Head in the Cloud: Project Caroline musings, facts, viewpoints

We of Project Caroline (pC) have been pretty busy lately given our recent initial roll out of the Public Evaluation (PE) grid. While there's little to suggest that the pace of our development will be slowing anytime soon, personally, I've felt the need to begin to scratch an itch thats been bothering me for a while. I'm hoping these pages will provide the right vehicle for doing so. Given the explosion of interest in Cloud computing, scrawling a few random words about pC and the stuff I happen to be working on seems the best way to find relief.

By way of introduction, My current responsibilities on the project revolve around web tier issues, specifically I've been charged with the design and production of the Caroline Web Server (CWS). CWS, actually is somewhat of a misnomer as the CWS service actually allows for the deployment of a farm of horizontally scaled web servers. Currently the business portion of CWS utilizes bits and pieces of the new Glassfish v3 to act as the container. CWS surrounds this engine with the appropriate logic to control both the servers lifecycle as well as application deployment into farm. So to first order, a lot of what will wind up on these pages will be hopefully of interest to those having dealings with pC from a front end perspective.

But, primarily my intent here is to blog mostly on random anecdotal experiences with the pC Platform and its API. Like our development partners, I too am a consumer of the platform and my hope is that we can start dialogue on a variety of topics. The few that I currently have in my head for upcoming articles are to discuss the subtleties of using the pC Filesystem resources, Meta-data usage and conventions, CWS features and improvements as well as an article or two on how CWS and the unzip utility were put together.

Whether all this will be purely Cathartic or perhaps serve a higher purpose, only time and the availability of it will tell. In either case, we'll get started in earnest right after the upcoming release of CWS 0.3.0 is completed in the next couple of days. In the meantime, I bid you peace.