Welcome bag

I made it through the first day of the CommunityOne West. Unfortunately my drive back from Fresno to California took longer than I thought. I was only be able to attend two conference sessions in the afternoon. The first session was about database architectures for web 2.0 applications. Personally I found the talk a bit superficial. Too much high level stuff. I wrote down a few buzzwords like Memcache, Multi Statement Requests, Horizontal Partitioning and Hibernate Shards.

The second session was an introduction to Amazon EC2 and it was very interesting. Finally I know what Cloud Computing stands for and how it works. I realized, that I was programming in the cloud already, as I had used Google App Engine. Chris Richardson, who did the session, sounded a bit negative every time he mentioned Google App Engine. At least I got these vibes. He did not like that GAE was not fully 100% Java compliant and that database access was limited to Appengine's own datastore. Well, at least it is free I'd say.

Before I went to the CommunityOne West, I checked in for tomorrows Java One and got my welcome bag. It contained a T-shirt, a jacket, some papers, an Open Solaris CD and something, you would have had a big question mark above your head for - antibacterial hand gel. Pig influenza is just around the corner.