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JavaOne: Day 3
JavaOne: Day 2
JavaOne: Day 1
JavaOne: Day -1
Video: Mark Proctor, part 2: Origins and uses of JBoss Drools
Video: Mark Little on SOA
Video: Bela Ban
Video: Mark Proctor
Video: JBoss World wrap-up
Tips and tricks: In which languages can I receive JBoss Technical Support?
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JavaOne: Day 3

Posted on 2008-05-08 03:20:20.0 by Ruth Suehle [ View original post ]

This will be my last post from JavaOne this year–I’m headed back home. But that doesn’t mean that the rest of the JBoss crew is. They’re here through Friday to bring you more packed mini-sessions at the Pavilion booth and a few more technical sessions.

Here’s the schedule for the rest of the week and another personal recommendation.

Technical sessions
Don’t forget to pre-register for these on the JavaOne site. I learned my lesson yesterday morning when I nearly missed Gavin’s session!

Burr Sutter and Max Katz (Exadel) – TS-7479 – Open Source Development Tools for the Java™ Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE Platform), Web 2.0, and SOA – Thursday, May 8 4:10-5:10pm and Friday, May 9, 2:50-3:50pm

Kevin Conner, Mark Little and Keith Babo (Sun Microsystems, Inc) – BOF-5846 - Developing Service-Oriented Architecture Applications with OSGi – Thursday, May 8 6:30-7:30pm

Mark Little will also be on the panel for “PAN-5188 Open Standards for SOA and Java Technology” to participate in a discussion about Software Component Architecture.

JBoss mini-session schedule
If you haven’t been to one of these yet, you’re missing out. It’s not too late, though. Here’s what’s still to come on Thursday:

12:00 p.m. — Clustering your Applications with JBoss
Presented by Mike Dickson – JBoss Division
Clustering is crucial for scalable enterprise applications, you can improve performance, stability and/or fault tolerance by simply adding more nodes to the cluster. In this demonstration we will examine some of the key concepts of clustering and walk through just how easy it is to cluster applications running upon JBoss Enterprise Application Platform.

1:00 p.m. — What’s new in JBoss Enterprise Application Platform
Presented by: Mike Dickson – JBoss Division
JBoss Enterprise Application Platform includes JBoss Application Server, the worlds most popular open source application server, and integrates leading JBoss technologies like JBoss Hibernate, JBoss Seam to form a simple and easy solution for next generation applications. JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, combined with JBoss Developer Studio & JBoss Operations Network provide a complete end to end solution for standards based Java applications. This session will highlight the latest supported features and roadmap in clustering, web services, messaging, and transactions.

2:00 p.m. — JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform Overview
Presented by: Ray Ploski - JBoss Division
Today’s top enterprises look to achieve a competitive advantage by deploying enterprise portals within their IT infrastructure. JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform provides an integrated open source platform for hosting and serving a portal’s web interface, aggregating, publishing, and managing its content, and personalizing its experience. Join us as we walk through how the key features of JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform including integration with WSRP and Google Widgets, Account Security, User Dashboards and Portlet Administration.

3:00 p.m. — Improving TCO through effective Management of your JBoss Middleware Environment
Presented by: Greg Hinkle/Tom Madden – Red Hat
An overview of JBoss Operations Network (JON) 2.0. During this session, attendees will see a demo of the key new features of JON used to administer, deploy and monitor a JBoss Middleware Environment.

4:00 p.m. — Practical Complex Event Processing (CEP) with the JBoss Technology Stack
Presented by: Max Yankelevich – Freedom OSS
Complex Event Processing (CEP) enables enterprises to achieve agile business processes through intelligent correlation of seemingly unrelated events. Chief Information Officer Max Yankelevich of Freedom Open Source Solutions will walk attendees through a practical case study of a large Trust/Wealth Management Institution and demonstrate how CEP helped solve a complex business problem – charging their customers more money in fees. The use of JBoss Application Platform including JBoss Rules, jBPM and JBoss Messaging, were leveraged to implement the CEP Architecture and earned the client an extra $20M over the course of five years.

Personal recommendation
I missed giving you a recommendation yesterday, so I’ll make up for it today with a really good one. If you’re staying an extra day or two to see the city, try San Francisco’s Ghost Hunt . I’ve done ghost walks in about ten cities, and it’s a fun way to get the history of a place in a little bit different format from your average tour. I did San Francisco’s for the first time on Sunday, and it was one of the best I’ve tried.

Have a great rest of the week, and have a safe trip home!

JavaOne: Day 2

Posted on 2008-05-07 16:26:06.0 by Ruth Suehle [ View original post ]

Gavin King’s packed Web Beans technical session

Monday’s CommunityOne crowd was manageable and pretty much what I expected. Tuesday’s crowd was larger, but I walked straight into the technical sessions without a problem. This morning I stepped outside for a few minutes, and when I came back in, there was a line stretching across the entire large hallway and down an adjacent narrow one. Then I realized that was the line I wanted to be in.

At the end of that long (but quickly moving) line, Gavin King from JBoss spoke to a standing-room-only crowd about the basics of Web Beans. The presentation included a lot of example code, stepping everyone through binding types, deployment types, producer methods, and more.

If you’re interested in hearing Gavin yourself, we have a video interview of him talking about Web Beans .

Mapping Mars
This afternoon, I went to hear Saadat Anwar, Scott Dickenshield, and Eric Engle talk about JMARS , which is an open source Java application for working with Mars data. As of April 30, 2008, it is licensed under GPLv3. It’s a vital part of the planning process for NASA’s Mars satellites, and anybody who wants to can freely access both the pretty pictures and the cold, raw data.

JMARS began as a targeting tool for THEMIS and the HiRISE mission. Now it’s a GIS browser, and from the demo I saw, the mapping looks pretty nice. To solve the eternal mapping problem of round planet, flat screen, they wrote their own project code and built a custom WMS map server capable of ingesting their standard data formats and returning only the necessary part of the image, which means getting a few megabytes instead of terabytes.

Those interested in getting involved or just digging into the code can find the project at oss.mars.asu.edu/trac and oss.mars.asu.edu/svn . If you’re a teacher or have kids, you might be interested in the Mars Student Imaging Project . They’ve also consolidated a lot of the relevant links at http://jmars.asu.edu/javaone2008 .

Things to see

Sun has posted video of the general session panel Monday that included Mike Evans from Red Hat
CommunityOne set on Flickr
JavaOne set on Flickr

JavaOne: Day 1

Posted on 2008-05-06 20:43:14.0 by Ruth Suehle [ View original post ]

Today was the first official day of JavaOne. I visited a couple of non-JBoss sessions that sounded really interesting, and they were–so now I share them with you. The first is about an improved web recommendation system, and the second is for improving collaboration with your off-site coworkers.

But first, if you’re here with us…
Come visit us at the JBoss booth in the Pavilion. We’re straight back and on the right when you come through the door. Every day, we’re holding 15-minute mini-sessions in the booth on the hour. You can meet the core developers and ask your questions in person. We’ve also got JBoss t-shirts and free entitlements of JBoss Developer Studio.

Also, the JBoss technical sessions are all still ahead of us. So if you’re here at JavaOne, be sure to check them out. If you’re not, keep reading this week to hear more about what’s going on.

Recommendation systems, or, what’s that about my nose hair?
The first session I heard this morning was Stephen Green and Paul Lamere from Sun talking about an improved recommendation system for websites like Amazon or iTunes or any that uses recommendations. They had some impressive statistics about the power of recommendations to drive sales and downloads. NetFlix is even offering a million-dollar prize to the first team that can improve their recommendation accuracy by 10%, which, it turns out, is a tougher task than you might think.

They had quite a few amusing examples of bad recommendations they got from various sites. If you own “Baby One More Time,” you might like Report on Pre-War Intelligence . Because you bought The Chronicles of Narnia , you might like this nose and ear hair groomer.

Project Aura is based on collaborative filtering, which means grouping similar items based on a halo of users and terms. It creates a text aura from content analysis of things like reviews, blogs, and tags. But those things only work when that content and those users exist for comparison and analysis. So Aura solves the “cold start” problem for music through feature analysis.

It extracts information from the song file about things like rhythm and harmonic content. That data is then fed through a trained system that tags that unknown song with all the relevant categories, based on what it has learned from all the previous input. In the example they showed, an analysis of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” resulted in tags like “classic rock,” “happy,” “England,” “70s,” and “favorite artist.” In the end, general tags lead to more specific tags, which lead to recommendations.

Project Aura uses openid for users and Attention Profile Markup Language (APML) to attach a concept a user likes, such as an artist name, along with a degree to which the user likes it, to that user’s profile for their recommendations. It’s not available for use yet, but they did suggest checking out taste.sourceforge.net for a look at open source collaborative filtering.

Project Wonderland, or as I’m thinking of it, Second Work
Sun noticed that on any given day, half of their employees are out of the office. And as anyone who’s experienced it knows, the personal interaction you lose when you’re off site, especially long term, can be really important. Conference calls just aren’t the same as being in the meeting yourself.

Enter Project Wonderland. It’s an open source, Java-based, 3D, API-based graphics engine that manages the world, animations, and avatars for all the sorts of employee interactions that you’d have in real life. Think of it as going to work in Second Life. It’s built on top of Project Darkstar , which was created for MMORPGs, and is extensible with customizable worlds.

The real bonus over other options (like just having a meeting on IRC) is that it allows employees to interact in a more real-world fashion. You don’t have to train people how to use a system, how to open a private chat, etc., because the interactions are natural. If you’re in a group and want to have a private conversation, you simply walk away from the group, just like you would if you were all standing together in real life.

Project Wonderland is approaching version 0.5. They’re aiming for a 1.0 in 2009.

Personal recommendation of the day
For those of you here braving the crowds, relentless badge checkers, and $7 hot dogs, I found a great secret today. The one thing I’ve always hated about conferences at the Moscone Center is the lack of good, quick restaurants nearby. Then this morning, somebody told me about Organic Coffee. Go straight upstairs to the street, turn right out the doors (toward the carousel), then right at the corner. It’s a block or two up the street on the left, near the Metreon. They have great sandwiches and a tasty-looking hunk of quiche I intend to try tomorrow. Ever better, it’s inexpensive, and there was no line, even at lunchtime.

JBoss session schedule

Introduction to Web Beans (TS-5286) – Wednesday, 10:50-11:50 a.m., Gavin King
JSR 303: From a World of Constraints to Constrain the World (TS-5615) – Wednesday, 4:10-5:10 p.m., Emmanuel Bernard
Open Source Development Tools for the Java™ Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE Platform), Web 2.0, and SOA (TS-7479) – Thursday, 4:10-5:10pm and Friday, May 9, 2:50-3:50 p.m., Burr Sutter and Max Katz (Exadel)
Developing Service-Oriented Architecture Applications with OSGi (BOF-5846) – Thursday 6:30-7:30 p.m., Kevin Conner, Mark Little and Keith Babo (Sun Microsystems, Inc)
Mark Little will also be on the panel for “PAN-5188 Open Standards for SOA and Java Technology” to participate in a discussion about Software Component Architecture.

JavaOne: Day -1

Posted on 2008-05-06 01:12:42.0 by Ruth Suehle [ View original post ]

This week Red Hat Magazine is in San Francisco to bring you to JavaOne. (Or to join you if you’re here too!) I call it day -1 because JavaOne itself hasn’t officially started yet. Today things kicked off with CommunityOne , the “free and open developer conference,” featuring a good variety of sessions and representations from across the open source spectrum. It also included beanbags in front of Star Wars on continuous loop and human hamster balls –never let it be said that developers don’t like to have fun.

I started the day with Benjamin Mako Hill’s talk “Advancing a Definition of Free Culture.” It was a great introduction to the history and ideals behind free software. At the time, I was a little surprised that such a basic level talk would find an audience at a developer community event. But later in the day, a speaker asked the room how many had contributed to a free software project. Very few hands went up. I think it would be really interesting to see a breakdown of the backgrounds and experience of the average CommunityOne attendee.

Mako talked a bit about how the free software and free culture movements are made up of a lot of groups who don’t necessarily agree. But those people can work together because they agree on this broad definition of the same ideals. “Many definers, one definition,” as he put it. And that’s exactly what CommunityOne was. For example, in the same room, one after another, there were sessions about Ubuntu, openSUSE, and Fedora, followed by the Distro Panel in which those presenters gathered as one group. We’re not all on the same cable car, but we are all headed to the same place.

If you’re interested in seeing what things look like here (or what I look like inside a giant hamster ball), check out our Flickr set for the event. And check back here the rest of the week to hear more about what’s going on at JavaOne.

Video: Mark Proctor, part 2: Origins and uses of JBoss Drools

Posted on 2008-05-01 16:48:45.0 by the editorial team [ View original post ]

How did Mark Proctor get started on the Drools project and–more importantly–why? (To get caught up on what Drools is and find out who Mark is, see the first part of this video.) Hear about how an interest in artificial intelligence drew Proctor in and what sort of university developments and business uses keep him–and the project–going.

And if you enjoy this kind of access to smart developers speaking about the projects they’re passionate about, you’ll want to join us at the Red Hat Summit . Or catch some more of the highlights from JBoss World 2008 . That’s where we filmed this piece, and so much more. Enjoy.