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. ;)

Merger Madness & One Sample App To Rule Them All

VMware ---	SpringSource ---	/---G2One
		\---CloudFoundry
Terracotta ---	Ehcache
Oracle ---	Sun

With all the mergers and acquisitions happening in the Java world, I thought I'd suggest a sample app someone could build to bring them all together.

Here it is: a Grails app using an Oracle DB with distributed caching provided by Terracotta and Ehcache, all running in a VMware cloud, with deployment and management handled by CloudFoundry.  I think that covers all the bases.  I have no idea what it will do yet, but let me know if I've missed anything. :)

Note: I actually have a lot of respect for all the technologies and people involved, I'm just feeling a bit overwhelmed with all of the recent consolidation!

Terracotta Acquires Ehcache

Exciting news!  This morning I received a note from Greg Luck via the Ehcache Open Discussion mailing list announcing that the Ehcache project was joining forces with Terracotta and that Greg would be joining the team at Terracotta, Inc.  Since there's been a Terracotta Integration Module for Ehcache for a while, I don't foresee any instant improvements with regard to integration between the two technologies, but I was quite excited to see the following in Greg's blog post announcing the news:

I am full-time on Ehcache. I have not had the time I would have liked to devote to Ehcache (I have been doing a miserly 10-15 hours per week for the past 6 years) but now I do. Look out!

Given what he's done so far with limited time, I'm looking forward to seeing what Greg can do when Ehcache becomes his full-time job!

For more information, see Terracotta's announcement, CTO of Terracotta Ari Zilka's blog post, or Alex Miller's blog post.

p.s. I submitted a patch that Greg ended up incorporating into Ehcache 1.6, so I feel a tiny bit of ownership toward the project – similar to the way I feel toward Tomcat.

Update: Terracotta and Ehcache are holding a webcast on August 20th at 4PM ET to further discuss the acquisition.  Also, I just submitted my second patch to Ehcache. :)

Groovy versus Scala (Update)

Back in March of last year, I wrote a post comparing Groovy and Scala.  Enough time has passed that I thought it was worth revisiting the topic.

In my original post, I reached the conclusion that at least for me, it made sense to first focus on Groovy and then later learn more Scala.  I still feel that way, but my thoughts on the matter have evolved.  How about combining Groovy and Scala in the same program or architecture?  That thought had vaguely occurred to me already, but it was solidified by the discussion of Twitter’s use of Ruby and Scala.  They started off using Ruby (Ruby on Rails, in particular) to run their whole site.  When they ran into performance and scalability issues, they determined what was causing the most trouble (back-end tasks) and gradually converted the relevant parts of the system into Scala.  This kind of polyglot programming makes sense to me.  It follows the principle of “using the best tool for the job.”  I think the combination of Groovy and Scala makes even better sense: they’re designed to run and interoperate with other languages on the same VM.  Not surprisingly, I’m not the first person to think of this.  I found two posts from Andres Almiray (“Griffon: Groovy & Scala working together” and the follow up “Follow up on Griffon/Groovy/Scala”) showing some practical examples and another on a different blog discussing the ability jointly compile “Groovy+Scala+Java”.  I’m excited to watch and perhaps participate in these exciting developments.

Side Note: On the subject of Groovy, when my one-year IntelliJ license was close to expiring, I decided to check out NetBeans.  I was pleased to discover it had quite good Groovy and Grails support.  I’ve been using the 6.7 milestone builds and now the beta, in order to get support for Grails 1.1.  If you haven’t tried Groovy/Grails development in NetBeans yet, you should.

Update: Here are links to the items Andres mentioned in the comments

• Groovy Transforms
• Scalify
• ”Groovy and Scala sitting in a tree...”

Update (Jan 12, 2010): Andres recently posted the highly relevant Groovy & Scala: a tale of two JVM languages

RightScale - managing Amazon EC2 instances

I was recently reading some postings on High Scalability and came upon one discussing some cool new features in EC2. It also mentioned a company, RightScale, which has a product for automatically managing your EC2 instances, including automatically launching and killing them based on spikes in demand. The company also has a good EC2-related blog, which unfortunately seems not to have an available RSS feed (odd!).