Back from JUDCon China 2012

JUDCon China was held for the first time last week in Beijing, and it was a blast!

I had never been to China before, let alone a conference there, so it was interesting to compare it with other conferences around the world. The use of simulaneous translators meant those giving presentations in English had to pace themselves a bit more so that translators would have time to catch up. There’s was a good bunch of presentation given by native Chinese speakers too, so the audience got the chance to attend more interactive sessions too.

During this two-day developer conference, I was showing Infinispan’s capabilities as a powerful cache bulding a transactional EE application that neeeded to scale up live. In this presentation, which combines Infinispan with JSF and CDI, I showed how to go from a basic temporary cached, to a clustered cache that used consistent hashing to distribute data, showing the ability to scale up and failover. This presentation which was given shortly after the keynote on the first day generated a lot of interest in the audience, with a lot of users wanting to find out how we compared with other existing cache and data grid providers. This was a great opportunitiy to introduce the rest of Inifnispan talks that were happening that day and the day after, where they could learn more Infinsipan’s other features as a data grid: i.e. querying, geographic failover…​etc.

My second presentation that same day was about querying Infinispan based data grids. The room was packed for this one, and in the presentation I talked about how Infinispan’s map/reduce functions can take advantage of the paralellism available in cluster to resolve basic queries, and how Infinispan’s contents can be indexed using the query module and queried via Hibernate Search or Apache Lucene APIs. Finally, I did a little overview of higher level APIs offering further querying possibilities (i.e. ModeShape, Hibernate OGM). As pointed out by Ales, the lead of CapeDwarf team, I somehow forgot to add his project, which offers the possibility of running Google App Engine on top of JBoss Application Server, which uses Infinispan and offers different querying possibilities too. Don’t worry Ales, we’ll sort it out for this presentation’s next outing :)

For those who attended, the presentations should be uploaded to the JUDCon China website within the next few weeks.

Not all was presentations though, we also had the chance to socialise with attendees and other Red Hat employees in China. After all talks finished the first day, Jim Ma and Yong Yang did a fantastics demo of a cluster of JBoss Application Server 7 instances running on Rasperry PIs, and the audience had the opportunity to win one a Rasperry Pi too!

If you’re thinking of going to China, you can’t leave without trying a hot pot place! On Friday night we went to a Hai Dai Lao Hot Pot restaurant for food, and from a culinary perspective, it was the best food I had during my China stay. Hot Pot restaurants have this concept of cooking different meats, vegetables and noodles in two hot pots, one spicy and the other not. On top of that, you get the chance to mix up some cold sauces yourself (sesame oil, coriander, nuts, chillies,,etc) and mix that with the cooked meat/veg. Unfortunately, one of our colleagues who had a nut allergy had to be rushed to hospital, but it was all Ok in the end :).

From here I’d like to thank Cindy Dong, Jervis Liu, Jim Ma, Christina Lin and many others that helped us, Aliens (according to Chinese Immigration prospects), feel like at home :). Can’t wait to get back to China.

Cheers, Galder