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While asked how each Spring products are used in the market at the end of today’s training, the instructor showed us a nice website as a reference. Here is the diagram showing the numbers of jobs requiring skills of Spring and EJB. A great answer even though not a direct answer.

Strictly speaking, the jobs are not products, but well reflect what products are in use. So this is a good index on market shares of different products. If you have your products too easy to use, this index works against you.

VMware, Microsoft or Xen?

Following that, Let’s check ESX, XEN and Hyper-V to see how related jobs compare with each other. Here is the diagram. ESX is way above either Hyper-V and XEN.

Administrator, Architect or Developer?

Now it’s clear what directions to go. Let’s look at what specific categories of jobs are in demand there: administrators, architects, or developers?

As you can see, the jobs or populations of both the administrators and architects are more than double of that of developers. My next book should target system administrators and architects as well.

What’s Beyond?

The top 10 trendy keywords at Indeed.com are: Twitter, Cloud Computing, iPhone, Facebook, Corporate Social Responsibility, Blogger Pediatrician, Hospitalist, Social Media, Speech Language Pathologist. Most of these are not related to virtualization itself or even IT. If you want to build up from your current skill sets, cloud computing is definitely the best choice becuase the tranistion should be smoothier than to any others in the list.

I will blog about essential skills for cloud computing professionals later. Stay tuned.

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With SpringSource being part of VMware family, getting a Spring training is certainly a lot easier than before. For one thing, my boss doesn’t need to pay for it.:-)

I just finished my 4-day training starting from this Tuesday. It’s been pretty exhausting given that I had to get up before 7AM to match the central time. But what’s learnt worth the effort.

The coverage of the training includes:

• Day 1 – Integration Foundations including concurrency, remoting, etc.
• Day 2 – Effective Web Services
• Day 3 – Message-Based Systems and Advanced Transaction Management
• Day 4 – Applying Spring Batch and Spring Integration

More details can be found here.

What interested me the most are the Spring JMS and Spring Batch. For those don’t know Spring Batch yet, it’s a batch processing framework similar to the concept of running Shell commands in a batch. As I can see, these two are two important enabling technologies for cloud computing, especially in federated cloud environments where you want to seamlessly shifting workload and balancing them across the boundaries.

I will blog them more when I start to use them in future projects. Stay tuned.

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Just came back from a SDForum meeting organized by its emerging technology SIG. The topic was about the 4 languages in the title. It’s not much about any emerging technology per se, but pretty controversial among the developers.

The organizers invited four panelists and one moderator:

• Clojure advocate – Amit Rathore, author of the forthcoming “Clojure In Action”
• Go advocate – Robert Griesemer, Google, co-author of Go
• Scala advocate – David Pollak, lead author of Lift
• Ruby advocate – Evan Phoenix, lead developer of Rubinius, a high performance Ruby VM
• Moderator – Steve Mezak, co-chair of the SDForum Software Architecture and Modeling SIG, author of Software without Borders

Each of the panelists had 10 minutes of introduction of the language in the first part. Then, they all answered questions ranging from language strength/weakness, library/tool/IDE support, application framework, advice on migrating existing codebase, to how these languages compare to each other.

Here are introductions from the languages’ homepages. See if you can map them to the languages. Read more »

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VMware announced today ”Spring on VMware” promotion in which you may get free licenses of the tc Server in a news release.

To help you get started, VMware is pleased to announce the “Spring on VMware Promotion”. Under this promotion, all customer orders fulfilled  between March 8th 2010 and May 8th 2010 that include products (license only) from the vSphere, vCenter, View or ThinApp product family will receive 2 perpetual, production-use CPU licenses of tc Server Spring Edition 2.0 and 60 days of Evaluation Support for SpringSource (collectively referred to as the “Spring on VMware Bundle”).

Key Terms and Conditions can be found here.

While running Spring on VMware, you want to read this white paper Java in Virtual Machines on VMware® ESX:　Best Practices. It introduces many guidelines to run Java on VMware for the best performance. These guidelines are also applicable for Spring.

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Just got the following email from Andrew Kutz (@sakutz) who wrote the famous VMware Infrastructure (VI) plug-ins whitepaper and created several other great projects like VMM.

David Marshall, Dave McCrory and I, as well as everyone else at Hyper9, are extraordinarily proud to announce SimDK – a VMware vSphere4 simulator which provides vSphere4 API-compatibility for official vSphere4 clients and other applications built using the vSphere4 SDK.. SimDK is an open source project available at http://simdk.sourceforge.net/. You can read more about this exciting announcement at http://akutz.wordpress.com/2010/03/09/simdk.

“What does it mean for me?”

Well, you can leverage this in many different use cases, for example, testing your application for scalability. With SimDK, you don’t need many ESX servers/vCenter servers. You can just simulate them! Having said that, you do need to test your application with real system with smaller scope, at least once before shipping it.

For me, I am particularly interested in having this as a learning tool. If you don’t have ESX/vCenter server but SimDK, you can still learn vSphere Java API and other bindings of vSphere API.

Thanks for the exciting contribution to the open source community, Andrew, David, and Dave!

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Several smart bloggers (Eric Sloof, Justin Emerson, Ian Koenig, Alessandro Perilli) discovered the VMware Labs web site over the weekend. As many pointed out, it’s absolutely cool.

I actually knew it was going to be online this past weekend, but would like to get official announcement from the company before blogging it. The reason I knew the site to go live is because the vSphere Java API I created is one of the first 10 projects.

As expected, all the projects there are not products, therefore not officially supported. But it’s a great way for the company especially R&D team to know what user and developer communities like. So it’s important to exercise your influence by voting for the projects you like. If many folks like a particular project, it’s possible that the project becomes a product officially supported by the company in the future.

Since you are reading this blog, I assume you likely use vSphere Java API directly or indirectly. Please take a moment to vote 5 star for vSphere Java API here.

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VMwareExpress truck came to VMware headquarter before noon today, parking between the gym and office buildings. I went to check it out this afternoon, also enjoyed ice cream in front of the truck.

The following is a picture of the truck. I could use others, but think this one is better because it has the cloud as background.

As you can see from the picture, the truck has bright colors with a slogan saying “VMware – the source for virtualization.” On the right side, there are two big screen showing slides.

Internally the truck body is divided into three parts. The front is a small meeting room; the middle is a demo room for desktop and vSphere products; the rear part is a very small server room behind glasses. Besides the vSphere demos, there are desktop demos like FollowMe desktop that are very useful in hospitals where users move around frequently. You just wave your badge in front a reader to get your desktop and wave again to sign off. Whatever you left as last sign off is what you see at next computer. Great use case for the virtual desktops!

The truck will leave for the 2010 Virtualization Tour. Don’t miss the opportunity to check it out when it goes close to you.

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In vSphere Java API 2.0, I wrote a lightweight caching framework. It’s still experimental but has a great potential to greatly simplify your development work. Commercial companies already use it in their products.

The motivation behind this framework is simple – instead of keep polling the changes from the server side, you keep a local cache that is made as fresh as possible. The View in the vSphere Perl toolkit is one way to do. It caches all properties of a managed object despite the fact that you don’t need that many at all.

The caching framework in vSphere Java API takes another approach. You tells it what managed objects and what properties you want to be cached. After that, the caching framework does its best to read the properties and keep them as fresh as possible.

Architecturally the caching framework is totally separated from the core of the API. You can take it away without any impact on the rest of the API. This is quite different from other toolkit.

Have enough introduction? Let’s take a look at sample code: Read more »

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I came across a blog “5 things VMware must do to fend off Microsoft.” The author Jon Brodkin listed the following musts: cut prices, improve Security, win the desktop war, simplify management, don’t overhype the cloud. Here is a response to the article by Steve Kaplan.

Because I am working on cloud related projects, especially I am the creator of the vSphere Java API that manages the “cloud operating system,” I am curious to know whether VMware is overhyping the cloud computing.

Instead of expressing my opinions, I decided to do a simple research using Google and Wikipedia. To my surprise, the “cloud computing” page does not include VMware in “Cloud computing logical diagram.” The companies listed are Microsoft, Google, Saleforce, Amazon, Yahoo, Rackspace, Zoho. Well, that is good for me to do the next step.

Then, I used Google to search each company’s name and “cloud computing.” I wasn’t testing the performance, but to see how many web pages are there including these keywords. Strictly speaking, the number of hits is not an index of hyping cloud computing, but you can get a good sense on how much marketing effort each company invest into “cloud computing.”

To save you time, I captured the screenshots of each search, and list the most important parts we are interested as follows. Read more »

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WordPress is a great blogging software. I am very happy with it except that it does not have nice built-in support to include source code, which an absolutely needed feature for me.

Given the rich set of plug-ins WordPress has, I know there must be some plug-in there already. Today I spent a little time on research. After trying several plug-ins, I decided to use Google Syntax Highlighter for WordPress. You can check out how it looks like as follows.

Thinking many other folks may be interested in having this in their blogs, I decide to share it. It’s also a reminder for me later on for adding source code.

The installation is pretty simple. First, click on the Plugins and then Add New. On the page, type in Google Syntax Highlighter for WordPress. You will get it as the first item in the result list. Just click on the install link at the end of the item. It’s pretty straight forward and I don’t need to repeat it here.

After you install it, you can see a little link “usage directions.” You can find much information and discussion there. Here is what I used for my post:

1. Add the following part with source code into the post editor HTML mode.

... Your Source COde ...

You can change the value of class to any others like cpp, css, xml, html, csharp, javascript, python, ruby, sql, etc. These are pretty much all I need. More can be found here.

2. Add the following part at the end of the HTML source.

It should be working after you save the page.

The trick part is the name attribute in part 1. Somehow after I saved it, I could not find it later. It might be caused by the switching of visual mode and HTML mode. In the end, I switched to HMTL mode and made sure the name attribute there for sure before I saved it. The highlighting doesn’t work if the name attribute is missing. So pay a little attention there.