A ticket for Madonna

Try to get a ticket online for Madonna's next concert in Athens from http://www.ticketpro.gr/ and you'll see something like:

Server under heavy load
Server under heavy load. Please try again later
Thank you for understanding

The .asp application backing up the website cannot obviously cope with the load of (I can guess) thousands of users trying to get hold of a ticket.

It's nice to collect huge commissions on the tickets sold (even an unbelievable 10% overcharge for those unlucky that want to pay with a credit card), but when it comes to investing in technology and know-how, those guys just don't get it.

Somebody should tell them about 3-tier architectures, caching techniques, load-balancing, load testing, clustering, etc. Moving to Java and an opensource platform could help, as well.

I could only laugh while reading how Betfair are able to handle 1 million transactions per second with a mix of proprietary and opensource solutions, that includes JBoss and Linux on top of commodity x86 hardware. Not exactly the same market sector but the technology is similar.

So do you want a ticket for Madonna? Better go stand in the queue!

JBoss AS5 Q&A at InfoQ

An interview of yours truly on the current status of JBossAS 5 was just published at InfoQ.

I hope you find it interesting.

JBoss on OpenCoffee (video & slides)

I've just realised the video & slides from my presentation at OpenCoffee XII is now on-line. If you have some lengthy compilation job going on and want to kill 20 minutes of your time listening to the JBoss story and how Professional Opensource came to be (in Greek), click here.

Railo joins JBoss.org!

I suppose you have seen many times fancy websites with URLs ending in .cfm? .cfm stands for Cold Fusion Markup Language and is the language originally used to write application for the Adobe Cold Fusion appserver.

After the opening of the CFML language alternative server environments where created to host CFML application, with Railo being one of them (and the fastest, I hear).

Just today Sacha announced on his blog that Railo will be another member of the growing jboss.org community!

What does this mean? That soon you will have a full open source stack to run your CFML applications: Railo, on top of JBossAS! At the same time, we'll make an effort to provide CFML applications with access to JBoss services, like caching, clustering, messaging.

Those are really exciting news! Stay tuned...

JHUG Athens - Sat/7th - Be There!

Another event organised by the Java Hellenic User Group (JHUG) will take place the coming Saturday in central Athens.

For all those Java enthusiasts make sure you don't miss this event! There is an excellent panel of distinguished speakers from Sun talking about OpenSolaris & Netbeans, along with Kirk Pepperdine on Java Performance & Optimizations.

I'm also very happy that we've managed to bring two key JBoss members in this event: Mark Newton, recently promoted to JBoss.org community Lead, and Manik Surtani, JBoss Cache Lead.

It's a unique opportunity to get the latest news about the jboss.org community and have your questions answered on JBoss Cache and all-things-clustering.

Don't forget to register here.

See you on Saturday!

Out for (Open) Coffee?

Tonight I'm giving a short talk on "Professional Open Source" at the Open Coffee Athens XII event. It's about the JBoss story and how a successful company can be built around an open source project.

At the macro level Professional Open Source is just another manifestation of the power of the Internet enabling people to form communities and collaborate, challenging the status-quo, delivering real value to customers and users alike, and having fun along the way.

If you are up for a chat and a coffee, meet me at Bios this evening.

Cheers
/D