The LinuxWorld Conference and Expo is coming to San Francisco's Moscone's Center on August 4-7, 2008, and you could register for many free community sessions (on Moblin.org, PostgreSQL, OpenSUSE), Ubucon, and get a free pass to the Exhibit Hall.
Of course, you could also register for the full conference ($400-1500), featuring over 100 top-tier, educational sessions covering seven tracks that go deep into Linux and open source industry trends.
Grails has finally reached the milestone 1.0 release!
For those that don't know, Grails is the newest member of the Java EE stack of frameworks that promises convention-based rapid development of web applications. Rather than serve as yet another alternative for Java web development, Grails sits on top of the proven Spring/Hibernate/SiteMesh open-source combo that developers already know and trust.
Along with Groovy, Grails aims to do for Java EE what Rails did for the Ruby community.
Check out the Grails 1.0 Release Notes for info on new features, change log, downloads, and documentation.
We have opened some of our tutorials that was previously available only to paying participants for use by the general public. The new FREE Tutorials section features some quick overviews on topics such as Java, J2EE, XML, XSL, and other. Here's the list of the initial few:
Hope you enjoy it!
What a day for M&A's!
After months-long dispute over the value of BEA Systems Inc., Oracle finally agreed to buy the middleware software company for about $7.85 billion USD. When all is said and done, this little purchase will cost Oracle around $8.5 Billion or close to 25% more than BEA's current market cap. I guess BEA was smart to refuse Oracle's previous offer of $6.7 Billion.
Of course, this comes as no surprise given Oracle's $25 Billion three-year buying spree, which included PeopleSoft, Siebel Systems, and Hyperion Solutions.
Mind-boggling if you ask me.
Wow! With CNN Money predicting that MySQL will be "one of the most anticipated tech IPOs" of 2008, I guess it should come as no surprise that Sun acquired MySQL today for $1 Billion USD.
Of course, Sun is huge in the open-source community and it does not have a database server of its own, so its marriage with MySQL makes sense. There will be some anxiety within the ranks of the developers and users alike, but MySQL already addressed some of those concerns in their announcement. In short, everything we've come to love and expect from MySQL will still live on (e.g. like LAMP), so there is no reason to stress over what this means for the rest of us.
As far as I am concerned, this is another win for the open-source community!
Sun's open-source community conference, CommunityOne 2008, is now open for free registration!
This one-day event, happening on May 5th at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, conveniently prequels Sun's flag-ship conference, JavaOne 2008, which runs from May 6th to 9th at the same location.
While the JavaOne conference is very structured and is meant to serve the entire Java community, CommunityOne 2008 on the other hand is driven (or at least defined) by the open-source community itself. Attendees are encouraged to come and discuss their own projects or open-source efforts, though Sun does invite speakers to talk about some of the more specific topics, including: Projects and Strategy, Operating Systems, Web Servers and Databases, Scripting Languages: Content Authoring and RIAs, Tools and Integrated Development Environments, Next Generation Web Applications, Web Scale Computing, and Chip Multithreading (CMT).
While the registration is free, space is limited. There is only room for 2,500 attendees, so register sooner rather than later!
We are kicking off the San Francisco Agile Software Meetup. Someone had to do it and after searching for an appropriate group, we decided to do it ourselves.
The first event will be on Tuesday January 29th at Marakana San Francisco Center, 1081 Mississippi Street, San Francisco, CA 94107. Event starts at 6:30. Come and join us!
After much delay, I decided to start The San Francisco Java Meetup group. Granted, this meetup existed in the past, but never really caught on. I guess the chemistry wasn't there, but the Java community is not only strong, it is growing! I feel that there are enough people in the Bay Area who are eager to meet other like-minded Java professionals and exchange ideas on hip'n'cool Java technologies.
To get things started, I will give a short talk on TestNG at the first Java meetup event on February 11th 2008 in San Francisco. I hope to see you there!
Our over-caffeinated and under-slept development team has created a new Affiliate Marketing Program for all of you to make some $$. The payouts are pretty sweet:
Simply Create an Account, generate some links and put them on your site. That's all it takes to start making the $$Bucks.
To learn more, visit the Affiliate Marketing Program. Or Contact Us with any questions/comments/concerns.
Our super-duper ultimate training management system, Marakana Spark, just got another feature. We designed the type-ahead search box for you to quickly lookup zillions of classes that we offer. Just start typing, and the courses with words starting with that name are automatically looked up.
This feature, inspired by Apple.com new search, is Ajax-based and is pulling the data intelligently from the public XML feed at marakana.com.
Check it out, leave a comments with your thoughts.
We are proud to announce that Ralph Marx has joined Marakana - welcome aboard! Ralph will help us flush out our marketing strategy and set us up for accelerated growth.
Here's a bit about Ralph:
Ralph Marx is a seasoned executive with two decades of experience in marketing, business development, and engineering in the software industry. Since 1983, Marx has focused on emerging technology solutions and has been a key executive in three successful software ventures. In his role as the founder and CEO of his 4th company, Soiree Corp., Marx is delivering a new service offering to the events industry.
Prior to Soiree, Marx founded Acteva, Inc., which was a leading player in the modernization of the events and activity services industry. As CEO, Marx drove the Acteva idea from conception through planning and funding and on to a successful launch of the Acteva service. Marx garnered clients like Microsoft and Stanford University and his efforts at Acteva were covered in major publications including Forbes and Fortune and as a Case Study taught in Harvard's Graduate MBA program.
Earlier, Marx founded Advocate Systems, Inc. Advocate clientele included some of America?s largest law firms and corporate legal departments such as Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich & Rosatti and Seagate Technology. Advocate's hallmark was intelligent pioneering of new technology. As its US technology and marketing partner, Advocate developed one of three products for a $20 million joint venture with a British Software Company backed by Guinness PLC, British Petroleum, OCE, and Thompson CSF creating a nationwide distribution channel in just over 9 months.
We are pleased to announce a new course on Building Google Maps Applications. This course is based on Ajax and Ruby on Rails for the back-end.
First, students will make a map, add some custom pins, and geocode a set of data using freely available services. After that the course gets into more map development topics, like building a usable interface, dealing with extremely large groups of points, and finding sources of raw information.
Finally the course dives into advanced topics: building custom map overlays such as your own info window and tooltip, creating your own map tiles and projections, using the spherical equations necessary to calculate surface areas on the earth, and building your own geocoder from scratch.
The course is thought by Andre Lewis, the author of "Beginning Google Maps Applications with Rails and Ajax: From Novice to Professional".
The Google Maps training course is going to be a lot of fun. It's in the spirit of providing cutting-edge Web 2.0 training with expert instructors.
Here's another Ajax-based website that wants to be your portal to everything-web. Netvibes is in beta, but they are having a big launch party this coming Monday at Minna. We will be there! Definitely feels like 1999 all over again.
Her Majesty The Queen, as represented by a federal ministry in Quebec, has retained Marakana Canada to deliver PostgreSQL Administration Training to its entire development team.
This was the first class that Marakana Canada has delivered in French since the opening of our Toronto office a few months back. The world is flat, indeed.
After years of developing our app on PHP and MySQL, we hit the ceiling. The lack of frameworks and structure made further development just too costly. Adding all the new features that we have in the pipeline wasn't fun any more.
So we went to the drawing board and came up with the new platform. After researching all the technologies and frameworks out there, many of which are are providing training on, we chose Java with Spring and Hibernate frameworks.
Welcome Spark!
The new Spark platform lets us crank new features in days with a rock-solid reliability. Find out more about it - come to the next San Francisco Java Meetup and you'll get to peak under the hood.
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