beTech :: Evolve Already

Today Ian Brill demo’d ITC’s VMware infrastructure. A similar system is hosted by BeTech to host any number of web software development efforts. Currently ITC hosts ~150 web servers utilizing four servers clustered and running VMware. Ian described Vmotion (product for moving live virtual running virtual machines), Virtual Center Server (product for managing the details of virtual machines), VMware High Availability (product for managing automatic replication and fault tolerance), and DRS (product for virtual load balancing).

This stable VMware infrastructure appears to be a solid solution for hosting systems with a high available requirement. Contact ITC Microsystem, ITC-Microsystems@virginia.edu, if you are interested in standing up a new system in this popular VMware system.

If you are interested in developing a test system in a VMware environment, you can get started free of charge by emailing betechlabs@virginia.edu.

Great talk Ian! Thanks from BeTech.

On Wednesday, March 26, Madelyn Wessel and Bethany Nowviskie will present their experience in making the Library’s Blacklight project (http://blacklight.rubyforge.org/) open source.

When/Where:
* Wednesday, March 26
* 3:00 p.m.-4:30 p.m.
* Byrd Seminar Room in the Harrison/Small Library
(http://www.lib.virginia.edu/harrison/facilities.html#byrd)
(http://www.virginia.edu/webmap/ACentralGrounds.html)

Blacklight is an OPAC (online public access catalog) developed at the University of Virginia Library; it has been made public under an Apache 2.0 license. Blacklight was the first project made possible by beTech Labs and is the first project to come out of beTech Labs as open source.

Madelyn Wessel is Special Advisor to the University Librarian and Liaison to the General Counsel, focusing on a broad range of library system legal issues including intellectual property, copyright, licensing, and special issues arising in the area of digital scholarship.

Bethany Nowviskie is the Director of Digital Research & Scholarship at U.Va. Library. She is active in digital humanities and is an advocate for academic open source.

Below is a quick synopsis of the meeting today. The room was packed. The meeting and info shared was great. Thank you Eric Pugh.

Eric Pugh started off the meeting with the following hilarious youtube.com video “Code Monkey”:
  http://youtube.com/watch?v=v4Wy7gRGgeA

Eric explained the wide adoption of OpenID by many of the internet powerhouses like Yahoo, Google, and others. Interesting resource links include:

• http://openid.net (for more explanation about the standard)
• http://openiddirectory.com (to discover who is participating)
• http://spreadopenid.org
• http://www.37signals.com/openid/ (37 signals is using open ID for their systems)
• http://myopenid.net (popular openID provider)
• https://pip.verisignlabs.com/seatbelt.do (verisign offers a firefox plugin and openID service too)
• http://www.opensourceconnections.com (Eric will offer more information about his presentation on his company web site soon)

Eric also show a demo of his “Fish4Brains” application using OpenID put together at the 48hour long Rails Rumble this year. We also discussed the upcoming BeCamp event. Last year this event was tremendous, get involved this year and make it even better. Visit http://barcamp.org/beCamp2008/ for more information and keep up on the developments.

Great information, thank you Eric!

This Wednesday, February 20th, Eric Pugh will present on OpenID (using RoR specifically), a decentralized single-sign-on system now used by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and the rest of the world. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenID for all the juicy tidbits/history/etc.

Fascinated by the “craft” of software development, Eric Pugh is the owner of OpenSource Connections, a member of the Apache Software Foundation, and a committer on many projects including DBUnit, Maven, and Jakarta Commons.

When/Where:
* Wednesday, February 20th
* 2:00pm-3:30pm
* electronic classroom in the Science and Engineering
Library, Clark Hall. (http://www.virginia.edu/webmap/ACentralGrounds.html)

Also, Eric would like to get the beTech community involved with the planning and organization of the next beCamp and bring us up to speed with the progress that has been made on beCamp Squared…, beCamp Redux…, beCamp Part Deux…

Hope to see you there!
–Doug

NOTE: For Post Meeting Notes, Read The Follow-up Meeting Post and Any Comments to This Post

This is the conference you’ve been waiting for: beCamp is happening this June 15-16, from 5PM on Friday to 9PM on Saturday—non-stop! It’s 24+ straight hours of coding, collaborating, and conversing with people just as juiced about technology as you are. And the venue couldn’t be more perfect for such mayhem: the Fry’s Spring Beach Club!

beCamp is Charlottesville’s BarCamp-based unconference where the participants actually organize and create the conference. Think of it as an open-source geek gathering where you get to decide what goes into and what comes out of the event. Said one of our beTech colleagues and a two-time FooCamp alumn, “…we need at least 2 days of 24/7 tech talks, caffeine, robots, and heavy-duty geeks that can hang all night long!” We setup a beCamp wiki for you to register as a camper and, better yet, help enroll sponsors, propose sessions, etc.

If you’re a geek in or around the Charlottesville metroplex—or even if you’re merely tech-curious, this is the event you don’t want to miss. Reserve the dates on your calendar (e.g., Upcoming), register on our wiki, and take a closer look at what “camping” is all about:

• BarCamp | What to Expect
• When Geeks Go Camping, Ideas Hatch (CNN report)
• Foo Camp: Ad-hoc Learning (attendee report)
• BarCamp NYC - The Nuts and Bolts (a BarCamp debriefing)
• Dummies Guide to Organizing a BarCamp In Your City (how-to organize)
• Advice for Planning a BarCamp

Microsoft layed down the gauntlet at this week’s Mix 07 Conference with a Flash/Flex and Ajax competitor called Silverlight. This time around, the post-Gates Microsoft may have nailed it. Of course, the Microsoft faithful will love it—Silverlight provides a modern, well-designed presentation layer to leverage their .Net work.

But what’s captured the attention of the larger developer community is that Silverlight applications will work on IE, Firefox, Opera, and Safari (yup, on a Mac) AND support non-MS languages. Furthermore, these apps will be delivered to the browser in Microsoft’s XAML markup language which means information within will be more accessible and findable by default than with compiled Flash/Flex apps.

What the heck is going on here? Silverlight just may be the first significant salvo from the more open, Ray Ozzie-powered Microsoft 2.0.

Microsoft® Silverlight™ is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web. Silverlight offers a flexible programming model that supports AJAX, VB, C#, Python, and Ruby, and integrates with existing Web applications. Silverlight supports fast, cost-effective delivery of high-quality video to all major browsers running on the Mac OS or Windows.

More information:

• Channel 9: Scott Guthrie: Silverlight and the Cross-Platform CLR
• Webware: What is Silverlight, Really?
• TechCrunch: The Web Just Got Richer
• Dare Obasanjo AKA Carnage4Life: Silverlight: AJAX is now an Endangered Species
• Ed Burnett’s Dev Connection: Dissecting Silverlight

The Richmond Java User Group talk “Getting Started with Grails” is tonight (Wednesday, March 21st) at 5:30 PM in Glen Allen, VA.

Grails is an open-source web application framework that’s all about getting things done. Grails combines best-of-breed Java technologies (including Hibernate and Spring), convention over configuration, and the powerful and dynamic Groovy language. Together with these elements and Groovy’s ability to integrate seamlessly with your existing Java code, Grails finally legitimizes rapid web application development for the Java platform.

Read the rest of this entry »