I have already talked about it but NoSQL is about diversity and includes various different tools and even kind of tools. Cassandra is one of these tools and is certainly and currently one of the most popular in the NoSQL ecosystem. Built by Facebook and currently in production at web giants like Digg, Twitter, Cassandra is a hybrid solution between Dynamo and BigTable.

Hybrid firstly because Cassandra uses a column-oriented way of modeling data (inspired by the BigTable) and permit to use Hadoop Map/Reduce jobs and secondly because it uses patterns inspired by Dynamo like Eventually Consistent, Gossip protocols, a master-master way of serving both read and write requests…

Another DNA of Cassandra (and in fact a lot of NoSQL solutions) is that Cassandra has been built to be fully decentralized, designed for failure and Datacenter aware (in a sense you can configure Cassandra to ensure data replication between several Datacenter…). Hence, Cassandra is currently used between the Facebook US west and east coast datacenters and stored (around two years ago) 50+ TB of data on a 150 node cluster.
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This article is the English translation (human made, not automatic) of what I published on the French version of this blog few a months ago. It talks about Alfresco 3.1.

These days, we hear a lot about collaboration, 2.0 company, wiki, … and also of Alfresco.

Alfresco is an Enterprise Content Management system (ECM). It is a free software, it has a big community and its software architecture is close to Documentum but with more recent technologies.
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When you took a look at the scheduled speakers, no:sql(eu) in London itpromised to be a fantastic event but this was not taking into account the fact that a volcano deep down in Iceland… NoSQL
being about (among other things) availability even in the case of disaster, NoSQL.eu degraded gracefully and eventually took place in a pretty efficient way, with speakers giving their talks remotely, mainly from USA (sometimes very early in the morning due to time differences). This was also an opportunity to meet and discuss with Werner Vogels.

Anyway, here is what I will keep in mind after these 2 days in London:
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This is not a scoop : Swing – even if this technology is widely used in companies – is not evolving a lot. The developer kit still provides today components which are neither complex nor rich as a couple of years ago so you have to buy it elsewhere. The Swing development is still very verbose and finally not really productive, and to be honest, it is not the few JSR in stand-by that will change anything. Beans Binding is in an inactive status. Beans Validation – the draft dates from 2008 – is always not included into the JDK (maybe the version 7). The JSR 296 (which defined a standard application lifecycle) will not represent the most important improvement a framework has known (I swear, I really enjoy Swing…)
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