JAXenter interview with Matthew McCullough
Matthew McCullough, a member of the Sonatype training team and lead presenter with Ambient Ideas, was recently at JAX 2010 in Mainz.
Matthew is an international Java conference speaker, and is an active Maven community member, and an active contributor to many open source, and several Maven-specific projects, such as the Maven 2 CLI Plugin.
He sat down for an interview with JAXenter to talk about Maven. Click here for the full interview in German (the English version will be available soon).
And to see the full offering of Sonatype training courses, click here.
Maven Enforcer Plugin Tutorial: Part 2
We have added new videos and tutorials to Sonatype’s YouTube channel. Matthew McCullough’s training videos on the Enforcer Plugin part 2 walks you through the various motivations for having consistent Maven development environments, and shows you how to employ best practices. More videos will be added regularly, so check our blog often!
Amazon's AWS Powers Sonatype's On-demand Training Infrastructure
Sonatype uses the Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud, better known as EC2, for all our training lab machines. Most of our students use a training workstation for 3-4 hours per class, and since we often have bursts of custom training activity it just wouldn’t make sense for us to own real, physical hardware to support training. If we were maintaining our own hardware, we would have to either maintain enough capacity to teach several classes simultaneously, or we would have to limit the number of classes we deliver. For Sonatype’s training effort, instantiating machines as they are needed is the right thing to do and is exactly what the cloud is designed for.
Sonatype has leveraged AWS’s great set of command line APIs and written scripts on top of them. We just invoke “instantiate-lab-machines-small.sh 10″ and poof, we have a set of pristine machines for the students, all running VNC as a service (for remote desktop access) and pre-setup with the latest version of Maven, Eclipse, and the m2eclipse plugin. No teardown. No hardware maintenance. No hassle. We even have a subsequent script that lists out the machines hostnames for each copy-and-paste into the email that goes out to the students.
While our overhead for training infrastructure is smaller than it has ever been, our use of AWS is about much more than just the reduction in cost associated with cloud-based hardware, we’re much more agile because it takes us 10 minutes to create infrastructure. I don’t even want to imagine owning these lab machines. As our training offerings expand, we’ll be using more and more of these lab machines. I can foresee a day when we’ll literally have a set of AWS machines up around the clock to serve our training offerings. Until then, it’s pay by the hour — the raison d’etre for cloud based offerings.
Click here for more information about Sonatype Training.
Chariot Solutions becomes Sonatype Certified Training Partner
Chariot Solutions, a leading technology consulting firm specializing in software development with Java and open source, is now a Sonatype Certified Training Partner. Sonatype chose Chariot Solutions as a partner because of their deep understanding of Java training.
We are excited to have Chariot Solutions as a Certified Training partner…Organizations can rely on Chariot Solutions to provide a quality learning experience that will help them gain the most business value from their investment in Sonatype.
To learn more about Chariot Solutions, visit their website at www.chariotsolutions.com. For more on Sonatype’s partnership with Chariot Solutions, click here.
Maven Training December Round-up
We’ve got two more training classes coming up in January. These classes have been filling up, so make sure that you register early if you are interested. In the following post, I’m going to summarize some of the things we’ve learned from training this month.
Question Trends: Maven 3 and OSGi
Many questions and much interest around Maven 3. When is it going to be available? When can people start using the polyglot extensions? More and more people are starting out with teh assumption that OSGi is a target platform. I received more and more questions about the various tools that are available for OSGi development. This gave me the chance to feature some of the content from the (still developing) Maven Handbook. If anything I’ve learned that we’re going to need to be a bit more proactive in our Maven 3 coverage.
Participate: Ask Questions
A word to the wise, if you are going to take one of Sonatype’s training classes, I’d encourage you to come armed with some interesting questions. We’ve built enough time into our class to answer questions. We’ve found that students who engage our instructors usually come away with a better experience, and the online format makes it important that students actively participate. While there is a fair amount of slide-driven instruction, our instructors want you to interrupt them to ask questions.
A good teacher realizes that teaching is more a process of listening to students and reacting to the way a student learns a particular subject. In a classroom setting, it is easy to see how a student is sitting – if they look confused or eager to ask a question. In an online training format, it is more difficult to react to students without being in the same room. While WebEx has a few controls that help students signal and chat with instructors, the technology can often get in the way of engagement. My policy for training classes is to encourage engagement, I tell every student that takes one of our classes to interrupt.
Global Reach
I had the opportunity to teach one of our December training classes, the experience was interesting. For starters, our class spanned the globe for the first time. I always try to gauge how global our classes are by calculating the absolute difference in time zones. For the first time, we had students on one end of the globe being instructed by an instructor on the other. We had students in the Middle East being instructed by an instructor in New Zealand for one of our classes. Our training platform, Cisco’s WebEx platform, makes distance a non-issue.
