Miles to go ...

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 ?

Technorati: glassfish v3 javaee javafx sun amsterdam nljug jfall ams.rb meetup

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

Technorati: rightscale cloud meetup

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.

Technorati: glassfish jboss whitepaper

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:

Technorati: osxtips battery cyclecount

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:

Technorati: conf oracle openworld oow glassfish javaee otn bloggers arnold

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!

Technorati: conf oracle openworld oow glassfish javaee otn bloggers arnold

Oracle Open World 2009 – Day 3 Report

arungupta — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 04:43:45 +0000

Day 3 of Oracle Open World 2009 (Day 1, Day 2) started on an adventurous note for me. The San Francisco Bay Area got hit with the strongest October storm in 47 years and so the ride from home to Moscone Center took almost 30 extra minutes, because of flooded roads, strong winds, other accidents, and hydroplaning multiple times. Anyway only missed first few minutes of Thomas Kurian’s keynote. Kurian is no stranger to the Java crowd because he is a regular keynote speaker at JavaOne. However it was totally impressive to see customer endorsements (both quality and quantity) and how they are using Oracle to solve operational problems.

Some more observations from the floor:

The last session gets over at 6:30pm and Moscone halls are closed after that, no late night BoFs or AfterDark events.
The game lounge is in the Moscone West only, not sure why. May be because that’s where the Middleware stream is and that’s where the developers are attracted
There is a dedicated slots for Exhibitor Hall where no other formal activities are happening.

I spent some time on the Java EE 6 booth talking about the technology and showcasing GlassFish features such as monitoring and Rails deployment.

Enjoy videos of marketing gimmicks by some vendors at the show floor:

The evening ended with the OOW Bloggers Meetup at LJ’s Martini Club & Grill. It was good to meet fellow bloggers from Oracle and other companies. OTN folks arranged a game to promote social networking. Basically, everybody was given a tee-shirt to wear and whoever has the most signatures from other bloggers wins an HP notebook. A MacBook would’ve been a better incentive to compete for me Anyway there was beer and muchies to keep the bloggers happy. Thanks to Justin (aka "King of OTN") for picking the bill!

Here are some pictures from earlier today:

And the evolving album at:

If you are not able to attend in person, then you can follow OOW Blogs, Open World Live, @OpenWorld (twitter), Community tweets with #oow.

Looking forward to see Arnold Schwarzenegger discussing technology innovation with Larry Ellison tomorrow.

Technorati: conf oracle openworld oow glassfish javaee otn bloggers

Hudson Webinar and Q&A – 10/14, 10am PT

arungupta — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 18:48:18 +0000

Koshuke (aka "Mr Hudson") is giving a webinar and a live Q&A session on Hudson tomorrow.

Please register now!

Technorati: glassfish hudson webinar

Oracle Open World 2009 – Day 2 Report

arungupta — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 06:01:43 +0000

Following from Day 1, the Day 2 started with Charles Phillips and Safra Catz keynote. The keynotes at Open World are significantly different from JavaOne or any other developer conference I’ve attended so far. Of course they are expected to be because Open World is not primarily a developer’s conference. Oracle Develop (OD) certainly closely mimic any of the conferences I’ve typically attended. My "exhibitor" badge restricted me from attending any of the sessions at OD though

Here are some interesting statistics about the conference:

5 content streams (Database, Applications, Industries, Management & Infrastructure, & Middleware)
314 demo kisosk
401 partners & customer exchibiting
1966 educational sessions (10% more than last year)
4500 Oracle developers/experts for you
81,266 hotel room nights
170,000 cups of coffee
182,000 online participation

Here are some interesting sightings from the Open World exhibitor pavilion:

Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys, HCL, Wipro, Mahindra Satyam, Birlasoft, Cognizant and a host of other companies based in India are exhibiting in the pavilion. This is a pleasant surprise from JavaOne which typically does not see these many companies out of India.
Poker, Ducati, Glider, Beatles Guitar, Sumo wrestler, Callaway Golf, Mini Cooper and other similar sightings were spotted. Check out complete set of images here.
Lot more attendees are wearing a suit, quite unlike JavaOne or RailsConf which is typically denim/t-shirt rich.

On a personal front, everything that possibly could went wrong as part of the demo installation yesterday and rehearsal for my talks earlier today. NetBeans was not able to connect to the Oracle database (couple of machine restarts solved that), GlassFish Tools Bundle for Eclipse was timing out attempting to start GlassFish (removing workspace solved that problem), NetBeans’s RESTful tooling not recognizing JPA entities, and also found a blocking bug (issue #10166) in deploying Rails app to latest GlassFish promoted build. These demos have worked seamlessly for me all the time time and fortunately worked well during the talk.

My talk at the Unconference on Creating Quick and Powerful Web applications with Oracle, GlassFish and NetBeans/Eclipse went well. It was truly an unconference event with no projector or mic in the presentation room. But the small attendance allowed us to huddle around the table and luckily all the demos worked seamlessly. The slides are available at:

Several demos shown in the talk are available at:

Java EE 6 wizards using NetBeans and Eclipse
Deploy on Save using NetBeans and Eclipse
Connecting Oracle database to NetBeans
Creating JPA entities from a sample Oracle database
Exposing Oracle database table as RESTful entities
Rails application using Oracle and GlassFish

The slides have pointers to several other demos as well. Also showed the simplicity of Java EE 6 development using Eclipse in Java Platform, Enterprise Edition: The Foundation and Future of Your Enterpise.

The day concluded with OTN Night in Howard St tent. Check out a brief video from the event:

Here are some pictures from earlier today:

And the evolving album at:

If you are not able to attend in person, then you can follow OOW Blogs, Open World Live, @OpenWorld (twitter), Community tweets with #oow.

Back tomorrow on Day 3 with more pictures

Technorati: conf oracle openworld oow glassfish javaee netbeans eclipse

Oracle Open World 2009 – Day 1 Report

arungupta — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 07:57:33 +0000

Sun Microsystems is the innovation sponsor of Oracle Open World 2009. And that’s what was the theme of Scott McNealy’s keynote on a "Sun"day. It’s been a while that I’ve seen Scott on the keynote stage and it truly was an enjoyable experience. In his characteristic way, he gave top 10 reasons that "Engineers have gone wild" as:

10. Who needs thumb drive in the shape of sushi ?
9. "Noble prize" recently awards for gas mask bra – no more ridiculous than other noble prizes recently awarded
8. OS/2
7. Patent awarded for face mask with voice modification capability
6. I could do an entire top 10 of worlds strangest keyboards (strangest being iPhone, "Friends don’t let friends type on iPhone")
5. Windows 7
4. Man uses SPARCstation for his ashses
3. New market in "family size’ plots
2. Mainframe running Linux
1. Some one came up with this crazy idea for a ‘Java Ring’

And then on a more serious note, and keeping with the keynote theme, top 10 innovations from Sun:

10. NFS/PC-NFS Technology (1983)
9. SPARC (1989)
8. Open Source Software (Berkeley Unix, "Red Hat of Berkeley Unix", #1 contributor to OSS community)
7. BSD + UNIX System 5 = Solaris
6. Java (Java card, EE/SE/ME, JavaFX)
5. E10K (64-way Solaris, no longer mainframe required)
4. ZFS/Open Storage/Flash (Exadata)
3. Project Blackbox, world’s first modular datacenter
2. SunRay
1. Chip multithreading "CoolThreads"

And the biggest innovation from Sun:

Kicked Butt
Had Fun
Didn’t CHeat
Loved our customers
Changed computing for ever

Scott explained why SPARC, Solaris, MySQL, Java are here to stay. "Kick Butt, Have Fun" is truly the spirit at Sun

James Gosling, the father of Java, showed up on the stage to talk about Java’s relevance for Oracle. Also showed "The Gospel of Java according to James" and the video is shown below:

John Fowler talked about several brand new Sun/Oracle world-record benchmarks. A key point from these benchmarks "Oracle and Sun were able to set the world record using 1/8th the hardware that IBM used for its largest benchmark". And we also announced F5100 Flash Array, the world’s fastest solid-state flash array.

And here are some quotes from Larry Ellison’s keynote appearance:

"SPARC is a fantastic technology"
"All Oracle software runs reliably and faster on Solaris, than ever before"
"MySQL competes in different market", "We are going to spend more, not less, on MySQL", "Increase our rate of contribution to that product"
"Not only invest in Sun technology, also in Sun business"
IBM: Slower, Costs More, Not Fault Tolerant, Not Very Green (from a slide)
25% more throughput, (can do lot better), 16x better response time
"IBM’s processor is called "POWER", we know why ?" (because it’s consumes the entire power of your data center
"I’m not fair on IBM because they are not here to respond"
One mans’ SUNset is another man’s SUNrise, We think this is SUNrise time"

It totally reminded me of Scott McNealy’s "dot-not" (as compared to .NET) and "c-flat" (for C#) quotes from JavaOne

Check out related articles about Sun’s presence at Open World:

Here are some pictures:

And the evolving album at:

If you are not able to attend in person, then you can follow OOW Blogs, Open World Live, @OpenWorld (twitter), Community tweets with #oow.

On a personal note, this is my first Open World and am totally amazed by the size of attendees, and it’s only a Sunday. The entire Howard St is shutdown and tents are installed to accommodate the conference. All 3 Moscone halls (North, South, and West) are used. A scale down replica of Larry’s "Rising Sun" is also displayed on Howard Street. And for the first time in 10 years, I’m getting only an Exhibitor badge at Moscone

Also installed GlassFish, NetBeans/Eclipse demos on the booth machine and ready to wow the audience with Java EE 6 in the exhibitor hall for the next 3 days! And of course, I’m talking at the Unconference tomorrow at 11am on Creating Quick and Powerful Web applications with Oracle, GlassFish and NetBeans/Eclipse. Get ready to see lots and lots of demos!

Back tomorrow with more pictures

Technorati: conf oracle openworld oow glassfish netbeans eclipse