Boston Scalability
User Group

Hello everyone,

I’m happy to announce the next meeting of the Boston Scalability User Group will take place on Wednesday May 28 at 6 p.m. We will meet at the IBM Innovation Center in Waltham, MA.

Orion Letizi from Terracotta will conduct an interactive session exploring the open-source Terracotta project. Terracotta is useful in many different cases including use as Network Attached Memory for working with large datasets, clustering HTTP sessions, reducing database load, acting as a second-level cache for Hibernate objects and more. You can find out more about some of these use cases by visiting the Start Learning Terracotta page.

Orion’s talk starts off with an overview of Terracotta and using cluster visualization tools to diagnose performance problems with an application. After that the presentation becomes a discussion about Terracotta with the audience. No questions are off-limits so you can ask about how it works, how to contribute, find out if it is appropriate for your use-case and more. This is a fun and interesting way to run the meeting because it allows us to ask questions about the project that are important to us. So read up on Terracotta, use it and come to the meeting prepared to ask questions and learn!

Please register for this meeting if you plan to attend. There will be pizza so make sure you register so we know how much to order.

IBM is located at 404 Wyman St. Waltham, MA 02451


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See you on the 28th!

Hello everyone,

I’m happy to announce our April meeting will take place on Wednesday April 23 at 6 p.m. It’s important to note that our meeting location this month will be at Microsoft in Waltham, MA, a couple exits up from our IBM Innovation Center meeting location.

This month we will have Greg Leake present his new .NET StockTrader 2.0 application. This presentation will focus on building highly scalable applications using the Windows Communication Foundation found in .NET 3.0 and ASP.NET. Other important topics to be discussed are interoperability, particularly with JavaEE applications and SOA. The .NET StockTrader 2.0 application is a service-oriented application. You can find out more about it at http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/netframework/bb499684.aspx. I highly recommend getting familiar with the technical overview before the meeting as there is a lot of good information in there that directly relates to application scalability.

.NET StockTrader/SOA Session

Subject: The .NET StockTrader is an end-to-end sample application for .NET Enterprise Application Server technologies. It is a distributed service-oriented application based on the .NET Framework, specifically using Windows Communication Foundation and ASP.NET. This session will illustrate how many of the .NET enterprise development technologies are made for building highly scalable, rich “enterprise-connected” applications. Greg will also be doing a full demo of this application and how he has designed this application to be a benchmark kit.

Speaker: Greg Leake works in the Connected Systems Division at Microsoft. Greg has been at the company for about 15 years and has held several positions including a few in the Developer Division. He currently spends most of his time developing new enterprise software and samples that focus on interoperability, scalability and performance. Go to the link below to find out more about Greg and his work on the .NET Framework.

There will be pizza and drinks this month, sponsored by Microsoft. In order to know about how much food to order please register for this meeting! It’s just like reserving a few slices of pizza for yourself!

Can’t make this meeting but want to find out about future BostonSUG events? Join our announcement list!

Microsoft is located at 201 Jones Rd. Waltham, MA. 02451

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Free Books!

One of the benefits of being a member of BostonSUG is that you can request a free review copy of any O’Reilly book.  One book I’d like to see a BostonSUG member review is James Murty’s Programming Amazon Web Services.  It’s a recent release so if you get it quickly you could be the first one to review it on O’Reilly’s site, Amazon.com or Slashdot.  There has been a lot of talk about Amazon’s web services recently so getting this book and getting a review out there would be a big help to a lot of people (myself included)!

Let me know if you’re interested and I’ll request the book for you.  Once your review is done I’d like to post it on the BostonSUG web site and send it on to O’Reilly and Slashdot.  Don’t want to write a review?  Read on!

Cheap Books!

Another benefit of being a BostonSUG member is that we get a 35% discount on O’Reilly, No Starch, Paraglyph, PC Publishing, Pragmatic Bookshelf, Rocky Nook, SitePoint, or YoungJin products purchased directly from O’Reilly.  Orders can be made online at the O’Reilly Store.

Please contact me for the group discount code or to request a review copy.  [contact]  {at} (bostonsug)dot(org)

Hello everyone,

Our first meeting will take place on Wednesday March 26 at 6 p.m. in the IBM Innovation Center (Waltham, MA). Our first speaker will be Patrick Peralta of Oracle! Patrick will be presenting:

Orchestrating Messaging, Data Grid and Database for Scalable Performance
Recent years have seen a surge in the number of tools available for building high-scale systems. In the areas of messaging, data grids and databases, many products combine high availability and horizontal “scale-out” across multiple machines. The overlap between these approaches, and the number of possible combinations, raises these questions — “How do I know which combination of technologies to use?” and “How do these technologies work together?”

This presentation compares and contrasts these options, identifying where each technology fits, doesn’t fit, and even when to use a technology that’s not the best fit. We will further explore how to integrate these components while understanding the tradeoffs between performance, scalability and reliability.

Patrick Peralta is a Software Engineer for Oracle, specializing in Coherence. Patrick’s software development experience includes implementing Java/J2EE middle tier solutions, web applications, system integrations, and Swing desktop clients. Prior to joining Oracle, Patrick was a Senior Developer at Symantec, working on J2EE and integration systems. He enjoys mentoring others on technology, and he especially enjoys participating in Open Source. Patrick has a BS in computer science from Stetson University in Florida.

Important Note: There will be pizza at this meeting!

Please register if you would like to attend this meeting.

The IBM Innovation Center is at 404 Wyman St. Waltham, MA 02451

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Please sign up for the BostonSUG announcements list in order to receive more information on this meeting and future events. Remember, meeting attendance is FREE!

If you’ve made it to this page then you’ve probably figured out that the Boston Scalability User Group is the new group in town. The group was recently started to address the lack of ongoing professional discussion about application scalability. The goal of a scalable application is to have the ability to add capacity without diminishing the user experience. There are so many methods that can be used to achieve this goal and BostonSUG will enable software developers, architects, DBAs, and IT guys (and anyone else that might be interested) explore and discuss the tools, strategies and challenges involved with scaling a software application.

Scalability doesn’t apply to just one platform or just one programming language or just one application architecture or just one DBMS. At this point in time scalability considerations permeate almost all aspects of software development. There is no silver bullet that will instantly make your application scalable. Instead you have to work at it. BostonSUG will line up the foremost experts in the field to give presentations at each of our monthly meetings. Their presentations will be very technical and will encourage detailed discussion on some of the most cutting-edge software and best practice design considerations out there to give you the tools required to build a scalable software package.

The first several speakers should include representatives from Terracotta, Oracle and Microsoft with a lot more in the pipeline!

BostonSUG meets on the fourth Wednesday of each month at 6 p.m. The meeting location will be the IBM Innovation Center at 404 Wyman St. Waltham, MA unless otherwise noted. Here is the schedule of upcoming events:

March 26: Speaker TBD
April 23: Speaker TBD
May 28: Speaker TBD
June 25: Speaker TBD

Come prepared to think. Come prepared to learn. Come prepared to discuss.