Arun Gupta, Miles to go ...

Little India, Singapore in Pictures

Little India in Singapore is a great glimpse of Indian culture in Singapore. It has access to everything Indian in a matter of few streets: grocery, clothes, restaurants, music collections, temple, jewelry, and anything else you can think.

Click on the map below to explore the exact location:



I spent my yesterday evening strolling through the streets of Little India and took some pictures:

Posted by Arun Gupta in photography  |  Comments[1]

GlassFish swimming to Singapore, Delhi, Bangalore, and Hyderabad - Feb 2009

I'll be traveling (again) and this time to Singapore, Delhi, Bangalore, and Hyderabad over the next couple of weeks. A few meetings are already planned but there is buffer for squeezing any last-minute JUG visits, Rails Meetup or meeting Campus Ambassadors.

Here is my schedule:

	Singapore: Feb 12 & 13
	Delhi: Feb 14, 20, & 21
	Bangalore: Feb 15, 16, & 17
	Hyderabad: Feb 18 & 19

And I'll be there at Sun Tech Days in Hyderabad. Ask me anything about GlassFish :) Did you know James Gosling is going to be there ? Check out agenda, details and register today!

• Singapore Sling (Raffles) - Not a big crab fan ;-)
• Delhi Chaat (multiple venues)
• Bangalore Dosa (multiple venues)
• Hyderabadi Biryani (Paradise, Cafe Bahar)

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Singapore Tech Days 2009 - Wrapup

A picture is worth thousand words! Now that Picasa 3.0 is available on Mac, here is a collage of pictures from the recently concluded Sun Tech Days in Singapore.





The complete photo album is available at:




And if you are interested in knowing all the action, read here!

Technorati: conf suntechdays singapore

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Singapore Tech Days 2009 - Talent Show, Cloud Camp, GlassFish Demo

Follow up from Day 1.

Matt Thompson talked about cloud computing. Even though the term "cloud computing" is becoming more prominent now, it very well echoes Sun's 25 years old mantra - "The Network is the Computer". Even though there are some prominent players but the field is very much emerging. Matt touched upon different interpretations of a cloud - Platform, Infrastructure or Software as a Service (PaaS, Iaas, SaaS). A set of developer tools that allows you to manage your cloud is equally important for it to be successful. He then gave a preview of some of the open source developer tools (Kenai and Zembly) available from Sun Microsystems to assist in that direction.

After the keynote, some participants showed their "strange and unusual" talent to add a bit of levity to the otherwise intense technical conference. Even though there were 6 participants but it was less "strange and unusal" than the previous ones I've attended (Sao Paolo 2008, Hyderabad 2008, Beijing 2007). Here is a video of the show and judget it yourself:



A video of the GlassFish demo shown during Day 1 is now available:


The cloud camp in the evening had approx 50 attendees with an interesting discussion around the definition of cloud, security concerns, portability of applications across clouds, major players in the game, and much more. Free pizza and beer is always a good way to keep audience engaged until late in the night ;-) Sign up for a cloud camp near your city!

Here are some pictures from Day 2:

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Running by the Singapore River

Had a great 44 minutes run by the Singapore River in downtown Singapore.



There were underpasses for all the streets so that made it really comfortable. The hotel desk even had a running band with 2K, 6K, and 10K routes - really neat! I anyway deviated and ran along the river which was fun.

21 days of running so far this year - 100% in 2009 :)

Check out pictures of the Singapore trip so far:



Technorati: conf singapore river running

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Fish pedicure by Doctor Fish

Doctor Fish (aka "Garra rufa", Kangal fish, Nibble fish) is a freshwater fish fish that originates from Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. They consume the dead and affected areas of your skin and also help in curing skin diseases and disorders. Now attending Singapore Tech Days 2009, some of us got "fish pedicure" done outside the Singapore Night Safari park.

Here are couple of pictures:

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Sun Tech Days 2009, Singapore - Welcome Reception

Follow up from Part 1.

Attended "What Developers should care about MySQL ?" by Colin and "Groovy and Grails" by Chuk-munn Lee.

I enjoyed both the talks for different reasons. Colin's talk explained the pluggable storage engine architecture that is unique to MySQL (pronounced my-ess-kew-ell, not my-sequel). It was interesting to know that the different storage engines can be picked a la carte based upon the requirements. The performance comparison for INSERTs was 5x between MyISAM, InnoDB and Archive storage engines. But then InnoDB provide transactions and other goodies. Multiple performance tuning tips such as using negative unsigned int instead of BIGINT and partitioning databases if the number of records grow more than 1 billion were good! Keep an eye on his blog for slides.

Chuk's talk introduced Groovy, Grails, showed several samples of NetBeans and Grails integration. A Grails application can be deployed as a WAR file on GlassFish. Alternatively you can download the Grails module from GlassFish v3 Update Center and use the standard "run-app" command to run your Grails application using the embedded GlassFish v3 instead of Jetty. This is explained nicely in the screencast below:


Here are couple of pictures from rest of the day:

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Sun Tech Days 2009, Singapore - Day 1

The Sun Tech Days Singapore started earlier this morning - over 1100 developers, an outstanding audience!!!

The kick off had a good local flare when the Gods of Longevity, Fortune, and Prosperity (Fu Lu Shou) showed up to start the event ;-) The build up to their appearance was really exciting as evident from the video below:


This particular event will also be recorded in Singapore Book of Records for the largest numbers of Sun developers playing a rattle together :) Here are some pictures from the event:

1. GlassFish v3 OSGi-compliance and quick startup time
   
   Download GlassFish v3 Prelude from here, unzip, and start the server as
   
   

   glassfish/bin/asadmin start-domain --verbose

   
   to see a message something like:
   
   

   INFO: GlassFish v3 Prelude startup time : Felix(1732ms) startup services(1091ms) total(2823ms)

   
   The GlassFish v3 container starts up fairly quickly, 2.8 secs in this case, without starting any application-specific container. The container is using OSGi R4 APIs and Apache Felix as the runtime. This allows any standard OSGi bundle to be easily deployed in GlassFish v3. The underlying OSGi runtime can be easily replaced with Knopflerfish or Equinox because standard R4 APIs are used. As you notice, Felix start up time is explicitly shown in the startup message.
   
   The quick start up is possible because containers, such as Web container that serves web applications, is started only when the first Web application is deployed. No web application, no web container - simple! The same is true as other types of applications are deployed, for example a Rails application. The containers are started and stopped on demand giving a higher utilization of resources.
2. Auto-deploy of Servlets and preserving servlet session state across multiple re-deploys using NetBeans and Eclipse. This feature is really useful as it tremendously reduces your development time. Focus on what you are good at i.e. adding business logic and let NetBeans and GlassFish together take care of your deployment worries. And why should you loose your session state just because the application is re-deployed!
3. Modularity and Extensibility of GlassFish v3 by running/debugging a Rails application. GlassFish certainly supports traditional Java EE applications. But starting with GlassFish v3 the newer Web frameworks like Rails can also be deployed natively. The screencast #26 shows how to develop, run and debug a Rails application natively deployed on GlassFish. And this capability of deploying a Rails application is added as an OSGi module and also demonstrates the extensibility of GlassFish.
   
   It provides future protection as well because any other Web framework can be easily deployed as a standard OSGi module.
4. Extensibility of GlassFish v3 by dropping a JAR in the "/modules" directory. The admin console is a one-stop interface for the administration of your GlassFish instance such as deploying WAR/EAR, creating JDBC/JMS resource, and creating clusters. Starting with GlassFish v3, even the admin console is extensible. There are clearly defined extension points that allows you to write a "admin console module" and extend the capability of your admin console. The demo showed dropping a JAR in the standard "modules" directory and admin cosole recognizing the module. A sample project that shows all the integration points to GlassFish v3 Admin Console is available here.
   

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GlassFish Swimming to Singapore Tech Days

Sun Tech Days is traveling to Singapore next week and I'll be there!

You'll find me at the pavilion hall, sessions, hallway, lunch, reception, University Day, and else where. Stop by and say hello! Let us know how you are using GlassFish and how can we make it better for you.

Click on the map below to get the exact direction to Raffles City Convention Centre.



Here are some important links:

• Complete Agenda
• Dedicated University Day for students
• Tons of Technical Sessions by star speakers
• Deep-dive Hands-on-Labs
• Refer-a-friend and stand a chance to win Nintendo Wii

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