I’ll be speaking at JBoss World / Red Hat Summit again this year. I’m part of 3 sessions focussed on JBoss :

JBoss Enterprise Application Platform Roadmap, Wednesday 2pm

I’ll be sharing our 3-year roadmap and will touch on Java EE 6, HornetQ, Infinispan, support next-Gen (aka Cloud) infrastructure. I’ll also go through some of the changes we’ve recently made to our “release taxonomy”. What I expect you to get from the session is a clear understanding of our major areas of focus and the direction that JBoss EAP is heading in so you can better plan your own deployments. I looked at the feedback forms from last year and the only 2 negative comments were “more chairs please” – hopefully we’ll have a bigger room this year but come early.

Andiamo – Towards Operational Excellence with JBoss, Wednesday 5.30pm

Myself, Andy Miller, Brian Stansberry, Jason Greene and Charles Crouch will be holding this BOF session to discuss some of the changes we’re considering for JBoss EAP 6. Generally the discussion will be around operational ease of use, management, monitoring, tuning, diagnostics, deployment. Getting community input at this stage is super important so come along and tell us what you’d like to see. There’s a good chance of beers afterwards

Java 2020

I’ll be sharing the stage with fellow Brit. and JBoss CTO – Mark Little to discuss Java past, present and future and give a Red Hat perspective of some of the challenges and opportunities ahead. We’ll be covering Next Gen. Infrastructure (aka cloud), Multi-language VMs, virtualization, SOA and many other subjects. We may have time towards the end to discuss England’s performance in the World Cup.

If there are questions or areas you’d like to see us specifically cover in these sessions – either leave me a comment or drop me an email (rich dot sharples at my employer dot com) or message (@richsharples).

JBoss World and Summit represents a great opportunity for me to meet some of my colleagues, learn about other technology areas at Red Hat and spend time with customers. As with all tech. conferences – the real value is in the contacts you make and the hall-way conversations you have. I’ll be around all week – if you want to chat – get in touch.

See you in Boston !

“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then they produce lame marketing videos, then you win.”

- with apologies to the late Mahatma Gandhi.

Actually, I’d say if your competitors are producing videos at the rate that the Websphere marketing team are producing them about JBoss I think you can safely conclude that they’ve given up all hope competing with products and technology. The latest almost makes me feel a little embarrassed for the Websphere team. How the mighty have fallen.

Late on Friday night, one of my drinking / poker buddies told me he was running in the Cary Road Race (10k) starting at 8.30a the next day. I switched from beer to water (admittedly a bit late) and decided to enter as well.

The start is at Koka Amphitheater, just over a mile from my house so I jumped on my bike and headed down to register. It was a little chilly – but otherwise an awesome Spring morning.

I had no real target time or pace (didn’t even wear a watch) I just went along for the run. It’s basically two laps of a circuit starting with a decent hill.

My final time was 52.08 – that’s an 8.24 pace. That doesn’t break any records but was actually pretty fast for me. A 10k is a nice run – not long-enough to get really knackered but long enough to settle into a pace.

So now I have something to beat next year !

Replay Solutions just published a survey about Java Platform usage. The questioning, subsequent analysis and presentation of the results was poor IMO. But they did one thing right – they provided the raw data. Thanks for that.

There’s a posting on TSS entitled “Why is JBoss at the bottom of this list ???”. In typical TSS style – few people actually bothered to read the survey results or question them and a long and rather pointless thread ensues. This post is an expansion of my comment at the end of the TSS thread.

The original report has this chart :

Update – Sunday 4/11/10

My initial (very quick) analysis was wrong. My formula for searching for different categories had a basic reg-ex flaw so I was over-counting JBoss by fair bit. I’ve fixed that mistake (spreadsheet here) and also removed duplicates (responses with both “JB + TC” and “Tomcat” or “JBoss” – I’d already admitted to this minor double counting (in the comments) – the original author’s analysis still includes this error.

So the ranking is now the same as the original author’s but the %’s are different. My apologies to IBM for originally stealing their #2 spot By the way – Red Hat fully supports both Tomcat and JBoss AS – so #1 and #3 rankings and being able to satisfy 87% of the market isn’t such a bad result for us.

[As percentages of respondents - that's : Tomcat = 59%, Websphere = 39%, JBoss = 28%, Weblogic = 23%, Other = 19%]

These rankings (WAS above JBoss) are more representative of larger organizations (where both WAS and WLS have traditionally been stronger) – the latest Eclipse survey shows a similar break-out. Unlike the Eclipse survey – this survey doesn’t have any information on the respondents and they seem to be largely self-selected.

My original points still stand – poor questioning, poor analysis and presentation are common in these kinds of surveys. Always ask for the source data !

The JBoss team is expanding again – we’re looking to fill four PM / PMM roles – strong preference for location is Greater Boston (Westford, MA) :

Product Manager – Application Platforms

Product Marketing Manager – Middleware

Solutions Marketing Manager – Middleware

Technical Marketing Manager – Middleware

Submit your resume online via the above links and ping me if we’ve worked together in the past.

Lef to Right : Iain, Rich, Craig enjoy a post race “sports drink”

Last Sunday I completed the ATT Half Marathon (or Full Pikermi if you prefer). This series of posts is mostly for my own reference but if you’re interested you can read the rest here.

My personal goal was to finish in 1:50 minutes – the time of my last Half (2002?, Bristol). I managed to maintain a good pace for the first nine miles (sub 8.30 and even one sub 8 minute mile) but then basically ran out of energy and the last 4 miles were a struggle. I went pretty light on breakfast and a second Banana would probably have made all the difference. On my previous long runs – energy had never been a problem.

My official time was 1:57:01 – short of my goal but bearing in mind that just a couple of months ago I couldn’t even run 4 miles without stopping; I don’t think it was all that bad and shows that pretty much anyone can run a half with some dedication and a training plan.

This was the first ATT Marathon and I thought it was very well organized and as I’ve mentioned before – the ATT is a great place to run. My only criticism was the early start (7am) and the lack of parking meant that it wasn’t really possible for my family to cheer me across the line. Free beer and pizza after the race made up for the shortcoming though.

I plan to stick with the running – it’s by far the best way to keep fit, burn fat and clear your head. I plan to do the City of Oaks Half in November and maybe one other Half or 10k over the summer. You’ll likely find me on the ATT at least once a month for the longer runs.

I did consider doing a full marathon this year but I’m pretty sure I couldn’t do it without injuring my already knackered knees, feet and ankles. However, I am thinking pretty seriously about attempting a Triathlon this year – if anyone has advice on how to get started – let me know !

Well, it seems that another piece of the Sun OSS portfolio has floated adrift from the Oracle mother-ship. Some of the key developers have left / are leaving Oracle and have joined Rackspace. With this Rackspace essentially becomes the guardian of one of the major development branches of MySQL. It would be interesting to know what Oracle would price their MySQL assets at today.

Apparently it was Apache Web Server’s 15th birthday yesterday – congratulations to anyone who’s ever been involved in the project. I doubt any would have thought that 15 years on, Apache would have become the dominant Web Server on the Web and the foundation of one of the most successful and recognized Open Source forges. For a history of the Apache Web Server and the Apache Software Foundation, head over to the ASF Blog.

Red Hat has been a supporter of Apache Web Server for a long time and has shipped and supported a version in its Red Hat Enterprise Linux for as long as I’ve been noodling with it. Last year we started shipping a standalone, multi-platform distribution as well – JBoss Enterprise Web Server. Earlier today we released the latest version of it and expanded our support for Apache HTTP Server to 14 different Operating System / architecture combinations. The exact component versions are listed here and there’s more information in the Release Notes. If you’re deploying Apache HTTP or Tomcat at scale – Red Hat also supports management of Apache HTTP Server and Tomcat alongside all JBoss products via JBoss Operations Network.

Well the running is going pretty well – I’m starting week 8 with a rest day after a long run yesterday (on the American Tobacco Trail) – I was scheduled to do 11 miles, aiming to do 12 and ended up doing 13.68. This made up for the previous week which was a complete wash-out in terms of mileage due to travel and picking up a nasty bug between Boston and Raleigh.

I have 2 more weeks and weather permitting should be able to get 2 more long runs in before I start tapering down before the run on March 21st – I’d like to diverge from my schedule and see if I can do 16-18 miles – if I can, then I’m going to sign up for the City of Oaks full marathon in November.

One last thing – if you run in the Cary / Raleigh area and haven’t already – make your next run the American Tobacco Trail – it’s mostly flat; it’s a nice even surface, great scenery and shaded from the sun – there are also mile markers to keep you motivated. It’s pretty much the perfect place to run IMO.

The JBoss AS team moved to a more rapid and incremental release cycle with the 6.x family and the second milestone was released today (release notes, download, repo.). The release was lead by Brian Stansberry and new features include :

• Servlet 3.0 / JBoss Web 3.0
• JPA 2.0 / Hibernate 3.5
• JAX-RS 1.0 / RESTEasy 2.0
• Microcontainer 2.2

More detail in blogs from Ales, Brian, Steve and Rémy. Congratulations to Brian on another on-time release and good luck to Jason and team for the next milestone release in a couple of months time.