Its been a few months since I last blogged. Its also been a while since the last Oakland Java SIG meeting. So it's nice to kill two birds with one stone by blogging about the upcoming Java SIG meeting. I'm excited to announce that at tomorrow/wednesday's (2/17/2010) meeting Mik Kersten will be talking about the Eclipse Mylyn Open Source Project. For more information and to register please go here. I hope to see you there.

I have some very exciting news to announce today.  Cloud Foundry has been acquired by SpringSource and is being launched as SpringSource Cloud Foundry.  As a result, I am now a SpringSource employee, and I couldn't be more pleased.

Who would have guessed that my experiments two years ago with a then relatively obscure Amazon service called the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) would eventually lead to today's events?  Those early experiments that resulted in the Cloud Tools open-source project , then became the basis for my startup venture called Cloud Foundry, a Platform-as-a-Service offering that makes it very easy to deploy and manage Java applications on Amazon EC2.  Rod Johnson, CEO of SpringSource, approached me earlier this year, and after just a few conversations it became apparent that SpringSource + Cloud Foundry made perfect sense.

SpringSource is, of course, best known for the Spring framework, which also powers the Cloud Foundry application.  However, SpringSource also owns or contributes to a broad range of open-source and commercial technologies for building Java applications (e.g. Groovy/Grails and the Eclipse-based SpringSource Tool Suite), running web applications (e.g. SpringSource tc Server and Apache HTTPD), and managing the IT infrastructure (e.g. Hyperic HQ).  Furthermore, SpringSource employs most of the founders and contributors to those great open-source technologies.  When you combine those SpringSource properties and the associated expertise with Cloud Foundry, the result is an extremely compelling and easy-to-use solution for building, running and managing Java web applications in the cloud.  And that great potential is why I chose to join SpringSource.

You can expect Cloud Foundry to offer powerful new features as we integrate deeper with SpringSource technologies. We took the first big step today. The launch of SpringSource Cloud Foundry at CloudFoundry.com deploys applications on the enterprise-grade SpringSource tc Server and integrates Hyperic technologies for monitoring. It also has a slick new UI that is as visually appealing as it is useful! I hope you will check out the new and improved Cloud Foundry and let me and my new SpringSource colleagues know what you think.

Last month I gave a couple of talks at Community One East in NY. One was about running Java applications on Amazon EC2. The other was about dynamically languages vs. static languages and why I am very interested in Scala, which is a modern programming language that is statically typed yet very expressive. In the presentation I talk about my experiences using Groovy (good and bad) and some of the interesting features of the Scala language.

 Here are the slides:

Next week, I'll be going to a couple of interesting events. On Wednesday April 15th the Oakland Java SIG (I'm the co-chair) is having its April meeting. The topic is using Mule to integrate applications in the Enterprise and Cloud. And, on Friday and Saturday is SD Forum's Shaping the New Age of Application Development conference. I'll be participating in a panel on cloud-enabled applications. I hope to see you at one of these events.

In May, I'll be giving a 1/2 day tutorial on running Java and Grails applications on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud. This will be part of Skills Matter's Progressive Web Tutorials. Other tutorials at the event include Dojo Data, Grids, Charts and Comet by Dylan Schiemann, and Introduction to Adobe Flex by Peter Elst. This will be my first time giving a talk in my home country in a very, very long time and I am looking forward to it. I hope to see you there.