It’s exciting times at the Infinispan team! Here’s some of my highlights of the last few weeks and events coming up.

I’m back from the berlin buzzwords conference where I’ve been talking about the datagrids performance.  I’ve been told by several people how good this conference was - but even so I was very surprised by the quality of both the presenters and audience. The conference is very focused on data relates topics (scale, search, store) so it was great picking up the brains of so many data enthusiasts. The beer wasn’t that bad either.  A big thanks to the organizers for the this excellent event and hope that infinispan be part of next year’s agenda.

Cheers, Mircea

A couple of weeks back I was speaking about Infinispan and Radargun at MOW 2012. Although this conference was originally focused on Oracle products, for a over a year now, Miracle have been expanding into other territories, such as Microsoft and Java middleware. However, there’s still some work to be done in this area in order to make this a must-go conference for Java developers. Max Andersen and Thomas Heute were presenting as well on topics such as: Ceylon, JBoss AS7 and OpenShift.

If you want to find out more about Infinispan, don’t miss Mircea Markus at Berlin Buzzwords 2012, at the beginning of June.

Cheers, Galder

Sanne Grinovero and myself will talk about Infinispan and OGM at Portugal JUG in Coimbra on the April 18. This join talk covers an introduction to Infinispan and its main use cases followed by a presentation about NoSQL and Hibernate OGM. Thanks to Samuel Santos for inviting us and really looking forward to meet with the community!

Cheers,

Mircea

Finally I was able to complete my trip to Grenoble to speak at Alpes JUG on the 29th of March about all things Infinispan, and I must say that I through fully enjoyed the experience. On arrival I was greeted by one of my JBossian colleagues, Chris Laprun, who lives in Grenoble.

After spending a few hours hanging around, we headed for the location of the Alpes JUG, where I met by Ludovic Poitou and other members of the JUG. The talk involved me speaking for 2 hours giving an overall view of Infinispan, while developing a simple application that would showcase Infinispan’s capabilities. As always with live demos, one or two things didn’t go fully according to plan, but overall the demo worked fine. For those who attended, remember that the demo code can be found here.

After the talk I had the chance to meet the attendants of the JUG where we discussed about caching, data grids, Hibernate 2nd level cache…​etc. Having had some pizza slices, Chris and I moved on to a pub in the old part of Grenoble where we’re able to watch my dear Athetic Bilbao crash Shalke 04 in the Europa League :).

Next day Chris and I met with another of the Alpes JUG leaders, called Emmanuel Hugonnet, with whom we had some lunch. I must say that I felt in love with the local cuisine having tried some local rather pinky sausage with cold lentils with mustard (what a great combo!). Here’s a pic:

It was a joy being invited to speak at Alpes JUG and I’d certainly recommend it to any Java speakers out there! I hope to come back some other time :).

So, what’s next? Next week I’m speaking at Miracle Open World 2012 in Billund’s Legoland park, where I’ll be joined by two other JBoss colleagues, Max Andersen and Thomas Heute. In this rather atypical conference, I’ll be speaking about measuring performance of in-memory data grids, and about building transactional, scalable Infinispan applications. I was already speaking at this conference last year, and together with GeeCON, this was one of my favourite conferences of 2011. Can’t wait for next week!

Cheers, Galder

If you’re lucky enough to participate at this year’s Rome’s http://www.codemotion.it/Codemotion] then my Infinispan presentation might be an option to consider: this is an overview of the Infinispan ecosystem which focuses on what are the problems our data grid can help you solve. The presentation is on the 23 of March starting at 9:50 AM and contrary to its title, it lasts only for 40 minutes - but don’t worry, I’ll be around for entire duration of the conference so feel free to come and ping for a chat!

Cheers, Mircea

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

It’s that time of year again, and Red Hat Summit/JBoss World 2011 looms ever larger on the horizon.  Back in Boston again this year, it will be co-located with another JUDCon, the JBoss Users and Developers Conference.

Red Hat Summit/JBoss World Infinispan is well-represented again at Summit/JBW, as it was last year.  I will be speaking on using Infinispan to solve a number of scalability and availability issues, including reducing database bottlenecks.

Emmanuel Bernard and Sanne Grinovero will be speaking on Hibernate OGM - an awesomely cool project to provide JPA-like access to Infinispan (details of the session available here).

Craig Bomba and Shane Johnson will talk about optimising Infinispan for performance and consistency based on lessons learned using Infinispan at the Chicago Board of Options Exchange, the world’s largest options exchange.

Further, for the first time, we intend to run a hands-on lab on Infinispan, coordinated by Jim Tyrrell.  An awesome chance to learn about the practical aspects of working with Infinispan, with core Infinispan engineers on hand to answer questions, etc.  This sort of opportunity doesn’t come about every day!  :-)

JUDCon JUDCon attendees too will get their fill of your favourite data grid with a talk titled Infinispan for Ninja Developers and one on Infinispan’s new Map/Reduce capabilities.  Fun, hands-on, developer-focused deep dives.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention, Sanne Grinovero will also be talking about advanced querying on Infinispan.  More cool stuff.

For a summary of what happened at JUDCon and Summit/JBW last year, check out this blog entry.  It’s still not too late to get tickets, you may even qualify for early-bird discounts if you hurry!

Hope to see you there. Manik

The JBoss World/Red Hat Summit organisers have asked me to put together a short note on what to expect at the conference with regards to Infinispan, and this has been published on the conference website.  I thought I’d share this with you as well.

http://summitblog.redhat.com/2010/04/12/boston-are-you-ready-for-infinispan/

In addition to the conference, this is also the first time JBoss is running JUDCon (JBoss Users and Developers Conference), a free event (limited on a first-come first-served basis) for the community, also in Boston.  Be sure to sign up as places are limited!

Look forward to seeing you there! Manik