Namaste नमस्ते everyone!

As I am sitting at the last airport (Dubai!), I am happy to report from journey of mod_cluster going all the way to India! To back up a little bit, when the JUDCon 2012 call for papers announcement appeared, I thought to myself that India needs to see something about clustering. Moreover mod_cluster now being nicely bundled in JBoss AS7 I thought it would wounderfully fit. As I meet lof of people form India in the community I knew it would come in handy for many developers.

My session was on Tuesday morning and attendance was astonishing! We went through the main mod_cluster concepts explaining where mod_jk or other naive balancers just fall short. The main benefits presented were simplified configuration, better load balancing and fine-grained application lifecycle control. We also had a look of rolling upgrades without outage and briefly how to turn large flat clusters into smaller ones for better manageability and what else it gives us. For better understanding I showcased a load-balancing demo -- as many are asking the demo is here bundled with the distribution :). Everything was automatically (or rather automagically) configured using UDP multicast autodiscovery for balancers and nodes, we saw balancing happen and an example of how to roll an upgrade using session draining strategy.

The feedback was very positive (I remember one of attendees: "Sir, thank you, best presentation on JudCon!"; needless to say there were many great talks!). Actually, I didn't get to see any other sessions after that because there was so much community interaction and lots of other questions also on general clustering in AS7. Thinking about this, next time a general and an advanced topics in clustering talks would definitely benefit many developers over here.

For what I have seen, Ales has shown how to do CDI on CapeDwarf. The session was pretty advanced but well accepted by the developers. AS7 track by Bruno and Dimitris has given a very good start for devs. Greg gave an amazing presentation on JPA and Hibernate best practices -- if you are still a little lost in the world of persistence I encourage to definitely see his presentation. Dimitris gave a very inspiring presentation on open source citizenship. Manik and Galder did altogether several interesting presentations on different aspects of Infinispan (which is as we know the core of AS7 clustering). Galder even talked about "polyglot", go check it out.

After demanding JUDCon, Galder and I went for little visit to Delhi to regain the energy and refreshment for more hard work!

Thanks again for everyone coming and making India:2012 the biggest JUDCon to date! It was great experience. See you soon India!

Rado