Prediction for 2010: VMware acquires Terracotta

While at SpringOne2GX back in October, the thought occurred to me that Terracotta would make a really interesting acquisition target for VMware.  VMware has had some pretty amazing virtualization technology for a while, including the ability to migrate live virtual machines between physical boxes, but it has (as far as I know) all been focused on low-level infrastructural magic.  That changed with their acquisition of SpringSource last year, which followed shortly after SpringSource's acquisition of Cloud Foundry.  Now, if you just add Terracotta to the mix, you could make it possible to easily deploy an auto-scaling clustered app to the cloud.  Doesn't that sound interesting?  Add to that the fact that Terracotta has been a sponsor for at least the last two SpringOne conferences in the U.S., SpringSource and Terracotta have already collaborated to build a sample app, and Terracotta brings Ehcache (easy clustered caching) to the table.  Seems like a potent combination to me.

I have no concrete grounds for this prediction beyond the points above, but I wanted to get the idea out there now just in case it actually happens. ;)

Update (May 26, 2010): Unfortunately, with the announcement of SpringSource/VMware's acquisition of Gemstone, my prediction is now unlikely to occur.  Oh, well.  Plenty of others before me have been wrong. ;)

JetBrains Seeder Program

JetBrains has recently started the JetBrains Seeder Program, an attempt to build a volunteer evangelism network for their products. I'm not sure I'd make a great evangelist, since my use of IntelliJ IDEA has mostly been limited to my experimentation with Groovy. I might join the program anyway, since IntelliJ is a great IDE (especially for Groovy) and I'm curious to see how the seeder program works.

Update: I decided that I'd already signed up for enough programs like this without taking full advantage of them. As a side note, I've been trying out NetBeans 6.5 for my Groovy and Grails projects and have been pleasantly surprised. I'll have a dilemma on my hands when it comes time to either renew or drop my IntelliJ license in April.

Book: Free Agent Nation

I just started reading Free Agent Nation: The Future of Working For Yourself. So far, I like it quite a bit. The number of people working independently in the US (30 million or more as measured by several organizations) is staggering. I'll add more about the book as I make progress through it.