This morning instead of a keynote, experts from throughout Red Hat gathered for a Q&A panel:
– Craig Muzilla
– Iain Gray
– Paul Cormier
– Katrinka McCallum
– Brian Stevens
– Scott Crenshaw
We’ll be posting video soon of this session along with the other keynotes. Until then, here’s a quick summary of what the experts had to say on a few of the questions: » Read more
In the news:
From our own press corp:
Other voices:
Starting off this year’s Red Hat Summit was a triplet of keynotes: a Red Hat leader (CEO Jim Whitehurst), a Red Hat partner (Jim Stallings of IBM), and an open culture visionary (Dr. John Halmaka, CIO of Harvard Medical School.) This ordering of keynotes is representative of how the Red Hat commmunity is structured–a balance between enterprise and open communities, with Red Hat in the lead. (These keynotes will be available in their entirety from the Red Hat Summit page.) » Read more
We’ve scoured the web for all the latest dish on the Red Hat Summit. Here’s a few tidbits from the first day (and before):
In the news:
From our own press corps:
Other voices:
Whether or not you’re here in Boston with us at the Summit, you can follow along with Red Hat Magazine.
We’ll be posting updates here about what’s going on, and links to other Summit bloggers. If you’re blogging from the Summit, send us an email at rhm-summit@redhat.com with a link to your posts.
Here’s a little sneak preview of some of the educational sessions at this year’s Summit. And who better to outline their talks than the speakers themselves? In this first installment, Rik van Riel talks about computing speed; Fedora developer (and Red Hat engineer) Bill Nottingham outlines his thoughts on the most recent Fedora release; and Tom Callaway sums up his plans to speak about the simplest ways to use RPM. Want more? Come see us at the Summit, and check out the full schedule.
With two weeks to go before this year’s Red Hat Summit, preparations are in full swing here at Red Hat Magazine. Several members of our team are getting packed for Boston, and we’re all getting ready for the Summit content that will soon be coming our way.
And that leads us to a question for you. What would you like to see?
There’s no way for us to catch every session and talk that happens–there’s simply too many–but we do try to bring back as much as we can. Summit sessions cover eight tracks and over a hundred topics, from open source legal issues to Linux deployment to partner tech talks. Whether we bring back audio, video, or just slide decks and author articles, we hope to show you just what makes our yearly conference so special.
Take a look at our track and keynotes listing, and then a deeper dive into the full Summit session schedule. Which talks would you like to see? Which speakers interest you most?
We polled our staff and compiled a short list of what we’d like to see:
1. Joel Cohen keynote (read our interview with Cohen, a producer for The Simpsons)
2. Red Hat Enterprise Linux Kernel Performance Optimization – Part I (session talk by John Shakshober and Larry Woodman)
3. Why Computers Are Getting Slower (And What We Can Do About It) (session talk by Rik Van Riel)
4. Fedora 9 Overview and Demonstration (session talk by Bill Nottingham)
5. The Virtualization Toolbox. Open Source Solutions for Managing Virtual Environments (session talk by Dan Berrange and Rich Jones)
6. Managing Red Hat Enterprise Linux in a Virtual World with RHN Satellite (session talk by Todd Sanders and Cliff Perry)
7. Dynamic Grid Computing With MRG & Amazon EC2 (session talk by Bryan Che)
Agree? Disagree? Tell us what you would like to see. Leave a comment below. (Or, if you’re too shy, send us a private note.)
We’ll tally up your requests and use them to help us decide what to film.
Joel Cohen is an Emmy award-winning writer and associate producer of The Simpsons. He’s also a keynote speaker at the Red Hat Summit this June. Enjoy this sneak preview of Joel, and then join us in Boston to hear more from him about The Simpsons and keeping innovation alive for 420 episodes over two decades.
The Simpsons has been on for 20 years now. What does the team do to keep creativity alive for that long?
I look forward to talking about this more at the Summit, but basically it is a lot of brainstorming, building on ideas, constantly pushing ourselves to find new, previously un-mined veins for stories and jokes, and shamelessly ripping off other people’s ideas (somehow this last one is the easiest).
How did you wander from a career in sales to writing for The Simpsons and other shows and movies?
A question my parents have asked me repeatedly, although when they ask, they are more sneering and judgmental.
The first morning of JavaOne was a great serendipitous event. How often does something fall into place like this: I saw Barton George, who looks after Sun’s relationships with Linux communities, and we decided to cook up a podcast about OpenJDK 6 in Fedora 9. As we walked to the recording room, I commented that it would be great if we could get Tom Fitzsimmons, too. Not two beats later, we rounded a corner, and there stood Tom with Patrick Macdonald. Of course they were available and happy to record with us, and away we went.
Hear Barton (and a little bit of me) interview Tom and Patrick about the journey of OpenJDK and IcedTea: OGG and MP3
Patrick Macdonald, Tom Fitzsimmons (kneeling), and Karsten Wade. Photo: Barton George from this post The discussion covered the history of making a 100% free and open source runtime in Fedora from the initial Java open source code, which itself was 96% of a complete and self-building JDK. This remaining 4% was filled with components from GNU Classpath by the IcedTea team. The term “IcedTea” came from the package name used because, at that time, Fedora didn’t have a trademark license to use “OpenJDK”. Of the GNU Classpath code used, some if it ended up completing the circle to be included in OpenJDK. Based on relationships made at FOSDEM 2007, the team from Fedora/Red Hat were able to work with folks from Sun and other places to do work in the community in advance of resolving the remaining 4%, and do it in a way that could be more easily folded into OpenJDK. What is riveting about this story is the speed and quality of the outcome that is clearly due to the open source methodology used. By opening all the code that they could, Sun made it possible for others to fill the gaps Sun could not immediately fill. By working closely throughout that process, all of the open source code was used and tested in the community. Sun had time to choose the right license so the code could be merged. If Sun had waited until they could open all the code, we would have lost an entire year of development (at least.) Now that OpenJDK 6 is available in EPEL 5 for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, it is only a matter of time before it gets certified to appear in an update. This is being worked on by Keith Seitz and Mark Wielaard, who have “not many” test suites to complete to be ready to pass the TCK. Once that is done, the implementation can be called “Java compliant”, which is an important step to being ready for an Enterprise Linux 5.x update. Listen to the audio to get all the details, and check out Barton’s blog entry for his viewpoint.
At the JBoss booth at JavaOne 2008, I spoke with RichFaces developer Alexander Smirnov (OGG, MP3.) Alexander is the founder of the Ajax4jsf project, which he started as a personal side effort. It grew out of his interest in JSF and was originally run as a stand alone, self-hosted project.
As he developed Ajax4jsf, Alexander began working with the MyFaces community, and started communicating more with the larger JSF community. He moved the project to SourceForge at the suggestion of RichFaces lead developer Sergey Smirnov (no relation.) Exadel began developing the RichFaces JSF components library and Alexander joined the project as a framework background developer.
At the time it moved to java.net, Ajax4jsf had grown more useful when integrated with the RichFaces component library. RichFaces, however, was still not open source. The combined projects came to the attention of JBoss, which contracted with Exadel to open source both projects as JBoss projects. These were recently combined into a single project under the RichFaces name, available through JBoss.org. (RichFaces is combined with the JBoss Tools Eclipse-based developer environment to make up the JBoss Developer Studio subscription offering.)
Current activity for the RichFaces project includes a focus on building RichFaces functionality within JBoss Portlet Bridge. JBoss Portlet Bridge implements JSR-301 to provide support for not only JSF running in a portal, but also Seam and RichFaces.
Joining forces with JBoss has brought significantly more usage, ten times or more in terms of downloads. In particular, Alexander says there is an obvious increase in forum questions and discussions. In terms of attracting contributors, there are currently very few code contributions from the community outside of Exadel and JBoss. Alexander and Sergey describe the development process for the RichFaces team as being structured with a well-oiled process, which creates a higher barrier of entry for people outside of the team. As early ways to bring in external contributors, there are current needs for testing, defining future requirements, and requesting features and enhancements.
For the future roadmap of RichFaces, Alexander says that the next step is toward semantic web technologies.
