hackathon results are in

We have winners for the BUG hackathon we sponsored at EclipseCon!

• Wyatt Spear
• Andrew Davis

Andrew built a nifty flyover camera simulator and Wyatt built a time lapse photography app.

So with only a day or so of coding in the Cloudsmith PowerUp Lounge, these two gentlemen have each won a new BUG Hiro "build your gadget" kit, worth over $549 retail! What's more, they and their apps... will soon be featured on our site as 'distros of the day', basically making them famous for the rest of their lives.

Links to their apps at BUG Labs are here and here. We'll turn these into Cloudsmith virtual distros and link them up soon.

Unfortunately, I don't know exactly what Andrew and Wyatt look like, but they may well be somewhere in this photo.

We look forward to sponsoring the next BUG hackathon.

 ... read more

new 451 group report on Cloudsmith

The 451 Group just published a report on Cloudsmith. It focuses on the Cloudsmith service as it exists today...rather than where Cloudsmith will be later this year, but it provides a pretty a nice overview and some pretty good insights and is worth a read.

We're not 451 Group clients at this point, so you won't be able to access the unless you are. However, I am allowed to share the following soundbites:

"Cloudsmith's virtual distro approach is widely applicable and greatly simplifies the task of assembling a package from disparate sources and repositories."

"Cloudsmith's software-as-a-service model lowers the cost of assembling and distributing software and could enable software creators for whom the only hurdle is packaging and distribution."

"Cloudsmith comes to the enterprise Java market at a time when there is increased interest in componentization, versioning and assembly of software components thanks to ubiquitous open source and pressure to reduce time to market….and could see broad applicability in the enterprise Java market if it plays its cards right...an intriguing idea in terms of its wide applicability, but a lot of Cloudsmith's success will depend on the details of its execution…"

In case you aren't familiar with 451 Group, their research is generally pretty good, and I'd recommend finding a way to get it if you can.

Vishy…Thanks for checking us out, and many thanks for the coverage.
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gigaom/ostatic post about us

Mike Gunderloy of Ostatic/GigaOM wrote a nice post titled Cloudsmith-A Hint of the Future about us today.

What he wrote was a pretty straightforward observation about packaging services, which, of course, is just a small part of what we're going to to. But there was an edge underneath there, and I think he sees the essence of what we're doing (although he doesn't exactly say it).

But most of all, you have to love the title! ... read more

the lounge life

The Cloudsmith PowerUp Lounge was THE place to see and be seen during EclipseCon. To prove it, all it takes is a single picture of the irrepressible...

...Oisin Hurley of IONA Technologies:


For those who need more evidence, additional photos are here.
 ... read more

a week of fun in santa clara

EclipseCon was pretty good this year. Attendance and energy were up from a year ago. And everyone has moved past worrying about whether Eclipse was peaking, IBM was undermining the community, the show was fading, etc., etc.

EclipseCon was pretty good for Cloudsmith as well. Of course, things didn't turn out exactly as planned...

The Demo Gods struck our OSGi-Android demo that took us almost a month to get ready. Everything was going great, and the audience (packed ballroom) was really into it. But then demo machines all went into hibernate just as we were zipping OSGi stuff across the net. (It turned out afterwards that the power strips had shorted out.) Five minutes of manual effort brought things back to life, but no one in the audience knew what was happening while that was going on. Ken Gilmer's Bug took a picture of the ceiling as it was hibernating, which made it to the XDrive Space and showed up on our Android device. So it all worked, and we got big applause at the end. But there was definitely some relief mixed in there on the audience's part.

At the other end of the spectrum, we gave a last-minute talk on Cloudsmith, Spaces and Buckminster to fill a cancellation. Not quite as glitzy, but it went great and attracted lots of interest. I'm sure there's a moral in there somewhere.

There were five winning Cloudsmith hands in the poker game that ran throughout the show. Each of the winners got a nifty BUG/Hiro "build your gadget" kit worth over 500 bucks. You just do not want to play cards with any of these individuals:

• Maximillian Koegel
• Hanya Xiao
• Rong Chen
• Jason Clark
• Khawaja Shams

And of course, the Cloudsmith PowerUp lounge was THE place to hang out during the show, so now we're all famous.

So what did we achieve this year?

• Everyone who follows EclipseCon probably knows who Cloudsmith is (big change from last year, when no one did)

• Everyone who's interested probably gets what we do (again, big change from last year, when no one did)

• Everyone showed the site to thought it was cool, simple and looked great (big change from last year, when we didn't have a site)

So all in all, we got our money's worth.

Pictures are in a separate post.
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check us out at eclipsecon 2008

We're a "gold sponsor" this year, and we have a lot going on. We've tried to be creative, and also to involve as many Cloudsmith friends as we could. So here's a list of what we're up to...

1. Gold Sponsors get a one-hour speaking slot in a big room, and they're actually supposed to talk about themselves (rather than the Eclipse projects they're involved in). We wanted to avoid just droning on about ourselves, so we came up with a way to combine as many interesting things as possible into one presentation: Android, OSGi, BUG Labs, Eclipse Spaces, XDrive and, of course, Cloudsmith. The end result will be an OSGi mobile app, developed using Cloudsmith and published using Spaces, running on both Android and BUG directly from the Cloudsmith OSGi repository. It has a lot of moving parts, which gives it a kind of Rube Goldberg quality, but it's still pretty cool.
2. We finished the first production-ready implementation of the Eclipse Spaces using AOL/XDrive as the back-end storage provider. We've made the system available for EclipseCon presenters to share their code with conference participants. It turned out to be a huge amount of work, but it should be worth it.
3. We're sponsoring a hackathon with BUG Labs. Developers of the coolest mobile apps for the BUG using the Cloudsmith Dragonfly/Spaces SDK win BUGs. There's probably more BUG than Cloudsmith in the hackathon, but we're fine with that.
4. We're stepping out to Mashup Camp 6 in Mountain View on Monday to show off the work we've done with AOL around Spaces.
5. We've talked about hosting a Saint Patrick's day party Monday nite with our friends from IONA, but that may raise the execution risk for activities 1-4 above. So we'll see.
   

Plus, since our Stratus release, and accompanying site relaunch, will be going live on Monday, many of us will probably spend much of the conference sitting in the Cloudsmith Power-Up Lounge fixing bugs....
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we're little, but not fluffy

Adrian Trenaman of IONA appears to have been playing around with Cloudsmith recently, and was kind enough to capture his thoughts in a (generally) favorable post, little fluffy clouds.

We happen to agree with the shortcomings he finds. Some will be fixed next week; others will have to wait until our June 08 release cycle. ... read more