Update: the slides have been published! I finally did not demonstrate the FPS webapp and added more fresh content on the presentation. The demo part of the talk has also been improved a lot as it is now even easier to use Elastic Grid. The webcast is supposed to be provided at some point. I’ll update this blog post when the video is available.

I will be doing a talk like the one we did for JavaOne 08, except this time the demo will a bit shorten compared to the one we did at JavaOne. I will also demonstrate the Amazon FPS webapp we’ve been working on (more about this to come soon on this blog).

Our talk How Can Amazon EC2 Benefit from the Elastic Grid Solution? is scheduled on September 18th (2nd day of the JavaZone conference) at 3:45pm in Lab 6.

If you are in Oslo for JavaZone this year, let me know. I would be pleased to see you and discuss anything like AWS, Elastic Grid, or even for drinking a beer :-p

We are pleased to announce that Rio 4.0 M1 has been released and is available for download at http://www.rio-project.org and also on https://rio.dev.java.net

This milestone release is significant, and provides important enhancements and bug fixes. An overview of some of the enhancements follow:

External Service execution
The Rio execution framework provides the ability to encapsulate the control and monitoring of external services. Service control adapters represent applications/services, adding network wide visibility and control. Using this approach, we can attach monitoring, metering and SLA control to existing applications. You can have a look at the tutorial here:
http://www.rio-project.org/confluence/display/rug/Service+Exec+Introduction

Data staging
Provides the ability to download artifacts that a service needs to process. More information can be obtained here:
http://www.rio-project.org/confluence/display/rug/Data+Staging+and+Persistent+Provisioning

ServiceBean fork & exec
The ability to instantiate a service in it’s own JVM. This option provides the flexibility to create a new JVM for a service that is best executed in it’s own JVM, instead of contained withint the CYbernode in a multi-service JVM

Groovy integration
The parsing of the OperationalString is quite complex. Adding groovy to make this part of Rio more maintainable is a key contribution. Based on this ability we will also be creating a Groovy Domain Specific Language (DSL). You can view examples both in the distribution and online here:
http://www.rio-project.org/confluence/display/rug/Instantiation+Properties

Package name change
We are moving from the org.jini.rio namespace to the org.rioproject namespace. We realize this is a big change, but it is a needed change. The current package namespace has Rio under jini.org. This namespace is no longer relevant

License change
We have moved to LGPLv3

UI enhancements
A number of enhancements have been added to the new Rio UI, including better visualization of contained services, Watch Viewer value displays and deployment graph orientation

Service selection strategies
All association proxies have a service selection strategy. The service selection strategy provides a way to determine how services in the collection of discovered services are invoked. The current service selection strategies are fail-over, round-robin and utilization (note all service selection strategies will also prefer local services over remote services).

The release notes are available on Jira:
http://www.rio-project.org/jira/secure/ReleaseNote.jspa?projectId=10000&styleName=Html&version=10010

Please note also that some work has been started in the Wiki:
http://www.rio-project.org/confluence

We welcome you to download and try the 4.0 M1 release. All feedback is  welcome.