Cross-Site Replication with JBoss Data Grid

Hi all -

At the recently concluded Red Hat Tech Exchange in June, I presented a demo of how to make use of the cross-site replication feature that is included in JBoss Data Grid. The majority of the work for the demo was done previously by Tristan Tarrant (https://twitter.com/tristantarrant), so many thanks go to him of course.

The YouTube link is over here. So go ahead and have a look!

Cheers,
-Navin.

Singapore JBug - SCB talks Fuse

Greetings readers,

A couple of weeks ago we held another iteration of the Singapore JBoss User Group. We managed to have an external speaker in which I was glad about. The man is Ramkumar K.B. and he works for Standard Chartered Bank (SCB) in Singapore. They're one of our local JBoss customers.

Ram spoke about how they applied the JBoss Fuse for a mobile banking application in Indonesia. It provided some interesting insight as to how people in the real world are making use of Fuse along with the process of building from scratch up to actually deploying the project live. Furthermore, it's interesting for us at JBoss because there is a drive towards a mobile application platform (http://aerogear.org/) which will allow enterprises to swiftly and easily develop mobile applications for their businesses.

Naturally, Ram and his team were very happy with making use of our technology given that he proudly advertised that the number of lines of code was very low while using Fuse while comment lines were in abundance. The fact that they had the time to run these analytics alone was surprising enough!

Ram talking Fuse

The crowd was actually quite small, that's because we tried a new format - single content presentation and an earlier time in order to capture a more attentive audience. I think that even though there weren't many people present, the few who were there were very interested in the content presented by Ram and the discussions were very engaging.

Probably a good time here to express my thanks towards Ram and everyone in the Singapore team who helped put the event together.

What else am I up to?

Thought I'd add in an extra little plus here to tell you what else is happening and what else is around the corner. I have been helping some interns locally while they are building this year's Red Hat Challenge (http://goo.gl/mBkieN). I'm pretty impressed with the quality and speed of their work and we have our fingers crossed that when the challenge goes live at the end of October it will go through smoothly. I'll be sure to write up a blog post on my thoughts there by the end of the project.

For the next JBug iteration, we are looking at having our next event at some point in the middle of October. Once again, keep your eyes and ears open for news on that.

As usual - thanks to all for reading up!

New Year, shiney new blog and big new plans

Hello Community!

Hope you enjoyed the festive season. This blog is about a talk I carried out last month to some students in Singapore about how to deploy apps to OpenShift via JBoss Developer Studio (JBDS). I purposely didn't blog immediately to allow for the dust to settle in a sense, so that I could give a more objective review of the day.

Before I continue any further, I must express my gratitude towards Alan Ho, Charles Tang and Xinjun Li in the Marketing division in Singapore who helped set it up. Thanks also go to Burr Sutter for his EAP 6 on demo which is on Vimeo.

Let's start by recapping the talk. We showed students how to deploy apps to OpenShift by using JBoss Developer Studio. JBDS allows people to deploy their apps to OpenShift through a few mouse clicks - negating the need for the command line. 

Given that it was my first formal demo I think that it was fairly successful - I'd give it a 6.5/10. There were bound to be issues that I couldn’t really predict - the WiFi failed but iPhone tethering saved my skin!

2 important points about students. They tend to be shy about asking questions and love free stuff. Our bright idea was to give away some sets of headphones for those who asked 'interesting' questions. Unfortunately - that failed. Perhaps we should tell them what they'll win first!

After the talk, several of the students spent about 45 minutes asking genuinely interesting questions about JBDS and OpenShift. It was really heartening to see people keen to use JBoss in their graded work and personal lives too.

See? Not everyone was asleep!

The reason that I am looking forward to speaking with students is that while I was a student (up until very recently), I felt that JBoss could do better in terms of engaging with students in general. Now that I am an employee, I have a chance to change that. In the short term, we've decided to go out to some of these events and have some fun with the demos. That's it - just enjoy ourselves. We shouldn't expect people to just jump on the bandwagon immediately - those things take time. The long term goal is a bit more complex:

There isn't any existing JBoss User Group in the country at the moment. Ideally, these talks would be planting the seeds for a fully self-sufficient developer community. In essence, that's the big question for the year - how successfully can we plant the seeds of getting people interested in our technology?

All in, I’m really glad I had the chance to conduct the talk. There are improvements to be made and I’m looking forward to carrying on in 2013 for sure.

Thanks!

Navin.