links for 2007-04-23

• BigAdmin Feature Article: ZFS Overview and Guide
  A ZFS tutorial.
  (tags: article tutorial ZFS Solaris Sun OS IO FS FileSystem disk howto)
• David Dice's Weblog : Weblog
  Call to arms accompanied by a nice overview of the parallel programming landscape as of mid-2000s.
  (tags: blog post DavidDice Sun concurrency parallel parallelism java programming language Scala Fortress STM MessagePassing MPI X10)
• Review: Glassfish V2M4
  "Scott Balmos has written a review of the Glassfish project. According to Balmos, better integration, clustering, high availability sessions, JAX-WS, WebDAV and a number of features that were introduced earlier are now polished enough to launch as a beta
  (tags: article review Java JavaEE Sun Glasfish ScottBalmos TSS)
• shoal: Project Shoal - A Dynamic Java Clustering Framework
  "Shoal is a java based clustering framework that provides infrastructure to build fault tolerance, reliability and availability." Is is the foundation for Glassfish clustering.
  (tags: project Java JavaEE distributedsystems clustering cluster Glassfish jxta framework)

Sun Tech Days rocking São Paulo

Sun Tech Days is an yearly event, when we bring our evangelism team to Brazil for a couple of days of intense presentations. I attended for the third time, but it was the first as a Sun Campus Ambassador and I can tell it was a lot of fun. It is a pretty big event, I would estimate roughly around 2K attendees.

The best part of Sun Tech Days is the opportunity to meet new people. I got to know some of the speakers, including Bruno Sousa, who is widely known in Brazil by his alias “JavaMan” and outside of Brazil as “dude with the Brazilian flag at JavaOne”. He is a very nice guy and even helped me set-up a meeting with a couple of Sun US representatives and a professor at USP for discussing partnership possibilities. More on this on a later post as things get more concrete.

Among the sessions, I would highlight Manyi Lu's presentation on JavaDB. She demoed a conventional forms-based web app modified to use JavaDB for local persistence, a technique that gives a new twist to the old rich-client versus web-app dispute. Manyi also showed some surprising benchmark results comparing JavaDB with PostegreSQL and MySQL. The JRuby on NetBeans, Glassfish, and Swing Application Framework sessions were also pretty cool, but much of what was presented had already been showed in blogs and screencasts around the net.

The keynote was delivered by Rich Green, Sun's VP of software. I was impressed by how clear his view of the market was. This may seem like I'm “sucking-up”, but I'm really not; in fact, every statement from Sun's executive leadership I've seen in the past few years displays this clear drive to grow on the right markets. For a long time we heard criticisms that boiled down to “Sun just doesn't get it”. Well now I think there is hardly any doubt that we not only do get it, but we also get it better than the competition.

There is more. Rich Green invited the ambassadors for a meeting with him and local JUG leaders. When I was told about the meeting, I thought “that's nice, he probably wants to say hello and welcome us to Sun”. But it turned out that I was wrong, it was an actual bona-fide meeting, and he wanted to get our input about the state of the Brazilian job market and what we thought about a couple of Sun's upcoming initiatives. I can't really say much more about that for obvious reasons, only that we really are getting serious about languages on the JVM; its not merely rhetoric. Stay tuned.