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I attended Eclipse Day at Google headquarter today. It’s a great event packed with several great talks.

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. Read more »

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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WIth 2.1 GAed yesterday, I am happy to announce the 3.0 project kicks off officially. For more fun, I picked up a code name for 3.0 release: Crescendo. For folks know music, crescendo means music gets louder and louder. That is where I want to bring the project to. It’s been a huge success for this VMware sponsored open source project. We’ve had 9,000+ downloads, plus 1000+ SVN code sync, after its first debut in 2008.

So where are we going next?

Before answering the question, let’s take a look at the themes of previous releases. The theme of 1.0 was ease of use with full object model and getter methods hiding property collector. The theme of 2.0 was Just Enough High Performance Web Service Engine resulted in not only performance boost, but also clean license with pure BSD, and much smaller footprint and zero memory leak.

Now it’s time to re-visit ease of use again, but from a different perspective. As I discussed early, the learning curve of vSphere API comes from two folds: lack of object model, and complexity of data objects. The 1.0 release solved the problem nicely. Now it’s time to tackle the second one. Read more »

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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Right after vSphere 4.1 released, VI Java API 2.1 beta supporting vSphere 4.1 was released on July 15. After 40 days, I am pleased to announce GA of the 2.1 release. Many thanks to all vijava community memembers who helped to try 2.1 beta and give feedbacks.

The 2.1 beta is pretty good in terms of quality. I got several emails reporting greeen. I did get several bugs, some of which are carry-overs that should have been fixed in previous releases. Check the end of this blog for a list of bug fixes.

During the beta period, I started a poweredby page which now features 10 companies/products which use vijava API. If you would like your organizations/products included, please let me know.

Enough being said, are you ready to give 2.1 a try? Please feel to download it here. Even you are new to this API, 5 minutes is good enough to have your first HelloVSphere running with this tutorial. Read more »

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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Many people already know the book “The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference.” According to the author Malcolm Gladwell, tipping points are “the levels at which the momentum for change becomes unstoppable.” He defines the term as sociological and uses it to explain sociological epidemics.

Three Rules of Epidemics

In his book, Gladwell laid out the “three rules of epidemics” as follows:

1) The Law of the Few.
“The success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of social gifts.” The author categorized people into Connectors who link us up with the world; Mavens who are “people we rely upon to connect us with new information;” and Salesmen who are charismatic persuaders.

2) The Stickiness Factor
The specific content of a message that renders its impact memorable.

3) The Power of Context
Human behavior is sensitive to and strongly influenced by its environment.

Although the research comes from sociology, I think it applies to technology as well. After all, technology is social. Just think about social networks like Facebook, and the recent success of Apple’s iPad.

If you want your technology to be a huge success, you cannot ignore its social side story. In the end, it is human beings who make decisions regarding any technology adoption or product purchase. Read more »

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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My colleagues and I had a discussion regarding the vApp template. After virtual machine template for virtual machine, you would expect vApp template for vApp and manage it in a similar way from the vSphere Client. But you cannot.

Most of us know that from vSphere Client, you have context menu item allowing you to convert a virtual machine to a template easily with a click. However you cannot find a similar menu item with a vApp. You can choose to convert a virtual machine inside a vApp, but then the converted template will jump out of the vApp container.

Can we have vApp template? The answer is we can, but in a different way. Read more »

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.