The first JUDCon Brazil experience

The first ever JUDCon Brazil was held a couple of weeks back and it was a real blast! Firstly, it offered a great opportunity to meet some members of the JBoss community which have been helping us push JBoss projects forward in this region of the world, such as Hanneli Tavante, Roberto dos Santos Wagner, ...etc. It was great sharing ideas, experiences...etc with them and coming up with new ideas!

As mentioned before in the post before the conference, I had two new presentations to deliver, one on JSR-107 specification on JCache API and Infinispan's implementation, and the other on Hibernate Second Level Cache with Infinispan. The JCache presentation went really well and all the live coding worked as expected.

The second presentation was the busier of the two, with a full room packed with Hibernate/JPA users waiting to hear how to scale up their applications. I got excellent feedback from both presentations and looking forward to giving these presentations in more user groups or conferences.

The presentations are not up yet, but I expect them to be posted online in the next few weeks. In the mean time, here are a couple of temporary links to the PDFs of my presentations:

• Bolttlenecks are out! Java Cache Standard (JSR-107) is in! (PDF)
• Scaling up Hibernate/JPA applications with Infinispan second-level cache (PDF)

The big news of the conference was for sure the announcement of JBoss Application Servers' new name: WildFly. We're actively working with them to make the most out of Infinispan :)

Cheers,
Galder

Infinispan coming to Brazil's JUDCon!!

Infinispan team is coming to São Paulo (Brazil) to present on multiple topics around caching, data grids and NoSQL in Brazil's first ever JBoss Users & Developers Conference (JUDCon). The event is being held over two days, on 19th and 20th of April.

On the 19th, Manik Surtani and Pete Muir will present on how to supercharge web applications using JBoss Data Grid. Expect a very lively presentation from these very seasoned presenters :)

Another presentation where you'll be able to see Infinispan in action is in Shekhar Gulati's "Closed PaaS to Open PaaS : Migrate GAE Applications to OpenShift Using CapeDwarf" and Randall Hauch's "Elastic Consistent NoSQL Data Storage with ModeShape 3" talk, both on the 19th of April, where Shekhar and Randal will demonstrate JBoss projects using Infinispan heavily.

On 20th of April, I'll be speaking about scaling up Hibernate/JPA applications with Infinispan second-level cache. Even if the Infinispan caching provider was created almost 4 years ago, this is the first time I'm presenting about it. Really looking forward to that.

Finally, I'll also give the first ever presentation on Infinispan JCache (JSR-107) API implementation, which will be mostly a live coding session showing different bits about JCache API and the extra capabilities JCache users get from using Infinispan implementation.

Cheers,
Galder

Back from JUDCon China 2012

JUDCon China was held for the first time last week in Beijing, and it was a blast!

I had never been to China before, let alone a conference there, so it was interesting to compare it with other conferences around the world. The use of simulaneous translators meant those giving presentations in English had to pace themselves a bit more so that translators would have time to catch up. There's was a good bunch of presentation given by native Chinese speakers too, so the audience got the chance to attend more interactive sessions too.

During this two-day developer conference, I was showing Infinispan's capabilities as a powerful cache bulding a transactional EE application that neeeded to scale up live. In this presentation, which combines Infinispan with JSF and CDI, I showed how to go from a basic temporary cached, to a clustered cache that used consistent hashing to distribute data, showing the ability to scale up and failover. This presentation which was given shortly after the keynote on the first day generated a lot of interest in the audience, with a lot of users wanting to find out how we compared with other existing cache and data grid providers. This was a great opportunitiy to introduce the rest of Inifnispan talks that were happening that day and the day after, where they could learn more Infinsipan's other features as a data grid: i.e. querying, geographic failover...etc.

My second presentation that same day was about querying Infinispan based data grids. The room was packed for this one, and in the presentation I talked about how Infinispan's map/reduce functions can take advantage of the paralellism available in cluster to resolve basic queries, and how Infinispan's contents can be indexed using the query module and queried via Hibernate Search or Apache Lucene APIs. Finally, I did a little overview of higher level APIs offering further querying possibilities (i.e. ModeShape, Hibernate OGM). As pointed out by Ales, the lead of CapeDwarf team, I somehow forgot to add his project, which offers the possibility of running Google App Engine on top of JBoss Application Server, which uses Infinispan and offers different querying possibilities too. Don't worry Ales, we'll sort it out for this presentation's next outing :)

For those who attended, the presentations should be uploaded to the JUDCon China website within the next few weeks.

Not all was presentations though, we also had the chance to socialise with attendees and other Red Hat employees in China. After all talks finished the first day, Jim Ma and Yong Yang did a fantastics demo of a cluster of JBoss Application Server 7 instances running on Rasperry PIs, and the audience had the opportunity to win one a Rasperry Pi too!

If you're thinking of going to China, you can't leave without trying a hot pot place! On Friday night we went to a Hai Dai Lao Hot Pot restaurant for food, and from a culinary perspective, it was the best food I had during my China stay. Hot Pot restaurants have this concept of cooking different meats, vegetables and noodles in two hot pots, one spicy and the other not. On top of that, you get the chance to mix up some cold sauces yourself (sesame oil, coriander, nuts, chillies,,,etc) and mix that with the cooked meat/veg. Unfortunately, one of our colleagues who had a nut allergy had to be rushed to hospital, but it was all Ok in the end :).

From here I'd like to thank Cindy Dong, Jervis Liu, Jim Ma, Christina Lin and many others that helped us, Aliens (according to Chinese Immigration prospects), feel like at home :). Can't wait to get back to China.

Cheers,
Galder

Infinispan coming to JUDCon China 2012

The Infinispan team will be well represented in the forthcoming JUDCon China 2012 conference to be celebrated in Beijing on the 29th and 30th of November with no less than 9 talks!

We'll be covering all sorts of topics:
- Building transactional Infinispan applications
- Performing rolling upgrades for Infinispan based cluster
- Scaling Hibernate/JPA applications using Infinispan-based second level cache
- Effective querying of Infinispan data grids
- Measuring performance of data grids
- ...etc

So, if you're interested in data grids, caching or Infinispan, come and join us!! It's gonna be a fun a couple of days. Can't wait :)

Cheers,
Galder

Manik's take on JUDCon India

JUDCon has, for the first time ever, spread beyond the western world. JUDCon India, held on Tuesday and Wednesday this week, was a roaring success with over 800 passionate community members flocking to the event held in Bangalore, India's answer to California's silicon valley.


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One of the themes was developer productivity and engagement, to help community members get more involved in the projects they care about, to help them succeed in their businesses with JBoss technology.

JBoss AS 7, NoSQL and platform-as-a-service were a few of the popular themes, and there were no less than 6 talks on infinispan in just two days, presented by myself and Galder Zamarreño. The talks ranged from high level overviews and roadmaps to detailed, hands-on hacking sessions, as well as presenting thoughts and ideas for future development.

All in, an excellent community conference, well organised by Saltmarch Media, and very well received by the community. I for one look forward to another JUDCon in Bangalore in the hopefully not too distant future.

Cheers
Manik


PS: After writing this, I noticed that Galder has blogged about JUDCon India too!

JUDCon India post-mortem

JUDCon India is finished now and I was hugely impressed with what I saw in the conference. First of all, it was by far the biggest crowd I've seen in a JUDCon event so that's excellent news. The more, the merrier :)

The attendants have been excellent and in general I felt that they were paying more attention than in conferences in other countries. This is partly because hardly any attendant had their laptops open while listening to the presentations. They simply had a notebook and a pen or pencil and they were taking just notes. I wished this would happen more often in other conferences. Hmmm, time to ban laptops in non-interactive presentations?

I ended up doing 4 presentations, 3 of them in Infinispan related topics and 1 talking about JBoss Polyglot. Of all, the one that I felt attracted the most attention was the one on near caches. I got a lot of positive feedback from attendants and very interesting questions at the end of the presentation.

In terms of organization, it was impecable. Wifi worked like a treat with around 7 access points, 3/4 of which you could join from any place in the conference. Food was good as well, if you like Indian cooking of course :). As I already said on Twitter, the toilets were... interesting for a westener :).

Finally, I must congratulate the organisers on the method used to motivate attendants to provide feedback on the presentations. To get the JUDCon t-shirt, attendants needed to fill in feedback forms for all presentations they had attended, and once the last presentation had finished, they could go and claim their t-shirt once they'd handed over the feedback forms. I thought this was a fantastic idea to increase the amount of feedback received. So, well done to organisers! Looking forward to reading the feedback now.

Just landed in Delhi and now waiting for my colleague Rado, who's arriving in a later flight from Bangalore. It's time now for a couple of days off and doing a bit of touristy stuff around here. Plenty to see and do in the next few days with the Republic Day military parade, visit the Red Fort, Taj Mahal...etc.

Cheers,
Galder

Infinispan coming to India!!!

Next week Manik and I will be representing the Infinispan contingent at JUDCon India in Bangalore and we have plenty to talk about:

 Tuesday, 24th January

• Infinispan: The Path Ahead - Manik 
• Extreme Performance and Scalability with Infinispan Near Caches - Galder
• Building a Transactional, Scaled Application Using Infinispan and Java EE - Galder

Wednesday, 25th January

• Technical Deep-dive with Infinispan - Manik
• Eventual Consistency in Infinispan - Manik
• Infinispan In 50 Minutes - Galder

Finally, to top it up, I'll be doing a presentation on JBoss' Polyglot revolution!

This is going to be my first visit to India and I'm very excited to be presenting at this conference :). Looking forward to meeting developers, architects and in general, anyone interested in data grids and various NoSQL technologies next week.

Cheers,

Galder

JBoss World and JUDCon 2011 recap

So I finally get to recap on JUDCon in Boston and JBoss World/Red Hat Summit from last week.  And wow what a week it was too; I work with some brilliant minds.  Massively inspiring and innovative people.

JUDCon started well, at the World Trade Centre in Boston.  With over 200 people attending, it was the largest JUDCon we've ever done, with three parallel tracks of some of the coolest tech, many by non-Red Hat employees.  With regards to Infinispan, Mircea did a deep-dive covering how Infinispan works "under the hood".  Sanne did a talk on advanced querying across a data grid, including making use of map/reduce techniques.  I delivered a talk specifically on map/reduce and distributed code execution across Infinispan nodes - a talk I delivered on behalf of Vladimir as he sadly couldn't make the event due to personal reasons.  The first day ended in a pizza-and-beer-fuelled hackathon that went on till 2am.  Hopefully this will give you an idea of what JUDCon is all about, including the quality and focus of talks, and whet your appetite - make you want to attend the next such event.  :-)  Trust me, for techies, there's no better way of immersing yourself in it.

And then there was JBoss World.  As many in the industry keeps saying, JBoss has got its mojo back.  Coolness reminiscent of Marc Fleury's early bad-boy JBoss - a poke in the eye of establishment, disruptive and brazen, JBoss has gone back to its roots.  Craig Muzilla talked numbers and new products, Mark Little talked about his vision of ubiquitous computing and JBoss Everywhere, and then the much tweeted, much talked-about demo started.  Many said we were nuts to try and pull off a live demo of such scale and complexity - let me put it this way, we had no backup.  :-) I'm not going to spoil the demo for you, a recording of the keynote including the demo is here (the demo starts 39 minutes into the video).

Demos aside, JBoss World/Summit was an excellent event.  The biggest of its kind to date, I presented on use cases and design patterns involving Infinispan, Bela spoke about geographic failover (click on the JBoss World tab for the video).  Sanne and Emmanuel talked about Hibernate OGM, the ultra-cool JPA layer over Infinispan that so many people want to get their hands on.  Craig Bomba from CBOE - the largest options exchange in the world - talked about going live with Infinispan, stressing on keeping close to the community, participating and being "good open source citizens".  Something we all applaud.

But for many folks, the biggest thing was the announcement of the JBoss Enterprise Data Grid platform.  A fully supported data grid, based on Infinispan.  This enables users to buy production support, consultancy and training around Infinispan.  The announcement even made its way to the Wall Street Journal, among many other illustrious publications!

So now with all the adrenalin - and old-fashioneds at our favourite bar, Drink - of last week behind me, it's time to focus on getting Infinispan 5.0 into a stable state and cutting what will be the fastest, most feature-rich and ultimately usable Infinispan release ever.  Watch this space.

Cheers
Manik

Infinispan at JBoss World/Red Hat Summit/JUDCon in Boston, May 2011

It's that time of year again, and Red Hat Summit/JBoss World 2011 looms ever larger on the horizon.  Back in Boston again this year, it will be co-located with another JUDCon, the JBoss Users and Developers Conference.

Red Hat Summit/JBoss World
Infinispan is well-represented again at Summit/JBW, as it was last year.  I will be speaking on using Infinispan to solve a number of scalability and availability issues, including reducing database bottlenecks.

Emmanuel Bernard and Sanne Grinovero will be speaking on Hibernate OGM - an awesomely cool project to provide JPA-like access to Infinispan (details of the session available here).

Craig Bomba and Shane Johnson will talk about optimising Infinispan for performance and consistency based on lessons learned using Infinispan at the Chicago Board of Options Exchange, the world's largest options exchange.

Further, for the first time, we intend to run a hands-on lab on Infinispan, coordinated by Jim Tyrrell.  An awesome chance to learn about the practical aspects of working with Infinispan, with core Infinispan engineers on hand to answer questions, etc.  This sort of opportunity doesn't come about every day!  :-)

JUDCon
JUDCon attendees too will get their fill of your favourite data grid with a talk titled Infinispan for Ninja Developers and one on Infinispan's new Map/Reduce capabilities.  Fun, hands-on, developer-focused deep dives.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention, Sanne Grinovero will also be talking about advanced querying on Infinispan.  More cool stuff.

For a summary of what happened at JUDCon and Summit/JBW last year, check out this blog entry.  It's still not too late to get tickets, you may even qualify for early-bird discounts if you hurry!

Hope to see you there.
Manik

JBossWorld and JUDCon post-mortem

Wow, what a week.  We all know Infinispan is sexy and gets a lot of attention, but the last week has been unprecedented!

The first-ever JUDCon, the developer conference that took place the day before JBoss World and Red Hat Summit, was great and I look forward to future JUDCons around the world.  Pics from the first-ever JUDCon are now online, along with some video interviews with Jason Greene and Pete Muir.

Some of the great presentations at JUDCon include Galder Zamarreño's talk on Infinispan's Hot Rod protocol (slides here) and a talk I did with Mircea Markus on the cache benchmarking framework and benchmarking Infinispan (slides here).

JBoss World/Red Hat Summit was also very interesting.  There is clearly a lot of excitement around Infinispan, and we heard about interesting deployments and use cases, lots of ideas and thoughts for further improvement from customers, contributors and partners.

From JBoss World, there were three talks on Infinispan, including Storing Data on Cloud Infrastructure in a Scalable, Durable Manner which I presented along with Mircea Markus (slides), Why RESTful Design for the Cloud is Best by Galder Zamarreño (slides) and Using Infinispan for High Availability, Load Balancing, & Extreme Performance which I presented along with Galder Zamarreño (slides).

In addition to the slides, the first talk was even recorded so if you missed it, you can watch it below:



Further, Infinispan was showcased on Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens' keynote speech (about 28:15 into the video) where Brian talks about data grids and their importance, and I demonstrate Infinispan.



We even had an open roadmap and design session for Infinispan 5.0, which included not just core Infinispan engineers, but contributors, end-users and anyone who had any sort of interest.  I'll post again later with details of 5.0 and what our plans for it will be.

For those of you who couldn't make it to JUDCon and JBoss World, hope the slides and videos on this post will help give you an idea of what went on.

Cheers
Manik

JUDCon and the JBoss Community Awards

The first-ever JUDCon kicked off on Monday, and was very well received. It was good to see so many from the Infinispan community, and be able to discuss ideas and thoughts in detail.  I'm hoping to see even more Infinispan-related activity at future JUDCon events.

The JBoss Community Recognition Award winners were also announced at JUDCon, and I was really surprised to find that 4 of the 5 winners were Infinispan contributors.  Sanne Grinovero, Alex Kluge, Phil van Dyck and Amin Abbaspour - thanks for your participation in Infinispan, your peers have recognised your contributions and have voted with mouse clicks!  Congrats!

Given how many Infinispan engineers and contributors are at JBoss World this week, we are having an open Infinispan 5.0 planning and roadmap session.  So if you are around and would like to join in, this will be at 4:00pm on Thursday, in Campground 1.  For those of you not able to make it, discussions will continue via the usual channels of IRC and the developer mailing list.

Now to prepare for my next talk ... :-)

Cheers
Manik

Boston, are you ready for Infinispan?

The JBoss World/Red Hat Summit organisers have asked me to put together a short note on what to expect at the conference with regards to Infinispan, and this has been published on the conference website.  I thought I'd share this with you as well.

http://summitblog.redhat.com/2010/04/12/boston-are-you-ready-for-infinispan/

In addition to the conference, this is also the first time JBoss is running JUDCon (JBoss Users and Developers Conference), a free event (limited on a first-come first-served basis) for the community, also in Boston.  Be sure to sign up as places are limited!

Look forward to seeing you there!
Manik