 80% of its original capacity after 300 cycles as mentioned here. But in all practical cases, I’ve heard users replacing the batteries closer to 300 counts. This number goes upto 750 for MacBook Air and 1000 for newer MacBook Pro so there is relief already.

My MBP cycle count hit 283 on Friday and the scary part was "Full charge capacity" was down to 258 mAh. In usage terms, a fully charged battery was getting drained out in 10 minutes

A new battery was rushed, installed and the new count is certainly the expected number:

Here are some more relevant docs:

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Oracle Open World 2009 in Pictures

arungupta — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 10:03:21 +0000

Enjoy a collage of different pictures from the recently concluded Oracle Open World 2009 (Day 1, 2, 3, 4):

The complete album is available at:

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Oracle Open World 2009 – Day 4 with Larry, Arnold , and Aerosmith

arungupta — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 21:03:39 +0000

Day 4 of Oracle Open World 2009 (Day 1, Day 2, Day 3) was all about about spending time at the Java EE 6 exhibit, attending Larry’s keynote and finally the Appreciation Event.

Larry talked about Oracle Enterprise Linux, Exadata v2, Oracle Enterprise Manager, and Fusion Apps.

Exadata v2 runs Oracle database faster than any other machine on the planet. With Exadata v1, the advantages were pretty obvious with customers reducing query times from 24 hours to 30 mins and 30 min to 1 min and some observing 10x – 72x improvements. Exadata v2 is much faster and bigger than v1 with 400 GB of DRAM + 5 TB of flash gives spectacular random IO memory (1 million I/Os per second).

Arnold Schwarzenegger made a surprise appearance during Larry’s keynote to talk about the technology innovation. Watch him speak in the 2-part videos below:

Watch Arnold’s endorsement of Oracle/Sun merger starting at 1:15 in part 2 video above.

This was my first experience to watch Arnold speaking live at a conference and must say I was truly impressed, and feel honored, by our esteemed governor. He is a great business men who did not deter from the opportunity to sell "Kaalifornia" to all the conference attendees. And he still very much carry the charm & persona from his previous life as a superstar.

The Appreciation Event had an impressive lineup of rocks bands including Aerosmith and Roger Daltrey. There was a boardwalk carnival with Ferris wheel, thrill rides and a games arcade. And of course there were exotic treats to feed you. One thing was clear, Oracle certainly knows how to take care of their customers!

Here are some pictures from yesterday:

And the complete album at:

After attending Oracle Open World 2009 for four days, I’m more than eagerly waiting for the merger to complete now. Now whether they keep me or not, I’m confident that they’ll be able to turn Sun around and make money out of it. If they keep me, I’m part of that success. If not, I’ll get job elsewhere but at least will be happy to see Sun’s products generating revenue

Cmon EU!

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