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Friday, June 4, 2010

JAZOON 2010, Day 3

The 3rd day at JAZOON 2010 had plenty of good talks in the schedule. The day started with a keynote "The Gaia satellite and Data Processing" by William O'Mullane from ESAC.

The main topic of the keynote was about the issues related to the establishment of a satellite carrying a giant telescope, Gaia. He also mentioned that ESAC uses Java for data processing almost exclusively since 2000. Only some scientific numerical calculations are still implemented in Fortran.

From the standpoint of performance, they find the fact that Java is faster than C for an equivalent code, thanks to JIT on an Intel processor. (see the slide photo below) This claim was even noted at DZone.


The limitations of Java that William noted were:

* "Java is not the tracer bullet"
* too little math libraries maintained (the best being ApacheCommon Math)
* poor IEEE standards compliance

The next talk I attended was about Abacus Formula Compiler by Peter Arrenbrecht. The Abacus Formula Compiler is a Java library that enables you to build a spreadsheet functionality into you Java application. It works best if the spreadsheet contains the values and formulas only. Unfortunately it cannot deal with VBA macros. But still, it provides quite a natural way to embed integrate Java with the spreadsheets.





After that I've listened a presentation about portal evolution in Credit Suisse. A brand new version of the bank's intranet portal was introduced, which they call Intranet 2.0. The idea was that Credit Suisse has many different applications internally and they wanted to put the into one place, so that the customer relationship managers should not log into several applications to serve one client, and also have the personalized views for different type of employees. They used WSRP portlets to integrate the external applications and implemented ~25 portlets for the additional functionality.



To serve the clients they have deployed the portal onto a 16-node-large cluster co-located in 2 data centers. Whatta waste! Banks just don't get it - portal is a wrong way to go! But ok, they have plenty of money for that, so who cares. And architecture compliance is aways so important to such types of companies.


The funniest thing was that the presenter was using a bank's laptop to present the content and it was permanently trying to re-establish the VPN connection :) These bank's security things are just killing me - there should be something better than this.

The next talk was a pretty fair comparison of JSF and Tapestry by Igor Drobiazko. He presented plenty of examples for both, JSF and Tapestry 5, noting the new things in both and stating the pros and cons while explaining why something is done the way it is done. Good presentation especially as I know Igor had his first presentation in front of such a large audience.

One nice example he showed was about reloading the changes by Tapestry on the fly without rebooting or redeploying the entire application, just like JRebel does. Tapestry can to the reloading for almost everything that is included as a source and implemented "the Tapestry way". Unfortunately this mechanism cannot be used as a standalone library for other applications.

if you want to be productive, purchace JRebel or switch to Tapestry

DSL construction with xText was quite interesting, and the slides are already uploaded to Slideshare. xText is used to construct external DSLs as opposed to the approach that Neal Ford presented on the very first day. Previously I was really skeptical about the model-driven approach that xText is promoting, the presentation showed that it is still quite reasonable, especially as xText is heavily relying to ANTLR for grammar construction.

Spring Roo presentation by Eberhard Wolf was a live coding show. Very pleasant! He showed how to get started with Spring Roo, what the tool generates and how it can be altered. Roo (and also many other frameworks) has taken the approach advocated by rails actually - it provides the means for generating the code quickly with assisting the developer while creating the application. The difference is that Spring Roo doesn't enforce any additional runtime dependencies to the resulting application, and also it relies heavily on AspectJ aspects to alter the behavior of Java classes.

The last presentation I attended was about JSF portlet bridge, the brand new standard to integrate JSR168 and JSR286 with JSF1.2. I'm still not convinced that these standards are the right way to go. The portlet/portals approach looks like a very much vendor-driven and doesn't advocate lightweight development model. I know I'm becoming an anti-evangelist of portals but I jsut cannot see any benefit from this technology... unless until someone convinces me that there's no viable alternative.


So now JAZOON 2010 is over. Very good content, well-prepared presenters, lots of networking, very delicious food, awesome location (yes I like Zurich very much). I should have tried to submit a talk to the conference, probably will do that sooner or later.

Thursday, June 3, 2010

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 ........

Tuesday, June 1, 2010

JAZOON 2010, Day 1

So here I am at JAZOON2010 conference. The venue is perfect and the content of the conference is quite good to say the least.

The first day has started with a keynote by Danny Cowards, called "Java SE and JavaFX: The Road Ahead". The first question Danny was asked was about the new life in Oracle after Sun's acquisition. I was really disappointed by the politically correct answer...


He also showed an interesting video with James Gosling about the star7 experimental device - this is where Java roots are.



Frankly, I was still so tired because of the flight, so after the 3rd slide I got asleep and I woke up just in time when the talk was finished. Too bad as I suppose that the talk should have been quite interesting, at least the first slides were.

The other talks I have attended were "Pattern Driven Security Design for Web Tier" and "Web Frameworks and how they kill traditional security scanning" (quite a security-oriented day). I wouldn't say that I learned really something new from there, but I definitely have more structured knowledge in my head now, especially what concerns the terminology and pattern names. Also, quite an interesting approach to security scanning was presented, which is advocated by Armorize.

Objects of Value by Kevlin Henney was quite inspiring but too philosophical too me. The only practical value I got from the talk is the 2 books titles:

Problem Frames: Analysing & Structuring Software Development Problems
Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture


The next talk was from Neal Ford about Construction Techniques for Domain Specific Languages. This is a talk that I have seen on various videos, but haven't seen it live yet. Compared to the older versions of the talk, it was almost the same, but just with some improvements - Neal added a couple of slides with referring to some OSS frameworks that do DSL stuff, like easyb. But the general idea is still the same, the examples are the same, and techniques for DSL construction are the same.

The talk about classloaders from Jevgeni Kabanov from ZeroTurnaround was very interesting. Jevgeni presented several examples from the errors that may appear within container, either ClassNotFoundException, NoSuchMethodFoundError or ClassCastException.




The examples started with the very basics and finished with more weird errors which cause memory leaks, especially on application redeployment. Also you may find some interesting articles at ZeroTurnaround's blog about classloaders:

http://www.zeroturnaround.com/blog/reloading-objects-classes-classloaders/
http://www.zeroturnaround.com/blog/rjc201/
http://www.zeroturnaround.com/blog/rjc301/


The closing keynote of the day was by Kelvin Henney - 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know. The problem with that, is that I read the book beforehand :) So I decided to spend some time for networking instead.


Overall:

+ perfect venue
+ very comfortable chairs at the audiences
+ very good organization
+ yummy food
+ good content so far
+ laptop plugs available

- weak wi-fi
- not that many companies are presented this year (compared to 2008), and Google is missing




looking forward for Day 2!

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