JBoss Clustering Technologies

On Wednesday I had the pleasure to present JBoss Clustering technologies (JBossAS/JGroups/Infinispan) to a good number of computer science students at the Technological Educational Institute of Athens, right after a presentation from Xenofon Papadopoulos on the subject of experiences from OLPC deployments.

The main points of my talk:

• The need for clustering and high availability
• What clustering means inside the application server
• The layered approach to implementing the clustering facilities
• JGroups as the base infrastructure for reliable multicasting
• Caches, Data Grids, Clouds and Infinispan
  

The advent of virtualization and cloud computing present an exciting field for clustering and data grid technologies. This should be particularly interesting to computer science students who can learn or help shape the future by using or contributing to popular opensource projects.

A big thanks to Prof. Ifigeneia Founta for hosting the talk.

/Dimitris

Open Source, Open Horizons

Just came back from a 2-hour talk at Tech. Edu. Inst. of Athens, department of Informatics.

It was nice to see a full room and meet old friends, exactly 20 years after I first stepped my foot in those buildings.

The talk was called "Open Source, Open Horizons" and showcased the learning and professional opportunities presented to computer science students through the world of opensource development. The argument goes like this:

1. Studying, extending and building upon OpenSource software is the best way to learn, and produce something useful on the way.
   
2. OpenSource software nowadays is everywhere, so the future computer professionals will find it in their path, one way or another.
3. OpenSource software presents a unique opportunity for computer geeks to show to the world what their are capable of and even make a career out of it.

The classroom was packed so the interest is there. But we need to get more academics involved, as they are the ones to drive adoption.

Many thanks to Michalis Grivas and George Meletiou who organized the event.

Cheers
/Dimitris