Javapolis 2006

The last three days I’ve been attending the Javapolis 2006 conference.
Wednesday December 13th

• Keynotes (barely made it due to traffice jams)
• Typical oracle (Duncan Mills) demoing of their ajaxed suites, esb orchestration etc. To much, to fast, to Oracle
• Sun demo’s of Java ‘fun’ stuff, like controling robots and wearables etc.
• Pragmatic clustering guide (Mike Cannon-Brookes –> Atlassian (confluence, jira), founder of opensymphony, author of oscache)
• Great overview of the common pitfalls of clustering a typical Java webapp. Most interesting part of the talk was about clustering Lucene; I decided to try and catch Mike later to ask him to explain their solution for Lucene in a bit more detail.
• Agile Development – Practical experiences (Johan Lybeart)
• Good presentation on real-world agile development. Johan stressed the importance of discipline (keep your promises!) and communication.
• JRuby: Bringing Ruby and Rails to the JVM (Thomas E. Enebo & Charles Oliver Nutter –> Sun)
• Nice to get a preview of next weeks presentation on the status of JRuby. Great to see a swing client being programmed using the IRB. Also some nice examples of the new tools Sun is developing for Ruby development.
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• Private chat with Mike Cannon-Brookes
• I asked Mike to explain their solution for using Lucene in a cluster, and we had a nice little chat about it (I’ll probably try to make a separate post on clustering Lucene later). I also asked him about why they are using Tangosol Coherence as opposed to OSCache (Mike is the author of the first version of oscache). For a project on a tighter budget he actually recommended EHCache!
• Web Continuations (Geert Bevin –> Rife)
• Really, really, really cool presentation on continuations. Geert is an excellent presenter and fun to listen to! He explained continuations using the ‘safe game’ metaphor and build a demo webapplication heavily using the continuations support of rife. Excellent, I’ll have to try this myself…. and probably will blog a small example!

Thursay December 14th

• Keynotes (Mark Fleury, Arich Gamma)
• Keynotes… they where a bit disappointing…. Mark entered the stage dressed as a public enemy rapper (with golden chains and huge clock). But apart from that his talk on how the earn money with open source software wasn’t to interesting.
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• The talk on how the Eclipse development cycle works was a bit dull as well.
• Grails (Graeme Rocher)
• Didn’t expect this to be really interesting, but Grails got my attention! Wow this framework rocks! It really leverages the strengths of a scripting language (groovy) with the ‘solidness’ of hibernate and spring. I’ll try to get a couple of example online ASAP!
• New advanced features in JUnit4 ‘quicky’ (Antonio Concalves)
• Unpuzzling Java Puzzlers with IntelliJ IDEA ‘quicky’ (Rob Harwood, JetBrains)
• Direct Web Remoting (Joe ‘DWR’ Walker, Geert ‘Rife’ Bevin)
• Joe an Geert make a perfect team in for demonstrating exciting technologies. The wrote an ‘battleships’ game using ‘reverse’ ajax during the presentation and the audience was allowed to log in to it and try it. Cool!
• Server Side Scripting / Phobos (Ludovic Champenois, Sun)
• The heavy accent of Ludovic made this presentation a bit hard to follow, but phobos looked quite promising. In effect phobos is an engine to write webapplications using Javascript on the server. The tools beeing developed are promising as wel (good debugger for javascript, so maybe for jruby as well??)
• Closures for Java (Neal Gafter, Google)
• Good introduction to how closures will probably see the light in the Java language. Neal is an excellent, charismatic speaker and had a good story. I decided to join the BOF later on to hear him speak in a more private setting.
• Spring 2 update (Rod Johnson, Interface21)
• Alltough Spring is becomming the defacto standard for Java webapplication development and I think the concepts are really fine it’s starting to loose it’s shiny edge. Great to hear about Acegi becoming part of spring itself.

• BOF about closures (Neal Gafter, Google)
• Nice meeting to discuss closures in a bit more detail. I really like the way Neal tries to add closures to Java (http://www.javac.info/closures-v03.html) and I’ll try to explain how it works in a comming post (pfff… I see a lot of work comming ) meanwhile you can have a look at danny’s blog; he succeeded in getting an example online already.
• Went to pub ‘de elf geboden’ with Remco (Colleague, Ruby-head) and Danny (Friend of Remco, Ruby-head) to ‘evaluate’ the day while drinking a nice quadruple la Trappe beer.

Friday December 15th

• Adobe Flex & Java (James Ward)
• James wrote a small application using flex, the application was capable of taking a snapshot from the attached webcam and presenting the created snapshot in a fancy carousel. The interface generated by flex looks really slick… but hey…. it’s adobe.
• Strategic Domain Driven Design (DDD) (Eric Evans)
• Nice talk on Domain Driven Dessign…. by the ‘inventor’
• OpenOffice.org SDK & Java (Juergen Schmidt)
• Juergen showed how easy it is to extend openoffice using the API they’ve developed. The API isn’t Java specific and can be accessed from many other languages as well.
• Next Generation Continuous Integration Tools (TeamCity) (Dimitry Jemerov, JetBrains)
• TeamCity is a great product. Especially features like integration befor commiting and good scallability make it really interesting. Hopefully the opensource community will come up with something similar soon!

For know I’ll enjoy my weekend, next week I’ll try and see to find some time to ellaborate on some of the above!