Yes the future is open and that is what open source tries to create and emphasize. The attendance at the conference was large and many developers JBOSS / java folks were present. Developers poured out in large numbers and the air raved and ranted about goodies from the JBOSS stack and how RAD ( Rapid Application Development) can be had by using these cool tools from Redhat. This was my first to a redhat conference although have interacted with them on multiple occasions especially during a porting assignment in one of my previous avatars.
This was well attended from developers , architects and from all interested in what is latest on the JBOSS stable and how best they can integrate it into their products or solutions.
Attended select sessions from speakers and here is some brief summary of what they looked like . It is important for technology decision makers and people connected at all levels to the task of producing meaningful software to be abreast of what is latest from a popular open source vendor like Redhat.
OpenShift a PAAS solution for JBOSS developers : This is meant to have a all in one software plugins on your development environment ( maven, dependencies, libraries,deployment scripts,build scripts ) all bundled on a platform which is supposed to cut down on the dirty element in the process of churning software which is that many developers put in many many hours at creating software and lost countless hours creating different setups to be able to pull software and build them effectively. There needs to be a lot done in the PAAS area and this space will have lots of interesting things over a period of time. Eventually where thing including our local eclipses and netbeans will be on the cloud.
JBOSS is being rechristened as wildfly for the application server community edition and thus differentiates the Enterprise edition. JBOSS is no longer the application server company it has many many things under its hood and therefore justifies the change in name.
Pair programmed with Bharath of bharathwrites.in. on using widlfy and how to create an application which was organized and supervised and guided from Arun Gupta and Andrew of redhat. The wifi had its share of issues and folks running around with USBs to work around the problem. Annotation will rule the world as Java 7 has more annotations and more of it. Finally you could circumvent a lot of coding using annotations. The future would be annotations the way it goes for java and probably for other JVM languages.
Some random key take aways :
1. Websockets removes the overhead of HTTP / TCP and is preferred when you need to heavy connection based message passing. This can greatly improve performance and remove the clutter from the traffic especially the header and footer going back and forth for other protocols.
2. Batch Processing is a new feature of Java EE 7 apart from websockets, which gels with what JBOSS has to provide.
3. CDI Extensions ( dependency injection ) and add on features on how you can create features needing coding using annotations. Getting used to the latest ones are an issue but soon they can do a lot with no coding. The future is also open and annotated should be stated.
4. Fine tuning case study of a telecom major in India tuned all their way across the application stack across all tiers mod_jk , native APR , web subsystems , H/W accelerators , SSL accelerators, NUMA architectures , increased / created optimum memory page sizes on the OS, used sticky sessions and replication where possible and increased performance. This reminded my own experience where every performance increase was considered a mile crossed and when every inch , every ms every byte mattered. All of this can be useful when hard pressed for increased performance. Had interacted with clients who had spent a fortune on a machine and their only concern was did not want to move to a new machine and wanted to squeeze every pie out of the existing machine.
5. A nice case study from Wipro on how messaging solved many real time problem scenarios and how the Smart Santander a project in Spain uses much of this technology with sensors and devices to solve a lot of governance problems. Apache Camel and Active MQ apart from Kafka which was used as the ESB here was used to solve these problems.
6. Attended a nice talk on Infinispan on Inmemory database. At the outset the new statement was “Memory is the new disk and disk is the new tape”. Has a lot of use with transactional and non transactional scenarios with support for the No SQL and regualar RDBMs databases. This greatly improves performance and has a lot of settings on storing data close to where it is used and fetched using a hashing technique. This gives a uniform experience to users who could log in from any of the nodes in the system and almost be guaranteed a regular fetch time instead of varying fetch times. In memory would be the way for data fetches including transactional data which does not change too much.
People walked with hoodies and cool T-shirts apart from some lucky draw events from Intel on whose machines redhat linux largely gets run from most organizations. The future is open and this will a game changer on how to package your good small and service based. As some futurists predict there will be only three movements in future publishing , content and services based on that content. We are in interesting times where products/solutions designed to deliver value in portions and do not quote an hefty price upfront. This is the new selling mantra. And this is here to stay. Everything will be a service hardware/software/infrastructure/everything you model based on this principle can be attempted. Perhaps in future there could be a central air conditioner in a flat which could bill inmates on pay as you use and avoid people owing one and having to pay the total upfront cost when all they use it in places like Bangalore during the hot months.