Java + You + Ideas

I just got back from JavaOne 2008 this past weekend, and have had some time to reflect and recover from working in the Appistry booth. The theme "Java + You" seemed to cause any number of people to go "huh?" (so as a theme, perhaps not so great). However, there certainly were a lot of "you" that stopped by the booth, and we had a blast meeting you and talking about technology.

There have been a lot of complaints across the blogosphere since JavaOne that Java is becoming marginalized and boring. Perhaps that is true, particularly if one is focused pretty much on the same old same old stuff: dynamic web, user interfaces, stand-alone application servers, etc. On the other hand, there are exciting things happening in the industry. I’m particularly excited by what’s happening with federations of mobile devices, social networking, and distributed computing. Can Java have a place in these arenas? Sure it can, if the Java community will take it there.

From my view in the Appistry booth during JavaOne, it never ceased to amaze me the number of people stopping by that were doing cool, new stuff. Many of the new ideas at play in the industry push beyond the old school ways of computing, and need new ways to get the job done. The old school models just don’t hack it any more (for example, Twitter’s failure to scale) Many of you came to the Appistry booth looking at distributed computing as part of the solution to making your new ideas take flight.

When we founded Appistry in 2001, we were in the same position: we had new ideas that deserved to take flight in a big way. All of us came from backgrounds where we spent too much time worrying about scale and reliability. We wanted a new way to abstract all that stuff out of the application so that the developer (us!) didn’t have to think about it.  We knew early on that our designs and initial implementations were visionary and way ahead of extant grid products. Being a pioneer in a market can be tough in many ways, but we are now far from alone in saying that a new generation of distributed computing is key to our industry’s growth and success. 

JavaOne this year showed a surge of architects, developers, analysts, and business people in general that "get" grid-based application platforms, and are actively looking to our space to solve problems of scale, reliability, and deployment for their ideas. Instead of starting conversations with "what is grid computing and why the heck should I care", many came to the Appistry booth educated, and ready to talk nuts and bolts, digging at key features about what differentiates Appistry Enterprise Application Fabric. It was great to see eyes light up when you’d hit an answer to someone’s key concern or worry, and they’d go, "ahhh, got it!"

Appistry’s Open Distribution model really resonated at JavaOne also. We gave away a MacBook Air during the show, and  to qualify for the drawing, everyone signed up for our Peer2Peer developer community ("Get an MBA in Scalability" — heh heh). This gave us chance to tell a lot of people about Open Distribution, and Peer2Peer.

What is the open distribution model? Everyone that registers for our Peer2Peer developer community (free registration), can download the Appistry EAF Community Edition product, and receive a free, Community Edition license. The license is good for five servers and/or ten CPU cores (in whatever combination). It really jazzed folks that the license is permanent, doesn’t die, and can be used for production if you want. And, of course, you’ve got the Peer2Peer community to support you along the way.

JavaOne was a great time, and I look forward to Microsoft Tech Ed in Orlando next month, where we get to do it again (being one of the few cross-platform scalability options means we get to show both Java and .NET developers the love). We’ll have a give-away at Tech Ed also, so stop by and see us!  Also, we are giving away another MacBook Air after the first week of June, so if you haven’t registered, hop over to Peer2Peer and register for your chance to get your MBA in scalability.

See you in the forums!