CommunityOne

Getting to JavaOne early to test out the snowman lab actually gave me a chance to attend some of the sessions and events going on today at CommunityOne. This is a free conference that is geared towards users and developers of open source technologies and software. Here's a rundown of what I did/saw:

• The keynote this morning had two main focuses: cloud computing and OpenSolaris. There was some good stuff in there; Solaris has long had a bad reputation for being very unfriendly, making many oblivious to its core quality. Solaris is consistently the best performer in many of the Project Darkstar benchmarks that we've run, for example. I think OpenSolaris is slowly, but surely, making Solaris more accessible to the masses.
• I attended two morning talks, one on the features in the latest Subversion release and one on a Hudson use case. Most of the material I was already aware of but looking at some of the things they were doing with Hudson, I think we should really investigate expanding our Hudson deployment. Currently we have a Hudson server doing continuous integration builds on each commit to the Project Darkstar trunk. However, it's only deployed on a single Solaris machine so our continuous test platform is limited to that. In the presentation, these guys were using Hudson to fire up multiple virtual machines representing various platforms on demand to do cross-platform testing of Netbeans. This could also be an option for us.
• In the afternoon, I went to Chris Melissinos's talk on Project Darkstar. Chris is actually the Master of Ceremonies for the entire JavaOne conference and is one of the original promoters of the Project Darkstar project. If you've ever met him, you know that he's one of the most dynamic and outspoken people there is. Which makes this next fact even more surprising in that I actually ended up giving part of Chris's talk. About five minutes before the session was about to start, I bumped into Chris and chatted with him for a few minutes. Then he said something like "Oh good I'm glad you're here, do you mind coming up and sitting on stage to answer any technical questions people might have?" Um, sure? The next thing I know some guy is putting a microphone on me and I'm sitting in front of these blinding lights. Then, about halfway through the talk, Chris stumbles across some technical slides and says "Owen do you want to give this part of the presentation? Better you then me butchering it." Ummmm, ok? I spent the next fifteen minutes or so ad-libbing a sequence of presentation slides, having no idea what was coming next. Thanks Chris! The truth is, the presentation actually did turn out pretty well. Chris was his usual dynamic and entertaining self and I managed to bring just enough technical depth to the show. Karl suggested I stay away from Chris before he gives the JavaOne keynote tomorrow morning though!
• During the keynote this morning I briefly heard them mention something about the OpenSolaris Juicer. The Juicer is a service which allows anyone to submit a piece of software for OpenSolaris for test and review to be included in the official "contrib" repository of OpenSolaris packages. Software packaging and distribution is interesting to me so I took a peak at their late afternoon session on the Juicer. It's good to see that OpenSolaris is finally approaching something close to the apt system that has been around for years on Debian and now Ubuntu.

That's about it for my day. I met up with a few others for dinner and am now getting ready to go to sleep. Big day tomorrow with the Project Snowman lab scheduled in the afternoon.