various...

I hope that everyone be okay.

Day by day is amazing how clever people take advantage of the features availables in internet. WEB 2.0 aims to be a social network, where people can share tastes, hobbies, among others common interest. Such manner, successful pages like del.icio.us, flickr, digg.com, youtube has been developed for specific purposes in mind share links of interest, pictures, news, videos and so on. Today, RedHat did an announcement launching the Mugshot page. Mugshot's aim is "an open project to create live social experiences around entertainment." Mugshot intends become a convergence point of exising WEB 2.0 sites, such manner in one place you can track all modifications done by a friend, for example you can see the new videos she uploaded to youtube, or new referenced pages in del.icio.us.

Finally, workplaces and education institutions has imposed mechanisms and policies to avoid access to ilegal sharing files. Such manner, many of us has found restricted to use popular p2p programs in our work or university. However, an interesting page g2p.org using the enormous Google capacity for crawl the web, provides link to directories that contain copies of e-books, songs, albums, and so on.

What will be the next great idea? think about it!

Groovy...

Groovy looks as another scripting language. But it takes advantage of to be a son of Java.

Nobody denies about the fact of the large set of java libraries available to internet: networking, processing management, distributed systems, virtualization and so on.

Scripting languages help to speed up the prototyping development, for example: ruby, python, perl, among others. Groovy is a scripting language that takes the best of two worlds: huge set of libraries and increase expressiveness of the Java language. Its first stable release to january 2007, asides count with an excellent companion book Groovy in Action becomes a Groovy an excellent prototyping tool.

Java programmers will found it very useful because allows easy lists handle, asides closure concept presents to Groovy as sophisticated java based tool, furthermore smart XML interaction, database connectivity, file management, and so forth.

Since Java(95) born, never a project exciting me so much as Groovy did. Remember, "Standing on the shoulders of giants". Groovy stands on Java giant, your project stands on Groovy?

Grid computing is a great idea, but a lot of work needs to be done in order to approach to scientific community from diverse branches of knowledge.

Tools and your creativity will approximate grid to most people.

• Groovy homepage All you need to start to play with Groovy.
• Groovy in Action (Amazon)
• Groovy in Action (Manning publications) with sample chapters, furthermore book's samples source code.
  

New features in GRAM4

Recently, an article about new features in GRAM4(aka WS-GRAM) has been published in www.globus.org.

Among new features is worthwhile mention:

• Improvements in fault tolerance support.
• Has been increased the number of active jobs.
• Has been adopted JSDL as job description language.
• A new enhanced delegation scheme.
• and more... (read the article)

Preliminaries tests shown a poor performance related to GRAM2(aka pre Web Services GRAM), however, efforts to address that issue are in progress.

Interesting links...

I want to share with you about a couple interesting links for grid manager and programmer.

GDTE plugin
Eclipse is a popular IDE, whose its main feature is the possibility to integrate easily new functionality inside it, through plugins. For grid services development GDTE is widely accepted in grid community.

• You need download eclipse and then install GDTE plugin.
• Besides, a set of small tutorials for diverse features available in the plugin.

Link for the "Newbie"

Globus Toolkit(GT) is the Grid concept implementation most widely adopted. However, the installation process could be painful because GT consist of a lot of components to need be configure. Globusconsortium has posted a tutorial to install a lot of that components in order to provide a basic grid infrastructure.

Another successful grid history

An interesting article was posted to computerworld. It describes how grid concept was used to compute drug compounds related to malaria. In six months of "grid processing", with around of 5000 computational nodes, 420 years worth of data was process in just four months.

RedHat supporting Virtualization

RedHat has been supporting developments on virtualization. Actually, www.openvirtualization.com, is a site supported by RedHat and inside of it you can find a lot of interesting resources related to virtualization under open technologies.

enjoy it!

Grid and Virtualization

The main subject of discussion is about grid computing, but remarkable topics to be discussed here are:

• Provisioning
• Adaptivity
• Virtualization
• Orchestration

Grid computing aims to provide an infrastructure to gather logically a set of distributed resources in a transparent way to end user. All infrastructure is built on top of non-proprietary and widely accepted protocols.

Important achievements to provide that basic infrastructure has been made, however, distributed environments involves new challenges to be considered.

An important challenge is to build autonomic environments and preliminary developments related to the items enumerate above require be made.

Then, that blog periodically will publish relevant information about it.

regards.