JAZOON 2010, Day 2

JAZOON 2010 started with the keynote "Total Cost of Ownership and Return on Investment" by Ken Schwaber, co-developer of the scrum process.




The overview of the keynote speech is available at JAZOON website.

For me the day started with Václav Pech's presentation about concurrency - Unleash Your Processor(s). Tremendous! It was so interesting!

Multithreaded programs today work mostly by accident!

Václav talked about jsr166y, asynchronous background tasks, parallel collections, fork/join strategy, friendly deadlocks and many more. He also mentioned a number of libraries that can help implement actors in Java (Jetlang, for instance). He also explained how do the persistent data structures work and why they are trees in nature. Also, Václav is a big contributor to gpars project for groovy, but he didn't talk about it much as there was a dedicated talk to this topic.

The next presentation I attended was about HTML5 WebSockets, which was also very interesting. I think websockets is the thing we were really missing for many cases and therefor had to build some nasty workarounds to make the things work. Peter Lubbers from Kaazing showed some interesting examples how the new technology compares to Comet, and he also used wireshark to make the evidence. Nice presentation overall.

GPars was next on the list of me. Dierk König from Canoo was giving a talk about parallel programming concepts for the JVM in Groovy. Actually it wasn't a presentation but rather one big demo. Unfortunately, Dierk has to give the demo in groovyconsole as the best IDE in the world crashed (probably because of some 3rd-party plug-in?).

After the references from Václav and Dierk groovy was actually blasted by Nikita Ivanov who was giving a talk cloud computing with Scala and GridGain. I absolutely agree with Nikita about the poor performance of current Groovy, but I'd definitely disagree with the claim that Scala is more concise compared to Groovy. Groovy is extendable the same was as Scala and you can hook into AST of Groovy to alter the syntax if you absolutely need it. Nikita was talking so much and so fast I started to worry about the demo he promised, but he managed to build the example live without any copy-pasteing. Unfortunately there were no time left for more advanced things.

Nikita also introduced Scalar which is an internal DSL for Scala to be used for GridGain. What is nice about it is that with one line of code once could describe the expected behavior of GridGain cluster, instead of writing 10 times more Scala code.


...... to be continued ........