GlassFish, Java, MySQL, Solaris, OpenStorage A Developer from Hong Kong - Victor Chiu

With the coordination from Macao Polytechnique and Macau Public Administration and Civil Services, we held a very successful Java Day in macau on 28 Oct 2009.  More than 100 IT professionals (mainly from government) attended this half day seminar.  We have speakers from Macao Polytechnique and Macau Public Administration and Civil Services to share practical information regarding Java technology and they were quite amazing!

 Gabriel Santos did a wonderful lecture on how weak the security we deliver in Java could be and some experience sharing on secure information exchange in Macau Government.  One interesting thing he showed at last was the sixth sense technology that he is currently interested in and studying.  You will be amazed by watching the video here by this technology with pretty cheap components such as camera, protable projector and mirror:

Mickey Fan has delivered a wonderful session on Google Web Toolkit (GWT) on Java as one of the options in Java RIA and demonstrated how easy the RIA/javascript based application can be generated in Java with GWT.  You can find Mickey's presentation here.

 My session is more focusing on recent issues or topics around Java development especially in public sector.  I shared my recent observation or recommendation to universities and government departments' Java projects and how to manage the technology option and development methodology against some emerging technology or frameworks. You can find my presentation here.

It is my pleasure to be invited as a panelist in a discussion on Energy Efficiency in the 2nd International Conference on Climate Change (http://www.iccc2009.org/) held on 7-9 October 2009.  The conference was filled with a lot of decision makers from government and business sides to share their thoughts on how to help the climate change issue in a concrete manner. This was reported in the local newspaper here. 

Regarding energy efficiency or Green House Gas (GHG) emission reduction, Sun has always been the pioneer and active promoter in computer industry (see here) and I delivered the following key messages in panel discussion from Computer Industry perspective:

• Eco-Friendly CPU and Server - UltraSparc T2 Plus and T-Series Servers.  Actually, you can find HSBC endorsement here on how these kind of servers can increase throughput by 3 times via saving energy and cooling by 30% 
• Datacenter Redesign - Improvement of airflow, replacing old model servers with 'Energy Efficiency' Servers, leveraging virtualization or consolidation on servers and storage can save up to 40-50% in energy consumption as well as electricity bill according to live cases in our Datacenter in US and Eurpore as well as some live deployment in our customers in Malaysia and Switzerland.  Want to know more, click here.
• SSD and Tape to tackle storage growth - there is a study showing a 50% growth in new data annually and equipment to hold the data will consume significant power accordingly. SSD can save around 40% in power per G and 98% in power per I/O.  Tape is good for archiving solution together with our sophisticated Tape Library that use it as data storage/retrieval media instead of dump backup media.  Some large banks and hospitals in Hong Kong do use this technology to store their huge amount of CT-Scan images, compliance document or unstructure data.  Please note that one important difference between tape and disks on storing archving data is no power or cooling required for tape the data stored in that media.  While disks always require power and cooling even they are idle and they have a shorter life cycle.  This is a recent Archiving system deployed in Hong Kong by our storage specialist, Chan Tsz Hong, that contains disks and tapes to store large volume of unstructure data.  Click here for more details on this solution.
  

In the conference, most of the speakers or panelists are from construction, transportation or finance industry and I am almost the only one from IT/Computer industry.  What I can do is to increase the awareness to the non-IT audience to pay more attention on environment related metrics in their upcoming IT projects or budget instead of just focusing on pure dollar amount metric.  Questions like server utitlization, electricity bill, cooling requirement, eco-friendly computer product, design of datacentre or modular rack/colling design should be put in system/project requirement and active monitoring should be carried out by the business side to control GHG emission from their IT systems.

It was a great opportunity to meet with around 100 active local opensource developers and to learn some hot topics such as Android or 'One Laptop Per Child' initiative (see below):

My colleague, Ivan Ma, has presented the VirtualBox and OpenSolaris and here is his blog entry. 

There is also a booth for demonstrating OpenSolaris and VirtualBox that my colleagues, Ray and Rick, have distributed more than 200 copies of OpenSolaris CD (you can download here as well) to students or participants for their new desktop experience on common x86 machines or notebook.

I presented and demonstrated the latest update of JavaFX 1.2 regarding Desktop Application, Mobile and TV Deployment and you can find my presentation here.

Want to know leading opensource technology like Java, Linux, Android and meet the active folks in Hong Kong.  My colleagues and I will present VirtualBox, OpenSolaris and JavaFX in this event.  The event details is here:

 

Date: 19 September 2009, Saturday.

Time: 1400 - 1900.

Venue: Lecture Theatre LT-3, Classroom Y4701, and Classroom Y4702, 4/F City University of Hong Kong, 83 Tat Chee Avenue, Kowloon Tong, Kowloon, Hong Kong.

 Official Link: http://wiki.opensource.hk/index.php/Software_Freedom_Day_2009,_Hong_Kong

I didn't update this blog for quite a while since I've engaged in some live adoption cases for the technologies I promoted in this blog.  This time, I want to share the iPortal product developed by a Hong Kong Leading Financial IT solution provider Infocast.  You can see the 'Sun Web 2.0/Opensource in a Box' in their new portal here: http://hkstock.infocastfn.com   The portal is actually a product of Webspace Server, GlassFish, MySQL and Solaris running on Sun x64/x86 Servers with creativity and nice layout design.  I captured some screenshots here:

In the upcoming weeks, they will have some other significant milestones and launch to be announced and I may be able to share more on how their clients can get a competitive cutting edge such as personalized portal, drag-n-drop portlets and social networking platform by adopting these technologies.

Beside the financial industry, I'm also helping the technology adoption in Government, Education and Telco industry and would like see more innovation and creativity happening in this city.

Just came back from JavaOne (San Francisco) and brought HTC Diamond to Hong Kong - the world's first mobile with JavaFX 1.2 mobile runtime in it.  I deployed some demo applications with NetBeans Projects and it is really cool!

If you want to know more and even you want to see Sang Shin (www.javapassion.com)  in person in Hong Kong, come to 2009 Java Cert Day on Jun 18 (thur) at 2:00 in Wah Chai HK Convention Centre and here is the details:

Yesterday, I just delivered a presentation with live demos  to the Java developers in Macau. The topics are around new features of NetBeans 6.5.1 and 6.7 Beta. If you are also interested in these topics, please take a look at the slide here and it will save you a lot of development time from this powerful IDE.

• Java EE 5 and Web Services (Metro)
• Scripting Language Support - JavaFX and Ruby on Rails
• Advance Profiler and Multi-threading debugging
• NB 6.7 Beta and Project Kenai
  

This title was actually from a GlassFish Workshop in US and I found this is quite interesting (especially I see a large adoption momentum for GlassFish and MySQL in Hong Kong in the past 6 weeks in Telco, Finance, Education and ISV areas).  While I am delivering GlassFish workshops or presentation, I always got the following questions:

• What is the difference between Tomcat and GlassFish?
• What is the difference between WebLogic and GlassFish?
• How to migrate from WebLogic to GlassFish?
• How to use GlassFish from Eclipse?
  

I decided to post the relevant resources or whitepaper here so that you can easily evaluate or adopt GlassFish at your own pace. 

• Tomcat and GlassFish Comparison
• WebLogic and GlassFish Comparison
• Migrate Weblogic to GlassFish (Simplified Chinese) - read from Page 10
  
• GlassFish Tools for Eclipse
• Create JPA apps in Eclipse

A lot of people are talking about cloud computing but usually they don't really know what it is about.  A simple analogy will be using Google Mail, YouTube or Facebook that you won't care about how many servers are running or how large the storage will be to store your mail, video, etc...

 As a developer, you may wonder what the future model of developing and deploying application on such abstract platform will be.  We get used to develop on a physical server (e.g. file folder, IP address, port number, etc) and may feel uncomfortable on developing and deploying on an unknown object.

 I encourage you to try out Zembly.com (a very innovative way from Sun to realize the power of developing and deploying applications on cloud computing) and here is the simple tutotial to create a Facebook Application 'Birthday Reminder' via Zembly.com - Click Here

You will find all you need is just a browser (even the IDE is from browser - No NetBeans, No Eclipse!) and you have used GlassFish and MySQL transparently.  Magic!

From Oct 2008 to Mar 2009, I delivered a series of Java EE or GlassFish handson workshops (part of the OpenSource Workshop initiative in HK. See here) to a variety of groups such as Sun Partners, ISV or customers.  The objective is to get the participants to actually install and play with GlassFish and to realise the benefits and productivity from Java EE 5 compared with legacy J2EE.  The average attendance is around 10 people that I could build a reasonable in-depth mentoring with students.  This is a summary of this GlassFish/Java EE workshop:

Date	Audience	Attendance
Nov 14, 2008	Sun ISV	12
Dec 5, 2008	Sun ISV	12
Dec 1, 2008	Sun Partners	10
Feb 6, 2009	Customers	13
Mar 13, 2009	Customers	8

 Since some students requested me the workshop slides, I decided to put them here (with some updated slides of GlassFish Portfolio) -

- GF Workshop Slides

- GF Portfolio Slides

 Recently, I also got a lot of requests after my presentation or demo of Zembly, OpenESB V3 (Fuiji) and I'm thinking of building these workshops to let people get some handson excercise as well.  Any feedback is welcome.