Year in review 2011

Taking a personal look back at a very busy year in which I spent a great amount of my focus on JBoss technologies, writing and presenting all over the world. Trips to Sweden, Spain, England, Ireland, Belgium, Germany and Boston, USA.

Instead of rattling off all the stuff that passed by this year, I would refer you to the Blog Archive in the sidebar of this blog where you can follow that action month by month. ;-)

On the cycling front I was able to make good use of my lunch hours when working from home and these one hour rides added up! I clocked around 3000 km this year and with travel I was able to ride in the Ardennes (Rochefort), Germany (Trier), Limburg (Cauberg, Keutenberg, etc) and in the Veluwe (Postbank). I got my climbing hat on this year with the top being the trip to Trier (first time I had to stop on a climb to rest, ever...) and the Ardennes (single day ride with over 500m climbing, rockin' area around Rochefort).

Take care, thanks for reading in 2011 and see you next year!

Open Source Conference 2011 - OpenShift, jBPM and much more in Amsterdam at OSC11

OSC11 ready to rock!

Some time ago I mentioned that I would be giving talks on jBPM and OpenShift at OSC11, well let me tell you a bit about that experience!

Scott Crenshaw interview.

Interview
It all started on Thursday afternoon when I arrived at the hotel in Amsterdam to check in. Our VP Cloud, Scott Crenshaw was stuck in traffic coming back from a customer visit and I was asked to fill in for him with a reporter from CloudWorks. I got the chance to focus more on OpenShift than on the general Red Hat strategy until Scott arrived, at which time I was able to relax and snap a few pictures of him doing his magic.

View from 17th floor.

After that I got the chance to actually go up to my room before heading over to the venue. I have never stayed 17 floors above Amsterdam, but as you can see, the view was amazing over Central Train Station and the river behind it. I know, the photo looks like a hotel room with a painting on the wall, but believe me that is the view over the city. At night you could just sit in your hotel room and stare out the window at the city lights.

Keynote Scott Crenshaw

 Setup PTA
At the venue, the Amsterdam Passenger Terminal (PTA), the local cruise ship terminal, we arrived with our technical team to ensure a few things were going to be working smoothly for the demos and sessions. The rooms I would be talking in were about 80 seats, so nice for break-out sessions! We hung a few banners, watched the crews setup the main stage and then headed for our hotel to get ready for the Speakers Dinner.

OpenShift t-shirt was a hit!

Speaker Dinner
That evening there was a speakers dinner that started with drinks, then food and finished up in a lounge bar on the top floor of the Mint Hotel, again, another nice view over the city of Amsterdam. The nice part was chatting with the various keynote speakers, where I got some time with the VP from Alfresco talking BPM and with Scott Crenshaw talking OpenShift a bit.

Open Source Conference
Friday was the big event, we got there early and watched around 800 attendees (more than doubling the number from last year) appearing slowly out of the morning fog to come enjoy a day filled with Open Source and networking. It was amazing to see the PTA filled up with customers, partners and contacts that I know from my years of working on Open Source.  It was not possible to cross the main floor without getting stopped by someone at least 3 times, amazing interactions!

The OpenShift talk was packed full with all seats eventually taken and standing room filled on the sides. Even though the talks were only 30 minutes, it was possible to get some nice interactions with the crowd. I got some interesting Python and PHP questions, passed out a few goodies and after the talk even had to give away the last t-shirt I was wearing to a fan! The jBPM talk was filled also and again had to put a lot of information into the short time frame, but there were some really nice reactions to the talk in discussions after the session and on Twitter.

Both sessions slides will be made available via the OSC website, but I will include them here for all to enjoy. It was a long day, a busy day, but filled with great people at a great location. I am seriously looking forward to next years event and wonder if we can double the attendance again!

OSC11 - An OpenShift Primer for Developers to get your Code into the Cloud

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OSC11 - The future is now for all your Business Processes

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JAX 2012 - Integration woes, solving the migration to BPMN2

Submitted a talk to JAX 2012, fingers crossed!

Abstract:
We stand now on the brink of a revolution. The future calls to us with a promise of standardized processes and a specification to lead us. There is one small catch... what to do with our existing enterprise integration projects? This session will help you position your existing JBoss projects for the challenges of migrating to the JBoss Business Process Management System with real world examples.

JAX 2012 - The future is now for all your Business Processes

Submitted a talk to JAX 2012, fingers crossed!

Abstract:
A lot has happened in the BPM area over the last few years, with the intro of the BPMN 2.0 standard, the increasing interest in more dynamic and adaptive processes, integration with business rules and event processing, case management, etc. In this session, we will show you how JBoss tackles these challenges, discuss migration to this new platform and give an overview of its most import features.

JAX 2012 - Rise above the Cloud hype with OpenShift

Submitted a talk to JAX 2012, fingers crossed!

Abstract:

Whether a seasoned Java developer looking to start on EE6 or you wrote your 1st line yesterday, the Cloud is turning out to be the perfect environment for developing apps. Join us for an action-packed hour of power. If you want to learn how the OpenShift PaaS works, how investing 1hr of your time can change everything you though you knew about  developing apps in the Cloud, this session is for you!

My JUDCon 2011 in London was cloudy with a bit of migration

Great location JUDCon 2011 London

 Well, where do I start? That is the first thought that enters my head when I look back at two days of JUDCon in London! I will share with you my direct experiences and hope you enjoy them as much as I enjoyed hanging out with all the JBoss Rock Stars.

I flew in late on Sunday evening, as I had a morning meeting that kept me away from the morning sessions where there was a session focused on jBPM5 by Kris Verlaenen. There was also an OpenShift / Cloud track running parallel on my track so that meant I missed all of that.

Once I got to JUDCon it was well streamlined and I held my session on Launching into the Future with the jBPM Migration Project. I asked if there were jBPM3 users and over 1/2 raised their hands. I understand why there are there, so I go around the room asking the others why they are there. Most are also interested in moving existing jBPM3 projects to jBPM5 but did not raise their hands initially, sneaky! I also noted that there were a few Red Hat support engineers that will have to help support jBPM and were keen to see what we had done. Kudos to them for self education!

I kept the session more conversational and person with lots of interaction along the way. I walked through the history leading up to now for the project and demo'ed both the conversion in Eclipse, in an OpenShift webapp we have deployed and in the latest jBPM web designer deployed in OpenShift. I also included HOWTO slides so that everyone can put these tools together themselves in minutes.

Launching into the Future with jBPM Migration Project

By the way, the lunches, snacks and dinner were top rate. Plenty of food and everyone enjoyed the beers and pizza going into the evening Lightning Talks / Hackfest as you can see in the pictures.

The JBoss Asylum team put on a live show for us by recording the podcast as the first Lightning Talk. This was really quite good as the beer and pizza had already been flowing. You will notice lots of laughs in the background once they release this episode!

Lightning Talks were crowded

Finally we got down to business with both Max Andersen and myself targeting OpenShift in our talks. I hit the general note, inviting our first official Booth Babe to the stage (a lady who agreed to help out and got a great free shirt). I invited everyone who wanted to try it out to drop by our table at the front and we would help them install their apps into the cloud. I put a bit of Halloween tint on the initial slide, got some good cheers from that one. Again, it might have just been the beer? Jeremy Brown got up and demo'ed a pretty neat use of the 5x free OpenShift Express instances by showing how to use continuous builds with Jenkins to push to new instances for each feature branch a team would create on a development project.

Max Andersen then gave a talk on the JBossTools integration of OpenShift, including a demo of the upcoming release. This is a great step for the Java developers out there that don't want to have to use Ruby based CLI tooling from the shell. Well done!

Lets Get Started with Openshift

We then proceeded to have a bit of a hackfest, working on OpenShift and jBPM Migration Project as we chatted with customers, developers and other fellow JBoss'ians. The next day was spent in the morning watching a few of the JBoss related sessions such as jClouds and configuration management for JBoss AS7, but I had a plane to catch so was on the way home before it all ended.

It was again a really great time, I hope that you will make one of the next JUDCon's in 2012 as you really will get the chance to dunk yourself into the world of JBoss like no there conference can offer. See you there!

jBPM Web Designer integrates jBPM Migration Tooling in the OpenShift Cloud

New migration feature

Last week the jBPM Web Designer screen-casted the release of a new version (well, a beta anyway) that includes some pretty neat features. The one we here in the jBPM Migration Project team are most proud of is that they have exposed the jBPM Migration Tooling!

paste in jpdl3.2 + gpd files

We thought it would be nice to provide a playground in the OpenShift Cloud for you the public to give it a try. Here are a few screenshots showing the designer, the import pop-up with a jBPM3.2 process definition and the corresponding gpd file containing positioning information and finally the migrtated BPMN2 process definition.

Here are the example jPDL and GPD sources so you can directly cut&paste them into the migration pop-up to test it:


jPDL3.2 process definition source

 
  
 

 
  
   A human task.
  
  
   
    A test task.
   
   
  
  
 

 

GPD location information source

You can't save the process, but you can view the source in various forms with the tabs at the bottom of the screen. Give the BPMN2 tab a try!

View source tabs

I will be presenting this and more on the current status of the jBPM Migration Project in London next week at JUDCon. The session is entitled, Launching into the future with jBPM Migration Project.

See you there? ;-)

London JBug - JBoss jBPM Night (slides)

I gave the talk entitled, JBoss jBPM, the future is now for all your Business Processes tonight for about 30 attendees. It was pretty interactive with the audience showing a real interest in the new jBPM5 tooling, flexible processes and migration tooling.

Thanks again to all who turned up and the pizza was great afterwards!

Here are the slides:

JBoss jBPM, the future is now for all your Business Processes

View more presentations from Eric D. Schabell.

A few pictures were taken while I was talking:

London JBUG - 17 Oct 2011

From Code to Cloud - PHP on Red Hat's OpenShift (Slides)

As posted previously, I spoke at the International PHP Conference and Web Technology Conference in Mainz, Germany today. Here are the slides from the session, which included the audience participating directly in deploying Zend, Cake and Symfony frameworks into the OpenShift Express solution!

From Code to Cloud - PHP on Red Hat's OpenShift

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