Van Riper's Blog

April 2008 Archives

Java™ User Groups: Think Globally, Act Locally

This JUG Community panel session I organized was accepted for CommunityOne. Yes! The slides and the resource links are available now for this session.

It is not too late to register for CommunityOne being held on May 5th at Moscone Center. CommunityOne attendees will enjoy free access to the JavaOne Pavilion and General Sessions on Tuesday, May 6th. Registration is free, but space is limited, so save your spot today. Tell them I sent you by entering W0977217 as your referral code when signing up.

Redmonk will again be organizing an unconference track during CommunityOne. So, that session you failed to submit by the deadline could still happen as part of the unconference component of the day. Or that session you were hoping to see that is not listed on the schedule for the day can still be proposed as part of the unconference.

Personally, I'm looking forward to having Lunch with the Java Posse again this year. There are technical sessions planned covering the full gamut from OpenSolaris, Glassfish and OpenJDK on one end of the spectrum to Ruby, Python and PHP at the other end. The day ends with a reception from 6pm until 7:30pm. If you want to say hello, I'll be hangin' with the other JUG Leaders by the bean bag chairs at the foot of the escalators around 7pm.

Google App Engine: Request Java Runtime

I was at the Google Campfire One event on April 7th where Google App Engine was officially launched. The whole thing was recorded. So, you didn't miss anything except for the *cold*. Good thing there were camp fires and hot chocolate. Brrrr! Anyway, it sounds like a real sweet and free web application hosting environment. The problem is the only runtime supported initially is Python. However, you can show some Java love by starring this issue that asks Google to add Java support.

Important Note: Please do *not* add a "+1" comment to this issue like many others have already done. All that is necessary is to star the issue. Comments are intended to provide more information about an issue and everyone that stars an issue sees these comments. So, it ends up generating essentially spam email for everyone that has starred the issue.

For persistent storage, you will have access to the same BigTable data storage used by Google's internal applications. You can query your data using GQL. GQL is a SQL-like language for retrieving data entities from the App Engine scalable datastore. While GQL's features are different from those of a query language for a traditional relational database, the GQL syntax is similar to that of SQL.

My favorite part of the evening launch event was Guido van Rossum discussing why he joined the project. I particularly enjoyed his sense of humor starting around the 3:20 mark on this segment of the recording.

If you would like to be one of the first 10K beta testers, you had better sign up right now. If they are not all taken already, I expect those beta accounts to be gone soon.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.