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2012

I've been talking and presenting about cloud and PaaS for a number of years and each time I do, I say pretty much the same thing (and I paraphrase): "I think private (on premise) PaaS will be more important than public PaaS". I won't go into the reasons why, except to encourage anyone interested to check out some of the older posts. That's not to suggest that public Cloud isn't important or useful, which is why Red Hat has been making great strides with our OpenShift offerings, which we're proud to ensure remain open source. Over the last year or more, we've seen Java added to OpenShift, as well as JBossAS and EAP, and many other languages and frameworks are there too. The number of applications running on OpenShift has grown significantly since we officially released it last year and our community has increased much more.

 

However, although there is still a lot more we want to do on public OpenShift, the feedback we have been getting from community and customers has been the need for an on-premise offering. The intention with any on-premise PaaS has got to be that it's a cloud and not just a rebadged virtualisation offering and I'm really pleased to see that we've stuck to our principles with the announcement of OpenShift Enterprise. All of the things you've heard about OpenShift, such as its mission critical security (based on SELinux), flexibilty (multiple languages, frameworks etc.) and scalability (including, cloud bursting eventually) will be part of OpenShift Enterprise, the first enterprise PaaS. So what about JBoss? Well as I've said several times before, if you want an enterprise PaaS then you need an enterprise infrastructure (middleware), so it shouldn't come as a surprise that your favourite JBoss technologies and products will be coming to OpenShift Enterprise. In fact EAP and EWS (the production versions of the application server and Tomcat) are available already.

 

This is a very exciting time to be involved in middleware and the Cloud. I'm pleased that we can finally push forward on the larger vision we've been talking about for so long. And what next? Well maybe we'll be able to bring some of that ubiquitous computing cloud into the picture eventually

 

Onward!!

marklittle

Devoxx 2012

Posted by marklittle Nov 18, 2012

Devoxx has always been one of my favourite conferences. Back when JavaOne was more product (and Sun) oriented, it was a bastion of independence and what was going on in the wider Java community. Even today, with JavaOne improving, it is still an important conference. And that's even though I prefer it's old name of JavaPolis (what's that they say about trying to please all of the people all of the time?) This year was even bigger for Red Hat/JBoss. Not only did we have our usual healthy mix of sessions on things ranging from Arquillian to Polyglot, but we were a key sponsor. We payed for the party at Noxx, which was a very interesting venue. We also co-sponsored the Hackergarten, which was a great opportunity to meet like minded developers and community members.

 

Importantly, we also used Devoxx as part of our renaming exercise for JBossAS. However, we did have to change our original plans slightly. Back at JavaOne when we announced the rename, we thought that we'd have started and ended the name collection weeks ago and had a select number of names voted upon by Devoxx. In fact I worried about how we would choose the final number of names to put up for vote from those suggested by the community. How wrong I was. We received over 2000 names and from that there were almost as many unique entries. There were only a few names we obviously couldn't take forward and even less from people who suggested keeping the original name. However, then we ran into the reality of copyright and trademark law! For each name our legal team had to do an exhaustive search to ensure we would not be treading on some other company's name or product. And this search takes time - proportional to the number of names!

 

What this meant was we simply had no way to get the names ready for vote until just before Devoxx. So we decided to repurpose our Devoxx announcement (at the start of the keynote) to telling people the above story and announcing the names for vote. Now just as some people may not have liked the rename of JavaPolis to Devoxx, Marathon to Snickers, Borland to Inprise, or Coco Pops to Choco Krispies, some also don't like the rename of JBossAS or the selection of names we've ended up with. But from the feedback we've received, including during the Devoxx BOF (more below), it seems that the majority of people so far get it or don't see it as too much of a problem and can work with one or more of the names. Now that we've added more descriptions around the various names (thanks to the AS team expanding on those submitted originally) I hope people can see the potential with them and give it a chance. (If you feel otherwise, then feel free to email me as I value your feedback.)

 

After the keynote, Ray and I had a session where we tried to give an overview of all things JBoss related. We decided to reuse this years JBossWorld keynote, but without the audience participation in the demo. Ray did a great job of re-running the demo with bots playing the various roles and this was great too, since it shows how much we've simplified the testing and simulation of complex applications. And of course there was the BOF, which really could have run even longer if we'd had the room longer. There was a lot of good discussion and community involvement, as well as beer! And because we're good community members, we let our beer spill over into the adjacent BOFs

 

In conclusion, Devoxx was a great success. Our sessions went well. The community gave us a lot of great feedback. I got a chance to meet new people and friends. And the general vibrancy around the conference made a fitting conclusion to 4 months of travelling!

So Ray and I just finished our stint at the Devoxx keynote this morning to announce the names for voting. The video should be up soon but in case you don't get a good view of the Dilbert cartoon we used to explain the situation to the audience, here's the link. We were struggling with how best to let people know the difficulties in taking 1800+ submissions and getting them through the legal process, when Dilbert came to our rescue. I don't think we could have put it any more succinctly as this, so why bother?! Anyway, the voting process is now open and we'll be updating the pages on JBoss.org to try to add more flavour/meaning to the names that we eventually managed to get from the great submissions.

 

Thanks to everyone who submitted a name. There were many great names, but unfortunately we couldn't select the majority of them for reasons mentioned in the above cartoon. But the ones we have are good and I'm sure we can get behind whatever is eventually selected and make it a worthy successor to the JBossAS name! So get voting.

 

Onward!!

marklittle

CME and QCon

Posted by marklittle Nov 11, 2012

I'm just back from giving two very different presentations in the space of 4 days. The first was at the CME Technology Conference in Chicago, where I was invited to give the keynote. I gave an updated version of our vision of where cloud computing meets ubiquitous computing meets mobile. The room was packed and from the questions during and after, it went down well. The rest of the conference was interesting too, especially as many of the talks added more detail to some of the things I could only hint at within the keynote.

 

Then it was off to San Francisco and QCon. We were in the industrial track again this year, which had to be expanded to two tracks given the explosion of QCon attendance. Another result of their increased popularity was the move to another hotel, which had the added benefit of allowing everyone a chance to meet much more between sessions. I hope they do something similar for London, since the conference facilities they use there are too much of a rabbit warren.

 

Anyway, the talk I gave this year was based on the polyglot talk that Bob and I gave at JBossWorld. There were about 30 or so people in the room, which is good given the other tracks they had at the same time. And importantly, the audience asked a lot of questions throughout the presentation on our strategy, community interactions, and JBossEverywhere. I hope that some of them were interested enough to get involved with what we are doing and perhaps even start some similar projects in languages we can't cover at the moment. QCon takes immediate feedback from the attendees and then sends it to the presenter; the results of that were overwhelmingly positive too, so I'm hopeful that the projects I mentioned will see some benefits.

 

It's Devoxx in the next few days and raft of presentations and tutorials by JBoss people. I've got a keynote to give and maybe more. But once it's over that will mark the end of almost 4 months solid travel and presentations. Well almost ... There's one more to give in Boston in December, but then I'll be close to Christmas vacation and a chance to rest as well as catch up on some of my personal projects that have not had the attention they deserve recently, such as STM, mobile and Erlang.

I just wanted to post a quick status update on the renaming of the core JBoss Application Server project. As you all know, we asked for the community to send in their suggestions for a new name a few weeks back. We were overwhelmed with the number of names we received (well over 1500!) With the benefit of hindsight this shouldn't have been a surprise, but the amount of names we received were a lot more than we expected. Unfortunately this has had an impact on our timescales. Whereas originally we thought that we'd be putting up the more popular names for a community vote by now, that hasn't been possible because we have had to go through these names and check them against trademark infringements etc. This takes a lot of time, proportional to the number of names we received and we're only just drawing that phase to a conclusion. So what this means is that rather than announce the results of the vote at Devoxx next week, we'll be announcing the names that we're going to vote on. At this stage we're looking at a voting period of a few weeks and that then takes us into the Christmas holidays, so we'll probably make the final announcement early in 2013.

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