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