Today VMware and Salesforce.com announced vmforce.com finally after several weeks of speculations on what the joint project is about. The following diagram I captured from the live webcast of the event answered the question nicely.
The event attracted about 3,500 online viewers, not to mention the audience onsite. This was a very successful event, resulted in more media coverage than anyone can read. If you missed the live webcast, you can check out the recorded one from the website.
Among all the blogs and news coverage, I think you should read the one by Steve Herrod who has done a great job in explaining the joint adventure in a big picture. His blog also has links to other bloggers.
Looking beyond the exciting keynotes and demos, I think the key takeaways from the announcement are as follows: 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 RSS or Email, and follow on Twitter.
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.
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 RSS or Email, and follow on Twitter.
It’s the second day of the four day training. A lot of things were covered:
- Modern Web UI including progressive enhancement, accessibility, and design.
- Applying Spring JS, an abstraction around other AJAX toolkit. The coverage includes AJAX events, client side validation, and rich widgets.
- Working directly with Dojo Toolkit, including DOM scripting and Dojo widgets (Dijit).
The progressive enhancement is a great concept. The basic idea is to have your web pages start with plain HTML and then “decorates” them with richer L&F and more interaction on the fly. The key benefit is better compatibilities with different browsers which all support HTML but not necessarily JavaScript. When JavaScript is supported by the browser, the pages are enhanced by the embedded JavaScript; when not, the pages just render well as normal HTML. 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 RSS or Email, and follow on Twitter.
Today is my first day in a four day training – Rich Web Applications With Spring. It’s a pretty intensive day from 7AM to 3PM which covered the following:
- Quick start with Spring Tool Suite and reference application.
- Spring MVC essentials, including architecture, controllers, conventions.
- Using layouts and views, including composite views with Apache Tiles, and multiple rendering technologies like Excel, PDF in addition to the HTML.
- Processing form pages, including data binding, validation, and form tags.
I used Java Servlet and JSP about 10 years ago while working on a NMS project. At that time, there was no good MVC framework for developing a large web application. You had to program against the Java Servlet APIs directly. Jason Hunter’s book Java Servlet Programming was my favorite book. 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 RSS or Email, and follow on Twitter.
Last week VMware released a news “VMware Expands VMware vCloud Developer Ecosystem With Open-Source Java and Python SDKs for VMware vCloud API”. It says,
VMware has also made a number of open-source contributions to the Cloud Tools project, which powers the SpringSource Cloud Foundry service, enabling Java developers to deploy, test, and manage applications for VMware environments via VMware vSphere(TM) and the VMware vCloud API.
The contributions are the two adapters I developed for the CloudTools project to run on both vSphere and vCloud Express. I wrote the following news on VI Java API project home, which was then quoted in a SpringSource blog by Charles Lee.
DIY PaaS made possible with VI Java API and CloudTools
Nov 23, 2009
As mentioned earlier, VI Java API was leveraged at VMWorld 2009 Keynote demos. Now I got legal approval and contributed the related adapters to CloudTools code hosted at Google.
The CloudTools/CloudFoudry was originally designed for EC2. The CloudTools is open source; the CloudFoudry is not. With our contributed code, you can run CloudTools with vSphere for deploying your Java (Groovy) based web applications to your internal cloud. It offers both Maven and Grails plugins so you can do all the deployment with one line of command. Even better, you can integrate the plugin command with Spring Tools Suite (STS) and have a context menu in the Eclispe based IDE. This is what I call DIY PaaS (Do It Yourself Platform as a Service): vSphere + VI Java API + adapter + CloudTools.
The vCloud adapter was designed with Terremark vCloudExpress platform for the SpringOne 2GX keynote demo. The adapter does not use the VI Java API, but leverages the vCloud REST API. Besides the basic part, the Terremark vCloud API provides extensions for managing the network like public IP, InternetService, and node.
Although you see two different adapters, the user experiences are the same. Both adapters implement the required interfaces defined by CloudTools. Technically it’s not a big deal, but business wise, it is a big deal — you can seamlessly deploy to private (vSphere) cloud and public (service providers like Terremark) cloud, whatever best suits your needs.
DIY PaaS has many advantages overal typical PaaS especially ultimate flexibility and no vendor lock-in, which are critical for enterprises. I will detail more on the DIY PaaS concept, stategies and architecture in a later blog.
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 RSS or Email, and follow on Twitter.
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