Miles to go …

Attended and presented at my first NLJUG’s JFall conference earlier today.

NLJUG is the Java User Group of Netherlands. It’s a non-profit organization that try to get out the maximum out of content sharing with all of its members. An annual subscription to the JUG is 35.50 Euros and allows the members to attend its two annual conferences – JSpring and JFall and also provide a year long subscription to a local Java magazine.

The conference itself started with 200 attendees in 2004 and has grown up to 1250 attendees last year. This year they had to cap the limit at 1000 because of the cost control measures. NLJUG rely upon subscriptions from business partners for funding and in turn profile them within the Dutch community and offer them high-bandwidth networking opportunities at conferences like this. If you are interested in being their partner, send an email to .

This year, the selection committee had to review 100+ submissions to pick the top 32 sessions and 2 hands-on-labs sessions. The conference focus has certainly expanded from Java language to the Java platform and had a few talks even on Scala, Android, and HTML 5.

The slides from my "Java EE 6 and GlassFish v3: Paving the path for future" are available below:

Several demos shown (or not because of time shortage) during the talk are available at:

• TOTD #91: Applying Servlet 3.0 "web-fragment.xml" to Apache Wicket
• TOTD #101: Applying Servlet 3.0 "web-fragment.xml" to Lift
• TOTD #95: EJB 3.1 Simplified packaging
• TOTD #93: Getting started with GlassFish v3 and NetBeans 6.8: Simple Servlet 3.0 + JPA 2.0 app
• TOTD #94: JSF 2.0 + JPA 2.0 application using GlassFish v3 and NetBeans 6.8
• TOTD #81: Getting Started with Servlet 3.0 using NetBeans 6.x
• TOTD #102: Java EE 6 wizards (Servlet 3.0 and EJB 3.1) in Eclipse
• Session preservation & Deploy-on-save using NetBeans and Eclipse
• Screencast #26: Deploy, Run, Debug Rails applications using NetBeans and GlassFish

Most of the English-speaking sessions are by Sun speakers so could not attend other sessions that I wanted to.

Here are some pictures from the event:

It was certainly a pleasure to meet Bert Ertman, Klaasjan Tukker, Bert Breeman and other folks involved behind NLJUG and JFall 2009. The complete photo album is available:

Now to Rome for delivering an all-day GlassFish workshop at a partner’s location. And then finally home … phew!

Technorati: conf nljug jfall amsterdam glassfish v3 javaee

JFall 2009 is organized in the beautiful city of Bussum, The Netherlands – a 20 minutes train ride from Amsterdam. I checked into the hotel yesterday and, as always, found a good running trail right by the hotel.

Here is the clickable map if you are interested:

It took about 36 minutes to complete this 4.1 miles route because of two reasons. Firstly I was enjoying the landscape, color of fall trees and the typical architecture of homes on the trail. And secondly I kinda got lost and it started becoming dark …  but anyway managed back to the hotel by asking around.

Even though Dutch is the primary language but everybody (at least every one I talked to) speaks English so language was not an issue

Technorati: running jfall amsterdam bussum

GlassFish v3 provides a REST interface to management and monitoring information as discussed in TOTD #96. As mentioned in that blog "the REST interface is a lower level API that enables toolkit developers and IT administrators to write their custom scripts/clients using language of their choice". This blog introduces a tool that uses the REST API to provide management and monitoring of GlassFish v3 and is written using JavaFX.

This tool is only a proof-of-concept that demonstrates that GlassFish v3 REST interface is functionally very rich and can indeed be used to write third-party administration tools. The tool uses a subset of the REST interface and exposes only a limited amount of management and monitoring capabilities otherwise exposed. After all this is a proof-of-concept

A screencast of this tool in action along with a downloadable JNLP version will soon be available. For now, here is a snapshot of the main window of this tool:

The main screen allows you to enter a URL for the GlassFish administration. Then the GlassFish instance can be stopped/restarted from the main window using the buttons on top right. There is an animation at the bottom of the screen where the glassfish is swimming in the ocean and is directly related to the state of server running in the background. If the server is running, the animation works. If the server is not running then the animation stops as well.

The main screen has three main buttons:

• "List Applications" – list all the applications deployed on the running instance
• "Show Monitoring Levels" – show/Update all the monitoring levels
• "Server Stats" – show statistics of the running server

Clicking on "List Applications" shows the list of applications deployed on this particular instance. Here is how a snapshot looks like for an instance running on my localhost at port 4848:

As shown in the screen, it shows a radio-bulleted list of all the applications. Each bullet is also accompanied by an image indicating the type of application – Web or Rails for now. Select the application and click on "Monitor" button to monitor that particular application. The REST API exposes a vast amount of monitoring data but a subset of monitoring data is displayed for Web and Rails application for now. Here is a snapshot of the monitoring data published for a Web application:

As evident by the list of engines, this web application has EJBs bundled as well. It also shows total number of Servlets/JSPs loaded, number of requests made to this web application and some other monitoring data.

Here is a snapshot of the monitoring data published for a Rails application:

It shows number of JRuby runtimes configured for the application, number of requests sent to the application, number of responses with different HTTP access codes and some other data.

The monitoring levels of different containers can be easily updated by clicking on "Show Monitoring Levels" as shown below:

And finally some server statistics are shown by clicking on "Server Stats" as shown below:

It shows when the server was started, host/port information, version and finally how long the server has been running for. The dials are an animation that shows the server up time.

Here are other related JavaFX and GlassFish related blogs published earlier:

• TOTD #23: JavaFX Client invoking a Metro endpoint
• JavaFX 1.0 launched – access services hosted on embedded GlassFish

How are you going to use the REST interface exposed by GlassFish v3 in your environment ?

Are you using JavaFX with GlassFish together in any way ?

Leave a comment on this blog if you do!

Technorati: javafx glassfish v3 rest web jruby rubyonrails rest administration monitoring management

JFall is the annual conference of NL JUG – the 11 year old JUG of Netherlands. This year its happening on Nov 11 at SPANT! I’ll be speaking on Java EE 6 & GlassFish v3 (14:20 – 15:10) there and have lots of cool demos to show through out the talk. And also stay tuned for a brand new demo that shows JavaFX and GlassFish v3 integration. With over 1000 attendees, the conference is already sold out so if you have not registered yet then you have to wait until next year

Here is the list of several Sun sessions:

• Writing Asynchronous Web Application (Comet) using the Atmosphere Framework
• Event driven Architecture with Glassfish ESB
• Keynote – Enterprise 2.0: New Technologies, Innovations and Communities
• JavaFX: Building Real World Applications
• JDK7: What’s In and What’s Not
• Java and JavaFX Technology and the Nintendo Wiimote: Just How Much Fun Can You Have?
• Java EE 6 and GlassFish v3: Paving the path for future

Here are the sessions that I’d like to attend:

• 9:00 0 -9:15: Opening
• 9:15 – 10:00: Keynote – Enterprise 2.0: New Technologies, Innovations and Communities
• 10:25-11:15
  • Migrating your Java EE 5 applications to Java EE 6
  • Writing Asynchronous Web Application (Comet) using the Atmosphere Framework
• 11:20 – 12:10 Scaling Out with Hadoop and NoSql
• 14:20 – 15:10: Java EE 6 and GlassFish v3: Paving the path for future (of course this one
• 15:45 – 16:35:
  • The future of Enterprise Dependency Injection – JSR 299
  • JDK7: What’s In and What’s Not
• 16:40 – 17:30:
  •  Eclipse e4: a new beginning
  • Java and JavaFX Technology and the Nintendo Wiimote: Just How Much Fun Can You Have?

Most of the sessions are in Dutch so may have to fall back on English speaking sessions

Here are some quick data points …

• Complete list of sessions and schedule
• Archive of previous conferences: JFall 2004, JFall 2005, JFall 2006, JFall 2007, JFall 2008
• Archive of all NL JUG Events

Also trying to arrange a slot in the local Amsterdam Ruby Meetup to talk about JRuby/Rails/GlassFish, lets see if it works out. Otherwise we might somewhere in the hotel lobby

And as always, I’m looking for running trails in Amsterdam & Bussum. Any body interested in running together ?

Technorati: glassfish v3 javaee javafx sun amsterdam nljug jfall ams.rb meetup

With a variety of public cloud hosting solutions available in the market such as Amazon, Rackspace and GoGrid and private solutions like Eucalyptus, Terremark, and VMWare, Right Scale offers a cloud management platform that operates on most of them. Using Right Scale’s platform, you don’t need to write scripts to launch EC2 instances, or think about plugging your own monitoring / management mechanisms for health check, or worry about lock-in to a particular cloud provider. Ease-of-use and a faster on-ramp for going production on a cloud are other key reasons amongst several other benefits offered by Right Scale.

Right Scale‘s mantra "Real customers, Real deployments, Real benefits" was truly evident in their first ever user meetup. Other than discussing the trends, product road map and services offered by Right Scale, the most interesting part was the customer testimonials.

Greg Taylor from Sony Music uses Right Scale to manage it’s artists fan sites. Their main reasons for using Right Scale are largest choice of Operating System & AMI, multiple redundant data center reduce risk, and server templates/scripts versioning into portal. They are very happy with MySQL master/slave configuration server templates and have been able to scale to millions of users in a day (e.g. with michaeljackson.com). Michael Dosik from FanSnap (ticket search engine) leverage RightScale for automation instead of adding staff. Auto-scaling, RightScripts, Dashboard/monitoring and ease-of-use are other features specific that brings them to RightScale. Sam Ramji from Sonoa Systems (visibility, management, and control for Cloud services) talked about cutting down their configuration time from 3-4 days on EC2 to hours on RightScale platform and reduced concerns around portability as the main reasons for picking this platform. Read a more complete report about the meetup here.

Here are some other data points …

• Scalable Web Sites, Test & Dev, Business Intelligence, Backup & Recovery, Mobile Services, and Grid Computing are the highest usage areas by Right Scale users
• Fast on-ramp, Ease of setup, Ease of maintenance, IT visibility & control, Retain best practices, Productivity, Agility, Reliability, Predictability, and Portability are are some of the key benefits to Right Scale users.
• 100% production usage on EC2 for now
• Ubuntu 9.10, CentOS 5.4, Windows 2003, Windows 2008 support coming (Ubuntu 8.04 used internally)
• RHEL is the most often requested platform
• Chef integration is the future direction, most new features like Machine Tags are targeted at Chef only
• Right Scale’s CEO recommended to use the free version for 2 servers and the commercial version for 6-8+ servers
• Monitoring features: monit integration, CPU/Disk/Network/MySQL/Apache/others, Auto-scaling based on alerts, 7-day free monitoring

The meetup very much lived to it’s promise of "NO! HYPE" buttons which were distributed to all the attendees. Each attendee was given a tee-shirt which had "707,007+" printed in big letters in the front. This is the number of servers launched by Right Scale so far. The "NO! HYPE" promise became much more evident after attending some sessions at SYS-CON Cloud Computing Expo which were still talking about philosophies / theories. The cocktail party in the evening provided a great atmosphere to mingle with the folks behind Right Scale.

So far no pictures from the meetup are available on flickr but hopefully they will show up here.

Over all, I really enjoyed the presentations at the meetup, meeting the Right Scale folks, and food/drinks at the cocktail party

Technorati: rightscale cloud meetup