Random footnotes of Engineering

So the time has come for me to move on. I'm leaving Sun and headed off to try a few new things. It's been an incredible experience here and I will miss many of my current and former colleagues.

In case the blogging bug sticks I will be trying out blogging at a new location. So check it out, it will likely continue to be random ramblings based on what I come across...

Honeycomb was recently named the "Best Fixed Content Archiving Solution". It's really satisfying to know a product that I and many others worked long and hard to develop is thought of so highly. I raise a glass to the at-large Honeycomb team!

What's a Nelson? It's a cricket term. It typically refers to 111 (one eye, one arm and one leg of Admiral Nelson).

So this post is clearly not trying to educate the unwashed masses on obscure cricket-lore. Today is the day the Honeycomb 1.1.1 RRs. I've already blogged about this a few times. But we are finally ready to release this to our customers.

The team has worked pretty hard developing this and digging into bugs and problems. i can confidently say that this is the best ever release of Honeycomb.

The software is available for anyone to download and play with. We encourage anyone to take this and contribute.

I've just created a new mailing list for Honeycomb developers on OpenSolaris. You can subscribe to it. Make sure you let everyone you know about it. Let's build this community!

Today we posted the source code for the current 1.1.1 release candidate. This is a huge achievement by too many people to name. We are grateful both to the current folks who are working on Honeycomb today, and to all of those who have touched it in the past. This is a chance to re-engage as part of an open community built around Honeycomb and it's technology!

PASIG - Preservation and Archiving Special Interest Group

This is a group of Libraries, Universities and archivists that get together to discuss technology around digital repositories. The group was created a little over a year ago by a collaboration between Sun and Stanford.

They held their most recent conference in San Francisco and it was covered in sfgate. We've presented information around Honeycomb at all three PASIG conferences so far.

We've done what is the release candidate build for Honeycomb 1.1.1. This is a follow on to our fairly major milestone feature release 1.1 late last year.

My whole team has been working very hard to get this out. We think we've killed the last bugs, but we still have some testing to get done.

It's not really slower, with more bugs, but I thought the photo was great ;-)

Honeycomb has been reviewed by InfoWorld. They were pretty happy with the ST5800. They did some extensive testing of Honeycomb putting it through it's paces and ended up giving it a 9.3/10 rating. It feels great to see something that we've spent so much time and effort building being so well received in the field.

So we did it. We finally put the source code out there for Honeycomb. We put it in several locations: OpenSolaris, SNIA and java.net. So there are several questions about this, eg what did we actually open source, why three communities, etc.

So we released several pieces. We released the "Honeycomb Open Edition", this is basically a standalone java version of the Honeycomb protocol stack. It doesn't have the reliability, nor the RAIN architecture. However the bulk of the code that provides that functionality was in the drop. We also released the source to the VIM which will allow Honeycomb to work with the reference implementation of XAM from SNIA (note that the standard is still in the development phase). We also provided a photo demo which links XAM and honeycomb together. We used this as part of a demo at SNW last year showing our XAM compliance.

The obvious question is what can you do with all of this? We've provided the pieces so that it's possible to craft a single node instance of Honeycomb. You would be able to write applications to our API to this instance. It's also possible just to use the "Honeycomb Open Edition" to be an application development environment for Honeycomb.

So where are we going? This was the first code drop that we've done, we're not going to stop here. We are currently working on getting more of the pieces that make Honeycomb out. We are planning to start developing in the open very soon, so stay tuned!