Talking JavaOne with Rock Star Raghavan Srinivas
- by Janice J. Heiss
Raghavan Srinivas, affectionately known as “Rags,” is a two-time JavaOne
 Rock Star (from 2005 and 2011) who, as a Developer Advocate at 
Couchbase, gets his hands dirty with emerging technology directions and 
trends. His general focus is on distributed systems, with a 
specialization in cloud computing. He worked on Hadoop and HBase during 
its early stages, has spoken at conferences world-wide on a variety of 
technical topics, conducted and organized Hands-on Labs and taught 
graduate classes.He has 20 years of hands-on software 
development and over 10 years of architecture and technology evangelism 
experience and has worked for Digital Equipment Corporation, Sun 
Microsystems, Intuit and Accenture. He has evangelized and influenced 
the architecture of numerous technologies including the early releases 
of JavaFX, Java, Java EE, Java and XML, Java ME, AJAX and Web 2.0, and 
Java Security.Rags will be giving these sessions at JavaOne 2012: 
   
    CON3570 -- Autosharding Enterprise to Social Gaming Applications with NoSQL and Couchbase 
    CON3257 -- Script Bowl 2012: The Battle of the JVM-Based 
Languages (with Guillaume Laforge, Aaron Bedra, Dick Wall, and Dr Nic 
Williams) 
   
  Rags emphasized the importance of the Cloud: “The Cloud and 
the Big Data are popular technologies not merely because they are 
trendy, but, largely due to the fact that it's possible to do massive 
data mining and use that information for business advantage,” he 
explained. I asked him what we should know about Hadoop. 
“Hadoop,” he remarked, “is mainly about using commodity hardware and 
achieving unprecedented scalability. At the heart of all this is the 
Java Virtual Machine which is running on each of these nodes. The vision
 of taking the processing to where the data resides is made possible by 
Java and Hadoop.” And the most exciting thing happening in the 
world of Java today? “I read recently that Java projects on github.com 
are just off the charts when compared to other projects. It's exciting 
to realize the robust growth of Java and the degree of collaboration 
amongst Java programmers.” He encourages Java developers to take advantage of Java 7 for Mac OS X which is now available for download. At the same time, he also encourages us to read the caveats. 
  Originally published on blogs.oracle.com/javaone.