Friday, September 28, 2007

Best of Open Source in Platforms and Middleware

Being a software developer, I have truly begun to appreciate the benefits that my organization receives from Open Source software. This is especially true of middleware which consists of the meat of our IT infrastructure. Right from our Java EE application servers to our Web Services stack, the choice and quality of middleware available is truly phenomenal.

Infoworld recently announced the 2007 BOSSIE Awards for the Best of open source in platforms and middleware. I was glad to see JBoss and MySQL picking up awards - two products that I use every single day.

Sunday, September 09, 2007

Project Blackbox

Project Blackbox was launched around a year ago by Sun Microsystems. It is promoted as a mobile data center built into a 20' shipping container. The goal behind Project Blackbox is to provide a significantly powerful and capable data center that can be easily configured and deployed to varied and extreme locations. It is an interesting product and can be seen to fit into a number of scenarios where a traditional brick-and-mortar data center would not be feasible.

The Project Blackbox website has interesting information on the product. The video of the Earthquake Test of magnitude 6.7 is particularly impressive. I hope to soon spot black shipping containers with the Sun logo on rooftops all over our city.