Posts Tagged ‘devoxx’
Friday, November 20th, 2009
I started today with BPM and SOA. Merely because the other ones did not interest me. They were about JavaFX, which I earlier this week found immature, and Pomodoro, a methodology theory. So BPM and SOA. The guy gave us a business presentation of what BPM is, so I fell a sleep right away.
The second session I followed was the one from Brian Goetz and Alex Buckley about the changes they are planning to make in the JVM so they can support the new dynamic languages natively. They explained us why we need it and how they will implement the dynamicInvoke method. When invoking a dynamicInvoke call, the first time they will call a bootstrap method that will translate the dynamic language specific call into a invokevirtual call. The type they gonna use as a receiver will be called something like Dynamic. And all the subsequent calls won’t have to execute the translate logic anymore in the bootstrap method as these translate logic is something that doesn’t change once the app is running. So quite interesting stuff and they explained it very well. Make sure you check out this talk at parleys once it is available.
The last session of the Devoxx conference I picked out was about OSGi by Don Brown of Atlassian. And he to did a very good job explaining what OSGi is, what the possible frameworks are, how you can deploy them in a web app. He also gave us some hints about the possible pitfalls one might fall into. Again, make sure you check out is talk once it is available!
So what did I learn this week ? To start with, JDK 7 will be delayed, but will come with closures. Allrighdie !! Secondly, Scala looks like the upcoming language for web development so’ll definitely dive into that one. And the cloud, I heard lots about the cloud. It is becoming easier and easier to deploy your application and the PaaS development is one to follow. On the other hand, there are some drawbacks to it. The NoSql databases change your datamodel approach entirely. So I’ll have to look into that one as well. And there was uncle Bob. He said almost literally what I’ve been saying the last months. I found out about his manifesto, so I signed it last night and I hope, I really hope, people will start listening and doing what he and I are saying: start to take your job (and yourself) serious! Don’t be lazy, don’t act dumb. Just ask yourself ‘Am I doing the right thing here? Should I do more/less?”. Is my code readable? Do I have the right tests? (and not enough as uncle Bob stated). Say no when needed. In short, can you be proud about your work and guarantee it will work.
So to round up, it has been an interesting week with great speakers and I learned a lot. It’s time to start playing with it now.
Tags: devoxx, OSGI
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Friday, November 20th, 2009
Day 4, second day of the conference days. Again we started with a keynote from which I missed the first 2 speakers due some traffic jam. Luckily, I was just in time to see Robert C. Martin, maybe better known as ‘uncle Bob’. And he was good. Really good. Apart from the message he brought, he’s one of those speakers that get your attention from the first till the last moment. And I really liked what he had to say: professialism. Are we professionals? No we are not. Maybe some of us try to be one, but the majority is not. Something I’ve been saying myself for some time now. I even didn’t know there is a new manifesto out there for a while. So I feel good I am no longer alone in my queste  It all starts at the education.. lets be honest, they are insufficient. OK, when I graduated from university, I perfectly knew how a computer works, I had a basic understanding of OO development and somewhere along I heard something about patterns. But that was merely it. So what happens, we are thrown in the field, start to do our thing, some of us are lucky and get a good mentor from who they can learn a lot, some get a bad one, some get none at all. So we end up all doing the same thing doing differently. So how professional is that? I should write a dedicated post about this one time..
But lets continue with Devoxx. Spring 3 was announced by Poutsma. Basically they added REST support (I guess almost like it is defined in the JSR) and added an API for configuring your application context (next to XML and Annotations). And that’s about it. So I was a bit dissappointed as I expect a bit more for a 3.0 release, but on the other hand, I don’t want Spring to get much bigger than it is now. It has to remain light. To me this is more a 2.6, but what’s in the name anyway. It’s marketing afterall..
After lunch break, Room 5 got completely full for Perfomance Tuning by Kirk Pepperdine and Dan Hardiker. And it was a bit of a disappointment. Sorry folks. They showed us JMeter, JPS and VisualVM. Nothing new. But maybe we expected too much as we don’t like to debug performance issues and maybe we expected something like a golden bullet. Anyway, up to the next session.
And there was the JavaPosse live show. Good entertainment in a Java context was exactly what I needed to give my brain some rest. It’s amazing how one gets tired just by sitting and listening to all this Java goodness
I continued with Dick Wall (from JavaPosse) about funky Java and OO Scala. It was about some handy Java frameworks like Google Collections and Lombok. Together with the JDK 7 closures, code could become much nicer to write and read. He didn’t tell that much about Scala, but I concluded again that I have to get a look into it. It’s powerfull, very expressive !
Jason van Zyl ended my day with the presentation of maven 3.0. It was quite a boring presentation, but what I remember from it, they did a complete rewrite of the core. They start now by making an execution plan first after reading all the pom files and when OSGI stuff is detected, they can switch internally to a OSGI context. They expect to release 3.0 around january and now they are adapting Nexus and Hudson.
So that was day 4. One more half day to go..
Tags: craftsmanship, devoxx, Google Collections, Lombok, manifesto, maven, professionalism, Scala, Spring, uncle bob
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Friday, November 20th, 2009
Day 3 started with a keynote. Stephan Janssen presented the new version of Parleys (which is in Beta right now). For those who spend 50 euros, they can see all the devoxx presentations during 6 months right after the conference. And, you can fully download them. So that’s great. No more worrying about skipping a session or making a difficult choice between two sessions.
Then it was Oracles turn and up on this very moment I have no clue what the hell they tried to tell us there. And if you were hoping the demos bring any light in the Oracle darkness, nope, they were even worse. Sun did a quick announcement of the J2EE 6 stuff followed by a very nice and sexy show of the Adobe guys. CatalystFX does a great job, but as any RAD tool, I have my doubts about the usefullness in the field. Who will want to work with the generated mxml files. At first sight, I won’t. But, we can learn from it. E.g. how to create a slider from some graphics..
Then I went to see what’s going to be in JDK 7. Closures !! And fork/join. But they finally admitted they wont get there in time. So they added a few more milestones. They hope to be feature complete around Q2 2010 and release it a few months later. We’ll see. I like this scenario better than releasing now the 7 and have to wait for the 8 with the real changes again for several years.
Then I went to see Architecting Robust applications in the cloud, which was a bit of a mistake (so I didn’t went to Gosling). Not because it was a bad session, not at all, but it was merely a short version of the session I saw from Chris Richardson on monday during the university days.
JavaFX. Where are they at the moment? Well, they made progress, the components are fast, but there are still missing a few important ones. Maybe the most important one: the table (or grid or whatever you want to name it). It looks quite good though. One day, they will definelity be in the game. Hopefully for them they are not too far behind at that moment.
And then back to the cloud again. Doug Tidwell tried to give us some reasons why we should go for standards in the cloud. He also presented some frameworks, but I must admit he lost me as I had a bit of a dip. Didn’t get much sleep lately  The same counts for the last session of the day, the Lift (Scala) framework. I still remember it looked very cool and I want to try it out soon, but I can’t say anyting more than this about it. My brain got a bit overheated by then
Day 4 looks promising again. Robert C. Martin is coming..
Tags: Adobe, cloud, devoxx, Flex, J2EE 6, JavaFX, JDK 7, parleys, Scala
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Tuesday, November 17th, 2009
First day at Devoxx was all about cloud computing. At least that were the sessions I picked out. The first session introduced all the concepts and bizz words. John Willis did a pretty good job and he definitely knew what he was talking about. But I wanted more. Luckily, after the lunch break Chris Richardson explained us all about the Amazon cloud web services which gave me a more in depth view on things. After these 2 sessions, I can only conclude we are not there yet. OK, everything can be managed now in a nice UI (you can even choose). BUT.. SimpleDB needs a whole different approach of programming your product and does it suite our needs? I mean, it might be faster to read the data and scale easy, but do we need to offer all the good things we get from relational databases? I guess not. Let’s be honest: how may facebooks, googles, yahoos are out there? OK, MySql is supported now, but how will it scale and how about the I/O latency on all these virtual instances. Also, cloud computing is presented as the way to go for a start up company. Indeed, that might be the case if you could just drop in your war file, specify how many cores and memory you want and let it access a MySql or Oracle database or whatever other service you running on an other instance. Not to speak about the infrastructure work the EC2 platform requires as it just provides the infrastructure (IaaS). All should be set up in such a way that when an instance is powered up/down or replicated, the configuration and setup is scripted so it can be restored from scratch. I’m not an operation guy, but from my experience as a developer, this can become a huge task I think.
The good news is that there are some companies out there now offering PaaS, coming close to the war upload scenario, making the deployment task a lot easier. And, more and more new competitors are trying to get their share of the market. So we can only hope that the competition pushes them forward to a one-click-deployment. Hmmm, that sounds Amazon’ish 
Tags: cloud, devoxx, EC2, IaaS, PaaS
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