I'm a big fan of Twitter, especially at conferences where I'm an organiser. Nothing gives a feel better for how things are going, or what people really want, than the brutal honesty of 140 characters.

So as we're now less than 6 weeks away from QCon London 2010, and I'm track hosting the "Pragmatic Cloud" track, I thought I'd get things rolling by asking if everyone going to QCon who are attending (or speaking at) the cloud track could add the hashtag #pragcloud (and probably #qcon would be ncie too) to their posts. I'll be monitoring those tweets so they're one of the best ways (short of pegging me to a wall as I wander round the conference) of getting your thoughts/opinions/corrections to me.

/Russ

As "Pragmatic Cloud Computing" track host for QCon London, I'm very pleased to say that the track is now finalised with a truly stellar collection of speakers. We have:

• Chris Read from ThoughtWorks giving us the low-down on his real-world cloud deployment experiences
• One of my absolute favourite speakers, Simon Wardley from Canonical to take us on the next step through his amazingly huge ... slide deck
• Ümit Yalcinalp from SalesForce.com taking a harsh-but-necessary look at what Cloud can really mean to us developers
• Chris Richardson, uber Cloud aficionado from SpringSource (a divison of VMware, in case you didn't know), will be taking us through his considerable experience developing for Amazon's cloud.
• Me! (and yes, I do need to get a new photo done before I get sued for lying about my real hairline...) My chance to talk through some of my experiences with building, managing and monitoring my cloud applications. I won't be pulling any punches as I dig into some of the gnarliest complications of developing apps for the cloud. I'm also looking to capture other's experiences so if you have something to share, get in contact.
  

And yep, I'm now booked into the speakers hotel so if anyone fancies some late night banter I look forward to seeing you in the bar!

My company, OpenCredo, will also be there in force so if you want to grab a moment to chat with us (heck, or just fancy some free consultancy time ... why not, it's what it's all about!) we'll have a stand and a room on the main breakout room so pop on in.

For those who have a thirst for more (staying power I think it's called...) I've also been collaborating with the nice people from the CloudCamp series and they'll be staging an evening session on the very same day at the same venue. Drinks will be available afterwards and should round off a very nice, cloudy day in London *.

QCon is going to be awesome again this year, I look forward to seeing you all there!

/Russ

* Couldn't resist, if the Brits don't know a thing or two about cloud then who does!?

Today I have the immense pleasure of announcing the launch of the OpenCredo AMQ project. From the project announcement page:

"The goal of OpenCredo AMQ project is to facilitate communication between Java applications and AMQ servers (brokers)."

Headed up by OpenCredo founder Jonas Partner, our team have developed the following key features in this first version of the code:

• AmqTemplate - This template, in the style of Spring's Template approach (JDBCTemplate for example), simplifies the use of AMQ from Java.

• Spring Integration Support - Provides Spring Integration channel adapters and introduces a custom namespace to provide simple, configuration-based use of AMQ from your Spring Integration-based integration architecture.

The project is currently distributed as a Zip, Tar or is available from a Maven repository (or, of course, build from source)

Getting stuck in with AmqTemplate

A quick glance at the project's integration tests will give you a feel for how to use AmqTemplate. To get started, the first things you will have to do is get an AMQ broker running. AmqTemplate is tested against both QPid (0.5) and RabbitMQ 1.7.0 (1.7.1 should also work, but it hasn't been tested at this point in time) so head on over to their sites and get yourself a broker installed according to their instructions.

Once you have an AMQ broker up and running it's time to configure and use your AmqTemplate. To use a local broker you'd do this using regular Spring configuration like the following snippet.

    <bean id="rabbitMqTemplateBean"
                class="org.opencredo.amq.rabbitmq.RabbitMqTemplate">
        <constructor-arg ref="channelFactoryBean" />
    </bean>

    <bean id="channelFactoryBean"
        class="org.opencredo.amq.rabbitmq.DefaultChannelFactory">
        <constructor-arg ref="connectionFactoryBean" />
    </bean>

    <bean id="connectionFactoryBean"
 class="org.opencredo.amq.rabbitmq.SingleConnectionConnectionFactory">
        <constructor-arg value="localhost" />
    </bean>

The amqTemplate bean is then injected into any class that needs to interact with AMQ. In the following code snippet you can see the AmqTemplate being used to asynchronously send a simple string with an encoded timestamp and then receive it back.

   String routingKey = "DefaultExchangeTest";
   
    String msg = this.getClass().getSimpleName() + " msg: "
                    + (new Timestamp(
                                   System.currentTimeMillis())).toString();
   
    amqTemplate.convertAndSend(routingKey, msg);

    Object result = amqTemplate.receiveAndConvert(routingKey);

More samples can be seen in the org.opencredo.amq.amq-template project tests in the projects source.

"Spring" the AMQ integration

With Jonas being a committer on the Spring Integration project and project lead on OpenCredo AMQ, it was kinda inevitable that first-class support for this light-weight approach to implementing integration architecture in your applications would be provided.

All the options require a blog post of their very own to get into in detail, but to give you a taste of how natural this integration is the following sample shows a Spring Integration pipeline that uses our new AMQ namespace support to create a binding between a specified routing key and a particular AMQ queue, which then enables an AMQ outbound channel adapter to send messages from a Spring Integration channel to a specific AMQ exchange.

    <!-- AMQ config -->
    <beans:bean id="amqTemplate"
        class="org.opencredo.amq.rabbitmq.RabbitMqTemplate">
        <beans:constructor-arg  ref="amqChannelFactory" />
    </beans:bean>

    <beans:bean id="amqChannelFactory"
        class="org.opencredo.amq.rabbitmq.DefaultChannelFactory">
        <beans:constructor-arg  ref="amqConnectionFactory" />
    </beans:bean>

    <beans:bean id="amqConnectionFactory"
        class="org.opencredo.amq.rabbitmq.SingleConnectionConnectionFactory">
        <beans:constructor-arg value="localhost" />
    </beans:bean>

    <!--
        Defines binding between routing-key 'amq-key' and AMQP queue -
        'amq-queue'.
    -->
    <amq:amq-binding id="amqBinding"
                                    routing-key="amq-key">
        <amq:queue name="amq-queue" />
    </amq:amq-binding>

    <!-- Defines AMQP exchange of 'direct' type and its binding. -->
    <amq:amq-exchange id="amqExchange" type="direct">
        <amq:binding ref="amqBinding" />
    </amq:amq-exchange>

    <!--
        This is SI-AMQ adapter which sends message from SI channel
        'messagesChannel' to 'amqExchange' exchange.
    -->
    <amq:outbound-channel-adapter
        default-routing-key="amq-key"
        exchange="amqExchange"
        template="amqTemplate"
        channel="messagesChannel" />

That was just a taster and if you can't wait for the next blog post to see more check out the org.opencredo.amq.amq-samples project in the source.

Summary

OpenCredo AMQ makes it easier to play well with AMQ from both regular Java and Spring Integration environments.

And the development has not stopped there. The next version of the project, as can be seen from the project JIRA, plans to incorporate transaction management with the use of an AMQTransactionManager implementation.

Interested in getting involved?

OpenCredo is committed to open source and as such this project is a typical open source offering where anyone is encouraged to grab the code and get involved by submitting bug reports and patches through the project JIRA.

I recently gave two talks in Tunis:

• Spring Integration: Past, Present and Future
• Pragmatic Cloud Computing for the Business

The slides are now available for viewing and download on SlideShare (see below).

Watched Erik tonight on Jools Holland, was blown away... you turn your back on the guitar for 10 minutes, and some guy changes everything!

Enjoy!
/Russ