Mobile application is for sure a hot topic these days. There were several talks on mobile application development like Android Tools for Eclipse by Xavier Ducrohet from Google, Eclipse Sequoyah for Android App Developers by Eric Cloninger from Motorola, Tools for Mobile Web by Paul Beusterien from Symbian Foundation, and EMF for GWT by Ed Merks from Cloudsmith.

While sitting in the talk on Instantiations Eclipse Tools, I learned that Google bought the company 3 weeks ago. I expect Google will soon make WindowsBuilder, a famous WYSIWYG GUI authoring tool, free for GWT users, therefore further drive the adoption of GWT in competition with Flex, SilverLight.

Hopefully Google will also make it free to all others like SWT, SWING, RAP, RCP users. Big companies spend millions and billions of dollars on advertising. Google does not advertise by itself, and should spend money instead on free products that are useful to developers. In long term, I think community goodwill is more important than pure advertisement for a company’s brand recognition.

Another interesting talk is Git and Eclipse by Chris Aniszczyk from Red Hat and Shawn Pearce from Google. It’s mainly about EGIT plugin which allows you to use Git in Eclipse as CVS and Subversion. Two related projects are JGit, a Java implementation of original C based Git, and Gerrit which is “a web based code review system, facilitating online code reviews for projects using the Git version control system.” Even you don’t use Eclipse, you can benefit from JGit and Gerrit.

Author: Steve Jin is the author of VMware VI and vSphere SDK (Prentice Hall), creator of VMware vSphere Java API. For future articles, please subscribe to Email or RSS, and follow on Twitter.

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Here is part of Charles’s blog Hyperic Broadens vSphere Support through vCenter APIs in Version 4.4 explaining the rationale behind the choice:

While Hyperic has long had support for VMware technologies (a.k.a. VMware Infrastructure or VI), the availability of the VI Java API (http://vijava.sf.net) made our jobs much easier, because the power SDK streamlined how a Java application can interact with VI back then.  By adopting the VI Java API, we were able to keep up with VMware’s evolution easily from VI to VMware vSphere, as it is known today.  This also allowed us to communicate directly with both ESX and ESXi servers without differentiation or modification as those technologies evolved.

In fact, the connection between Hyperic and vijava started the alpha release of vijava in 2008.

We switched to using the VI Java API the day of its 1st alpha release in the Hyperic HQ plugin for VI3 and haven’t looked back. Using the VI Java API is concise and intuitive, yet powerful and solved all the challenges we’d seen previously when using the SDK. We’re also thrilled with the performance improvements and removal of dependency jars after upgrading to VI Java 2.0. Looking forward to tapping into the new vSphere features as well. A big thank you to Steve and the VI Java team!
Doug MacEachern, CTO, Hyperic (now part of VMware with SpringSource acquisition)

Hyperic is one of lots of success stories I heard about the API empowering various projects for commercial products and in-house automation. I’ve just created a PoweredBy page to share these stories with links back to your products and companies. With 25,000+ web hits a month to the project home, it’s a great advertisement for your products. If you want to be listed, just write me an email (sjin at vmware.com).

Author: Steve Jin is the author of VMware VI and vSphere SDK (Prentice Hall), creator of VMware vSphere Java API. For future articles, please subscribe to Email or RSS, and follow on Twitter.

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To convince your boss, please read the blog Pablo just wrote:

vSphere 4.1 APIs has some significant improvements, specifically around the Property Collector and AD authentication. We will have sessions to update you on what has changed, provide best practices when using them and hear from our engineers who have hands on experience working with our APIs.  See our latest sessions added

Access to our engineers – ever have a question that you needed some guidance on but just never got the answer you needed ? Our engineers will be not only presenting but there will be plenty of opportunities for questions and answers.

Learn about what VMware is doing from an Application Infrastructure perspective, the latest technology from newly acquired organizations, including Zimbra, RabbitMQ, Gemstone – all will be here, great opportunity to invite the Application infrastructure guys.

Labs and more labs. We will have Labs on the following topics vSphere PowerCLI, vSphere Web Services SDK for Java, and for C#, and vCloud APIs covering our latest SDKs.

Cool giveaways, Free Software, Chance to win an iPad, and a very nice Bag, and a very nice Polo shirt – We have certainly upscale here since our last event.

Ready to register? Click here.

Author: Steve Jin is the author of VMware VI and vSphere SDK (Prentice Hall), creator of VMware vSphere Java API. For future articles, please subscribe to Email or RSS, and follow on Twitter.

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The top 100 companies come from different industries ranging from technology vendors like SAS, salesforce.com, to the customers. The list does not cover companies from other parts of the world. I am sure many companies from Europe, Canada, etc. would have made the list otherwise.

Ready for the list?

1	USAA
2	Booz Allen Hamilton Inc.
3	JM Family Enterprises Inc.
4	General Mills Inc.
5	University of Pennsylvania
6	SAS Institute Inc.
7	Quicken Loans Inc.
8	Verizon Wireless
9	Securian Financial Group Inc.
10	Salesforce.com Inc.
11	Kellogg Co.
12	Southern California Edison Co.
13	H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center & Research Institute Inc.
14	American Fidelity Assurance Co.
15	Genentech Inc.
16	Campbell Soup Co.
17	Chesapeake Energy Corp.
18	American Express Co.
19	Prudential Financial Inc.
20	Qualcomm Inc.
21	Scottrade Inc.
22	National Information Solutions Cooperative
23	Marriott International Inc.
24	University of Miami
25	DTE Energy Co.
26	The Mitre Corp.
27	Kaiser Permanente
28	Medtronic Inc.
29	Palmetto Health
30	OhioHealth
31	Discovery Communications Inc.
32	Cedars-Sinai Health System
33	Southern Co.
34	Texas Health Resources
35	The Vanguard Group Inc.
36	Lehigh Valley Health Network
37	Corning Inc.
38	OCLC Online Computer Library Center Inc.
39	Rackspace US Inc.
40	Altria Group Inc.
41	VHA Inc.
42	HCA Inc.
43	Northwestern Mutual
44	Express Scripts Inc.
45	Edward Jones
46	Quest Diagnostics Inc.
47	CME Group Inc.
48	Raytheon Co.
49	Principal Financial Group Inc.
50	Allstate Insurance Co.

51	Intermountain Healthcare
52	Cerner Corp.
53	Temple University
54	Raymond James Financial Inc.
55	WellPoint Inc.
56	Thomson Reuters Corp.
57	Health Care Service Corp.
58	Harrah’s Entertainment Inc.
59	Southwest Airlines Co.
60	Publix Super Markets Inc.
61	State Farm Insurance Cos.
62	The Sherwin-Williams Co.
63	Kraft Foods Inc.
64	Norton Healthcare
65	Sacramento Municipal Utility District
66	The George Washington University
67	Transocean Ltd.
68	Indiana University
69	Automatic Data Processing Inc.
70	Antares Management Solutions
71	FedEx Corp.
72	Grant Thornton LLP
73	Northern Trust Corp.
74	Commonwealth Financial Network
75	Aflac Inc.

76	Partners HealthCare System Inc.
77	Discover Financial Services
78	National Rural Electric Cooperative Association
79	Penn National Insurance
80	GlobalScape Inc.
81	State Street Corp.
82	PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP
83	Intuit Inc.
84	W.W. Grainger Inc.
85	The University of Oklahoma
86	Eastman Chemical Co.
87	Comerica Bank
88	Black Hills Corp.
89	Paychex Inc.
90	International Paper Co.
91	Xerox Corp.
92	Applied Materials Inc.
93	United States Postal Service
94	American Water
95	Red Hat Inc.
96	Hess Corp.
97	Baker Hughes Inc.
98	We Energies
99	CDW Corp.
100	SRA International Inc.

You can sort by different criteria, and filter by region and company size by visiting this page.

Author: Steve Jin is the author of VMware VI and vSphere SDK (Prentice Hall), creator of VMware vSphere Java API. For future articles, please subscribe to Email or RSS, and follow on Twitter.

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We had several great speakers from companies like Makara, Engine Yard, Heroku, Appirio, etc. As you can guess from the speakers’ company profiles, the theme of the meet-up was about PaaS. Each speaker had about 20 minutes to introduce their technologies.

If you didn’t get the chance attending the event, you can still read some of the slides. So far, four presentation slides have been uploaded here:

cloud club – Heroku, Oren’s excellent presentation on the need for PaaS

PaaS seen by Ezra, Ezra’s presentation of PaaS at EngineYard

Makara, Tobias’ presentation of Makara at Cloud Connect

Appirio, Appirio’s presentation at Cloud Club (at Cloud Connect)

Author: Steve Jin is the author of VMware VI and vSphere SDK (Prentice Hall), creator of VMware vSphere Java API. For future articles, please subscribe to Email or RSS, and follow on Twitter.

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I just took some time to read these scripts even though PowerShell and Perl are not for me. Here I give you a brief introduction of the scripts, what vSphere APIs they used directly or indirectly, and why they topped the contest. Because vSphere API is based on Web Services, you can port the scripts to other languages like Java, .Net, whatever you feel comfortable with. If you want to port any of them using vSphere Java API, I am more than happy to include your contribution.

Note that the following comments are strictly my own opinions.

1. Who Created that VM ? – by Alan Renouf using PowerCLI

A script to add information back into the vSphere client, this script which is designed to run once a day (or more) as a scheduled task, will add a custom attribute to each VM with the creator and date created of that VM. A script to add information back into the vSphere client, this script which is designed to run once a day (or more) as a scheduled task, will add a custom attribute to each VM with the creator and date created of that VM.

Steve’s Comments:

Nice integration with the vSphere Client, making you almost doubt why it wasn’t there in the first place. Additional one liner scripts provide nice answers to the questions like who created the most VMs, how many VMs were created each month.

Technically, it used vSphere APIs indirectly to retrieve events like “VmBeingDeployedEvent”, “VmCreatedEvent”,”VmRegisteredEvent”, “VmClonedEvent”, and tag the VMs using the customFields. The Managed Objects involved are: VirtualMachine, EventHistoryCollector, CustomFieldsManager.

More details are here.

2. vAppManagement – by William Lam, VI Perl

The script allows for general vApp management supporting the following operations: querying for the VMs within a vApp, powering on a vApp, powering off a vApp, shutting down a vApp, querying for snapshots for VMs in the vApp, creating a common snapshot for each VM in the vApp, committing a common snapshot for each Vm in the vApp and goto (revert) to a common snapshot for each VM in the vApp.

Steve’s Comments:

Rich in features that cover many aspects running the vApp in vSphere. It complements well with the VMware OVF tools.

The scripts is the longest among the top 3. With different commands, the execution paths could be different. The managed objects involved include: VirtualApp, VirtualMachine, VirtualMachineSnapshot.

More details are here.

3. Get-VMDiskMapping by Arnim V Lieshout, PowerCLI

Most probably you were asked by the server administrator or dba to extend Windows disk number x. Unfortunately this Windows disk number doesn’t correspond to the virtual disk number of your VM. Finding out which virtual disk in the VM’s settings corresponds to this Windows disk can be a cumbersome task. Especially when you have multiple SCSI controllers and/or many disks attached to your VM.

This script matches Windows disks and their VMware virtual disk counterparts. It uses the Invoke-VMScript cmdlet to retrieve WMI information from the Windows guest, so there is no network connection needed to the VM. This makes the script suitable for isolated guests too (Internal only network, DMZ, or otherwise separated by firewall).

Multiple vCenter- or ESX(i)-servers can be added to the $VCServerList array, so there’s no need to know which host or vCenter manages your VM.

Steve’s Comments:

This script bridges the gap between the hypervisor and the Windows guest OS’s views to storage with the nice mapping. It also leverages the real strength of PowerShell – the ability integrating with other components beyond VMware.

The script runs VMI command using Invoke-VMScript (via VIX?), then retrieves the related info from hypervisor. In the end, it matches disks based on Controller and SCSI ID. The managed objects include: VirtualMachine, HostSystem

More details are here.

To be notified for future posts, feel free to subscribe to this feed, and follow me at Twitter.

Author: Steve Jin is the author of VMware VI and vSphere SDK (Prentice Hall), creator of VMware vSphere Java API. For future articles, please subscribe to Email or RSS, and follow on Twitter.

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VMworld 2010 calls for papers now. Presenting at VMworld is a great opportunity to share your experiences and ideas with other professionals in the world. To be selected, the content should be unique and based on real world experiences that could help many attendees.

The topics include:

• Public Cloud
• Private Cloud – Management
• Private Cloud – Business Continuity
• Private Cloud – Security
• Enterprise Applications
• Desktop Virtualization
• Technology & Architecture
• Virtualization 101 (US event only)

Everyone will have a chance to vote for the sessions.

This year we will have 2 rounds of Call for Papers Voting. The first will be through a Content Committee consisting of Customers and VMware Employees. The second will be open to the Public and will be accessible on VMworld.com. CFP submissions must be filled out completely in order to make it into Voting.

The Call for Papers will close on April 2nd. Be quick if you want to submit one. More details can be found at VMworld 2010 Call for Papers Guide.

The registration is not open yet, but you can pre-register and get notified once it’s open in 19 days.

Author: Steve Jin is the author of VMware VI and vSphere SDK (Prentice Hall), creator of VMware vSphere Java API. For future articles, please subscribe to Email or RSS, and follow on Twitter.

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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.

* is a dialect of Lisp, and shares with Lisp the code-as-data philosophy and a powerful macro system. * is predominantly a functional programming language, and features a rich set of immutable, persistent data structures. When mutable state is needed, * offers a software transactional memory system and reactive Agent system that ensure clean, correct, multithreaded designs.

a systems programming language – expressive, concurrent, garbage-collected.

A dynamic, open source programming language with a focus on simplicity and productivity. It has an elegant syntax that is natural to read and easy to write.

* is a general purpose programming language designed to express common programming patterns in a concise, elegant, and type-safe way. It smoothly integrates features of object-oriented and functional languages, enabling Java and other programmers to be more productive. Code sizes are typically reduced by a factor of two to three when compared to an equivalent Java application.

Here are several links if you want to dig into these languages: http://golang.org/, http://clojure.org/, http://www.scala-lang.org/, http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/

In some sense, programming languages are like religions. Different developers may have quite different languages they like or hate. For me, I don’t care too much about what programming language to use as long as it can do the best job - least time with the most done. The ”time” has to include the time that I use to learn that language, and APIs/frameworks if any.

Too many times you may see a demo showing you one line in one language can do more than 10+ in other languages. You say, “Wow!” When getting into it, you find too many things to learn, and it’s not so easy to customize to your projects.

So what should you chek while deciding which language to use for your next project?

1. Is the language supported on the platform I will work on?
2. Is the lauguage good for the nature of my project? For large scale system, a strong typed language is highly desirable. For multi-thread system, concurrency control is a must.
3. How hard is the lanugage to learn? Is it close to any language I am already familiar with?
4. How is the library support? Is it complete enough for my project?
5. Do I need any framework? How deep is the learning curve?
6. How active is the development community behind the languages/APIs/frameworks?
7. Any similar systems that have been implemented in the language?

When in team development, the decision is more than a personal preference but the group. Sometime it can go all way up to company policy. Many company actually doesn’t have a strong mandate on what languages to use. In some products, you can find find different languages and frameworks are used.

Modern software espeically applications are mostly built on top of some kind of abstractioin layer like JVM/CLR, and heavily use API/frameworks. It’s increasingly important to have good support beyond the language itself. Luckily, most popular frameworks are ported to different languages.

Author: Steve Jin is the author of VMware VI and vSphere SDK (Prentice Hall), creator of VMware vSphere Java API. For future articles, please subscribe to Email or RSS, and follow on Twitter.

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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.

Author: Steve Jin is the author of VMware VI and vSphere SDK (Prentice Hall), creator of VMware vSphere Java API. For future articles, please subscribe to Email or RSS, and follow on Twitter.

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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.

Author: Steve Jin is the author of VMware VI and vSphere SDK (Prentice Hall), creator of VMware vSphere Java API. For future articles, please subscribe to Email or RSS, and follow on Twitter.

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