My Blogs Sandeep Konchady's Weblog

I am currently pursuing my masters in software engineering at San Jose State University (SJSU), California. As a part of my curriculum I need to either work on a thesis or a project to complete my course. Both of these options can be research oriented or industry focused. Since I have a bit of experience in the industry, I would rather do an industry oriented project rather than research oriented ones. I know I am not the only one with this thought and SJSU is not the only school that has these options. So I would like to make this information available to all schools so that students and future employees of Sun Microsystems, Inc (SMI) can benefit from learning interesting technologies and also experience what it is to work on open source projects sponsored by SMI.

The starting place for any open source project that is sponsored by SMI or public is java.net. Here you have a wealth of information on each and every area of technology, be it cutting edge or just an improvement of existing ones. This is an excellent portal if you knew exactly what you wanted. Do most students know what *exactly* they want? So simply pointing someone at sf.net or java.net is not the solution. What I as a student would like to see is to have a small problem statement, guidance and mentoring from someone who is an expert in the field, with the end result that is at least 4 - 6 months long. This is what a typical software engineering school project would look like.

I am not an official spokes person or coordinator of such programs at SMI. But as an engineer who works at Sun and also a student at SJSU, I started looking for potential projects within Sun that had someone senior who was interested in offering it to students and was also willing to mentor and work with the students. It was very interesting to see quite a few distinguished engineers (DEs) from various departments and projects respond to my request. The response came in various forms, some existing URLs such as OpenSolaris project on  Google
Summer of Code 07 (http://code.google.com/soc/2007/opensolaris/about.html) and some with detailed explanation of the project itself. What I am hoping to achieve here is to put some of the projects that have expressed interest in opening it up to students. I am also hoping to make this available as a part of Sun's Global Education Learning Community (https://edu-gelc.dev.java.net/nonav/index.html). If any of you are interested in participating in these projects or would like to take this a step further, please feel free to contact me and I can put you in touch with the right project mentors, or DEs.

Projects:

1. JBI and OpenESB (https://open-esb.dev.java.net/)
   
   
• ELT integrator (http://www.glassfishwiki.org/jbiwiki/Wiki.jsp?page=ETLSE)
• REST implementation for Data Mashup (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_State_Transfer)
  
  
• Enterprise Data Mashup (http://www.glassfishwiki.org/jbiwiki/Wiki.jsp?page=EnterpriseDataMashup)
• Achieving massive throughput for bulk data loading using a
  combination of horizontal and vertical scaling techniques (SOA/BI using
  OpenESB/JBI)
  
  
• Standalone JBI under Java SE (http://www.glassfishwiki.org/jbiwiki/Wiki.jsp?page=JavaSEOnePager)
  
  
• Other projects open for contributions under OpenESB (http://www.glassfishwiki.org/jbiwiki/Wiki.jsp?page=OpenESB_Next)
2. Crossbow (http://www.opensolaris.org/os/project/crossbow/)
3. Virtual Network Machines (http://www.opensolaris.org/os/project/vnm/)
4. OpenSolaris (http://www.opensolaris.org/)
5. OpenJDK (http://openjdk.java.net/)
6. NetBeans (http://www.netbeans.org/)
7. GlassFish (https://glassfish.dev.java.net/)

Each of these areas give an unique insight into the technology that it encompasses, working experience in the open source world and also focused on industry requirements and software development life cycle (SDLC).