Gephi for JVM Runtime Dynamics


2010 Duke's choice awards were announced today. It is really amazing to see how well some people and organizations puts the technologies to the best effect, much beyond what the creators of Java could have originally imagined. One aspect of the enterprise system that always remained intriguing to me has been the Technical Data Visualization. Therefore, naturally I was inclined to check out the Duke award winner on this category. There it was, Gephi, a fantabulous framework for Data Visualization.

The feature of Gephi that impressed me the most was the Dynamic Analysis. I thought this can be an ideal platform to address a long term secret dream of mine; to create a performance monitoring tool that displays live the way in which new Objects are getting created in a JVM and how the garbage collector cleans up the orphaned ones, showing the live objects with relations intact. Any takers for this project? Ping me for the concept.

On Cloud Zero

It was when I was surfing around the Apache Myfaces website to download their new JSF 2.0 implementation that I noticed this little sentence; that I needed to make little changes to my web.xml so that Myfaces 2.0 application runs on Google App Engine. That’s when I realized that there is this little thing called Google App Engine who can run my little JSF application. I was always looking forward to playing around with JSF 2.0 with JBoss seam and EJB 3.0 with host of other add-ons that I wanted to try my hands on like ExtVal and PrimeFaces. Good and exciting stuff! I rush home and download Google App Engine, Jobss Seam and all those software that I wanted to lay my hands on. And by the way, there is also an Eclipse plug-in for Google App Engine.

I realized that gone are the days when I could only host my static web pages or blogs on the internet. As a programmer, I now have the power of using the powerful frameworks that I can now use to create a dynamic application and host it for free on web. Hey, and I get a Database as well to store my Application Data.

And finally, here I’m, sitting in the Nimhans Convention Centre for WebApps 2010 organized by SiliconIndia. All I hear throughout the day is “Cloud”; Yahoo says “Cloud” and Hadoop. Rediff says, Social Networking and cloud. eBay says, cloud. Microsoft says Azure and cloud. Amazon says AWS, EC2 and cloud. IBM says SmartCloud and Websphere platform. And finally the big guy Google talks bigtable and App Engine. I realize that they are all already on Cloud 9. And here I’m inching on to Cloud Zero.