Jazoon 2010

As a Java developer you'll need to stay on-top of what is new and noteworthy. A great way to do this is to go to a conference, because this is an interactive way to learn about new stuff. Together with Douglas,  I was attending Jazoon, an international conference held in Zurich, it is my first time here. Like Devoxx it's also held in a movie theater. Although Jazoon is also an international conference there are of course a lot of Swiss here and it's a little smaller. But that just means I have more change to win an iPad :D (didn't happen, too bad).

After the keynote the first presentation I attend is about REST. Stefan Tilkov is the presenter and he does a nice job bashing web frameworks like JSF that do not do REST at all. He has a point, the web is about URI (Unified Resource Indicator) and a document should be identified with that. That has always been the way of the web. And "modern" web application frameworks have a tendency not to change the URI for every resource and use only one HTTP method (e.g. POST) instead of all 7 of them. Stefan calls this abusing the web, or even desktop applications in disguise. I must agree to what he has to say about a lot of things. Search engines like Google work because of this and even if we are writing applications that are used inside intranets they are still web applications and they should be able to work accordingly. I'll need to investigate what people developing JSF thoughts are about this.

Next up Blueprint by Costin Leau, he works for SpringSource. I personally have not used Spring since  they were hesitant to adopt annotations and was rather using JBoss Seam ever since. But as we have customers interested in doing something with OSGi it will be interesting to see how they eased the way to develop something for OSGi. When I heard about Spring the first time, I was amazed and wondered why I didn't think of that. Now I have the same feeling with OSGi, it can be a lot simpler when you use IoC in combination with it. Blueprint is only a spec and there are 2 implementations. I really need to take a look at it because it looks really helpful.

On Thursday we had a nice Java roundtable to discuss all the news.
Erik was all excited! :D

On day 2 the keynote is from Ken Schwaber he is one of the founders of SCRUM. In his presentation he made the point that a lot of people who think they are doing scrum are actually not: Because they don't finish their user stories. This is due to the fact that we don't include enough when we say it's done. When is a user story done? When user acceptance testing has taken place? Load test integration test and refactoring? When things like these are kept to the very end of the project a lot of work still remains to be done when the project should have been finished. According to Ken this work will be exponentially more then when you do it after each sprint. All in all it was quite a mood breaker because Ken tried to emphasize that a lot of software projects still fail and that we should be professional and fix that by changing what we call done.

Peter Lubers (he must be Dutch :D ) had a talk about HTML 5 Websockets. I've heard about a couple of things that are going to be in the HTML 5 spec but I did not know about this! And this is very exiting:  there are a lot of projects that have tried to solve the problem how to push data to a web browser client. All of the implementations are not ideal. There are a couple of polling solutions, but the overhead that you get when making a request, on average, is about 800k. That does not look like much but if you want to scale your applications it is a lot. The way Websockets work is to "upgrade" your standard HTTP  connection to a socket where you can then send and receive data over. He showed a working example of this with Google Chrome the only browser that supports this right now- At the end of the presentation he said he talked to one of the technical guys from Microsoft and he has a strong feeling it will not be in IE9, how nice is that (the IE6 story all over).

The two talks I went to after lunch were both about alternative languages on the JVM namely Groovy and Scala. And they we're both about Distributed Computing. I thought it was really exciting, all we need now is a customer with a large set of data and a need to compute something with. That is the only problem with distributed computing and with cloud computing even more so, it needs lot of data to work with. Otherwise there is no need to use it. This is even more true when you already use web applications. They scale very easy because they use the request response model. Every request could be handled by a separate thread or instance in a cluster. So interesting things are happening here and a lot of development is going into solutions based on distributed computing and cloud computing.

Douglas and Daniel trying to get more infos about Web Sockets...
Well...isn't that a game on that iPad?

Last Day

On the last day of the conference the keynote was about Gaia the satellite that is going to map a lot of stars in our milky way. It was interesting to see that they use Java to analyse the huge amount of data. And that there are still debates about Java being fast enough. Come on people it's 2010 Java is blazing fast!!

The whole last day was more or less about testing. There were a lot of talks in this area and only one that I would like to mention here. There was a way to short talk about Arquillian. I don't think that the presenters wanted to have a small slot but I guess they we're forced to use a small one. Arquillian is a cool way to test EJBs inside the container. The project is brand new and they still need to add support for a couple of containers. But it's looking really promising. I got a cool shirt at their presentation so I'll definitely keep an eye on this project :-).

Thoughts

All in all Jazoon was great to see and to be at. But if I would have to choose between Jazoon or Devoxx  I'd rather go for Devoxx. The idea I get is that Jazoon is younger than Devoxx and still has to proof itself as important and unique besides Devoxx. Of course Jazoon is better organized, everybody knows that people from Belgium are chaotic ( :D sorry guys), but that is not enough of course. At Jazoon I don't get yet the atmosphere you get from a Devoxx, this hold true for the size and quality of speakers too.

But I do have a lot of new things I have to look at! So all in all it was a positive experience. I hope Jazoon gets more popularity so it will attract more people from around the world.

JavaOne 2010 and Oracle OpenWorld 2010

... or "Oracle acquired the city of San Francisco":
This year is the first year of JavaOne under the umbrella of Oracle and it takes place in the same city and the same week as Oracle OpenWorld: September 19th - 23rd in San Francisco.

You may ask how Oracle can host two conferences of that size at the same time in the same city: Moscone Center (for me the home of JavaOne) is now the home of Oracle OpenWorld whereas JavaOne has been relocated to the so called "The Zone" consisting of three large hotels, all near Union Square (see red markers in the following map):


View JavaOne 2010 in a larger map

Registration is open for both conferences and both do offer a discount at this moment when registering within the next few weeks.

If you go to JavaOne for the first time you might want to compare it with last year's conference where it was hosted by Sun Microsystems for the last time:

• Monday
• Tuesday
• Wednesday
• Thursday
• Friday

We (the CTP Java Competence Group) are very curious how both conferences will present themselves in this new Java era led by Oracle.

Devoxx day 4/5

Day 4 was really great we had some very good keynote sessions. Ivar Jacobson is the father of components and UML. In his presentation he told us about the work he is doing to standardise the methodologies. Now a lot of companies make their own flavour of a methodology or create an entirely new one but "steal" from others. He want to create reuse so that people don't have to relearn the entire thing but just have to learn the new parts. It's food for thought, that is for sure and if it works out we'll have to wait and see.

After that, another great keynote from Robert Martin a.k.a Uncle Bob he is the founder of fitnesse and very focused on TDD (Test driven development). His talk was about "Filling The Professionalism Gap" by being Craftsmen. What it comes down to, is to make more IT projects succeed, developers must see themselves more as craftsmen. That means that developers should have a more "ethic" approach in delivering things and only create software that is clean tested and that really works. This is what we already do at CTP but I think a lot of developers can learn from this.

There were also some big announcements made at this Devoxx:

1. Closures are in JDK7
2. More new components in JavaFx 1.3

Big stuff and cool to hear that closures are going to make it in JDK7, that is a huge thing.

Also I had some fun of this day at devoxx, I went to the presentation of the JavaPosse. And when you hear the recording you can probably hear me shout: "Switzerland" :-). Of course they had their beer sponsor Atlassian so we had some nice Belgium beer (Duvel). A cool side effect of conferences is the fact that they are normally hosted inside a movie theatre: So at Devoxx they showed the new movie '2012', a very nice movie with lots of effects.

And then it is already the last day and I didn't notice this before, but it's only half a day. So I had some good sessions today one from Andy Wilkinson about Modular Web Applications with OSGi. He uses Spring DM (that's an application server, but not a Java EE certified one) to be able to split his web application vertically and/or horizontally in different OSGi bundles. That could be really good to manage big applications. Also he had some news, they are working on a version that does not require Spring DM, so that is definitely something we must keep an eye on.

That is it from Antwerp, Devoxx 2009!
So let's see what will happen with all the announcements made here in the next year...

Devoxx Day 3

The network at devoxx is letting me down a bit, so this post is a little bit late. This day is the first conference day, the university days are over. That means that there are a lot more people here than yesterday. Oracle (Steven Harris) had a long keynote talk in which interesting upcoming details have been presented with what is coming with future WebLogic releases. What they demo-ed was kinda cool. A modular WebLogic based on OSGi (often referred as mSA aka Micro Service Architecture) that you can assemble using a GUI tool. That you can also run in a virtual machine without adding an OS.

Next keynote was presented by Roberto Chinnici from SUN, he is the spec lead for JavaEE6 and gave a quick overview what is new in EE6. As I already had a 2 hours talk about that topic during the university days there was nothing new to me but all in all it well covered all aspects for people hearing about it for the first time. One of the cool things in Java EE 6 I like most is the modularity of the web.xml being part of the Servlet 3.0 spec. Using 3rd party frameworks only requires to add a library, instead of also adding a servlet or servlet filter in your web.xml.

Also announced in the keynote is that everything presented at Devoxx is going to be released on parleys.com (currently upgraded to version 3!! ). That is great as all the presentations I've visited can be watched again including comments by other visitors etc.

During the break I ran into a lot of people I know from previous companies I worked for. It is always nice to hear what they are doing now and what other sessions they have seen and to tell them if they ever want to work for a nice company in Switzerland, I would know a good one :D

Now an update on where JDK7 is right now by Mark Reinhold. Great talk about what is important and where the focus for making Java move forward is going to lay. Talking about Project Jigsaw this is the first time ever I have seen some implementation how this could/would work. The shame is that there is no JSR for Java SE 7 so all development will not progress as long as this is the case. What was very surprising is that Mark wants Closures in, but in a very simple form, but that is great news for a lot of things Closures will make my code look nice.

In the keynote Apple gets a lot of criticism about being slow accepting apps in the store and the kind of feedback Apple provides when apps are disallowed.

Lunch break: Bumping into a lot of people again that I know; Talking to someone from JBoss about their community, now I have a nice CD to give away.

James Gosling is talking about the Java Store and I hope he is going to tell us that we here in Europe can use it now. So he is talking that we should provide him with feedback on the stuff they made, but as of now the Java Store is still not accessible for us. That makes his whole talk a bit pointless. Yes, I would love to have a platform I can sell my hobby projects with, but no need to tell me about how great it is when I still can't use it. There are a couple of countries being added in the near future, but Switzerland is not one of them.

Cameron Purdy tells us how we should change our programming paradigms if we want to use multi core, multi node programs. So the answer to all our problems is to use partitioning? I'm a bit puzzled how I could use this. I think this presentation could have been a bit more concrete. He presents all theoretical ways to do parallel distributed computing. At the very end I know why everything was so vague, if you want an implementation of all of what he talked about than you'll need to buy Coherence a bit of an anticlimax.

Doug Tidwell will now tell us a little about how to extract a way from implementations of cloud computing. He is from IBM an I hope this is not another product plug and it turns out that it's not, he is funny and a good speaker. What he is trying to tell us is that we need a standard for doing cloud computing, an API to talk to different clouds. The problem is that the services that clouds provide now are so diverse that one API to rule them all makes no sense. That is a bit what I miss, nobody is talking about how using a cloud will impact my design.

Then one of the creators of the Android platform Romain Guy will talk about animation. Romain Guy is really famous in the Java world so his presentation will be good. It's about animating GUI using the cartoon rules. There are some basic cartoon rules for doing animation he shows us how they apply to GUI animation.

Devoxx day 2

Today it is day two at Devoxx. What I didn't put in my last post is the BOF I went to last night. BOFs here are great - there are only a couple of people in the room, it is really different than at JavaOne where there are a lot more people. So yesterday I had a BOF with the JSF spec leads (well the 3 key persons: Dan Allen, Peter Muir and Andy Schwartz) and we could in a very relaxed setting ask them some questions about the JSF 2 spec. So we could find out how and why they made some decisions. The question I asked them: "Why is JSF 2 not more focused on components so that I can mix and match components of 3rd party providers?". The answer was that they are looking into that and that a lot of problems one has with that right now is how resources are loaded: all 3rd parties made something on their own. So now all the AJAX stuff needs to be gathered and then they will look into that. Good answer, I'm glad that they are aware of what lives in the community.

My first session of today is a session about JEE6. They are talking about and demo-ing everything that is new in the spec. Antonio Goncalves a French Java Rockstar has a lot of humor and a nice presenting style. JSF 2.0 is kind of confusing, because it could run on servlet 2.5 but also on 3.0 but then less needs to be configured. Yesterday the expert group also talked about this that they communicate better what is now the "preferred" way of doing things. This is difficult when you make a spec. You can't remove things, because it needs to be backwards compatible. This is also the case for EJB3 - there is now a EJB3.1 lite edition where all old stuff is removed. According to them there are some containers being built that only support this spec.

JavaFX is what my next talk is about. This is hyped a lot by Sun and now with the takeover by Oracle also Oracle will continue with JavaFX. The last changes around JavaFX involved a lot of tooling at this year's JavaOne. Tor Norbye presented a tool for designers that they can layout an application for mobile and desktop. Stephen ChinEmmanuel Bernard is also a guru of the Hibernate team and here at Devoxx he is talking about integrating Lucene into Hibernate as an alternative query API. So the bridge they have built for Hibernate is really cool. In the past we did this on ourselves, have a Lucene index to search on and then load entities when needed. But with the Hibernate search query API we can do it "automatically".

During the lunch I talked to Ceki Gülcü who is also from Switzerland and giving a talk about logback, the continuation of the dead log4j project, tomorrow. He would make a nice speaker on the JUGS.

Now it's time for tools in action again, first up is Gradle. Hans Dockter is the project lead and he gives an introduction about Gradle. Gradle is a build tool that uses CoC and has a DSL to configure your build. Yet another build tool, but this time is using groovy DSL to make a build file. I also blogged that Maven3 is also going to provide this. I don't know what Hans is trying to explain to me or how this is better than Maven3, but he is a bit chaotic. After a while there is a new speaker that is even worse. I think there are some good options in Gradle, but these are not the guys to explain it to me. One thing I did get from the presentation that you could fork your test over more threads, which is cool.

Next up is Scala Actors that will be a good one. You all know of course that ScalaFrank Sommers gave us a concrete example of how Actors can be used in Scala. It's great, a lot of stuff you get for free. Of course the concept of Actors is not bound to Scala, but there are things that Scala offers that make Scala a good language to use with Actors. For instance types in Scala are immutable by default. Great talk and when I'm going to type synchronized in code again I must remember this talk.

That is it for day number 2, it was a fun packed day and I look forward to tomorrow. One more thing I noticed today if you want to present on Devoxx you'll need a Mac and IntelliJ IDEA.

Devoxx day 1

Devoxx is probably the largest European Java Conference. As it always takes place at the end of the year and approximately half a year later than big brother JavaOne, it's a good time to get the stuff again that has been announced at JavaOne and to see how the news and forecasts have been adopted in the meanwhile.

When I think of Belgium I think of beer, bars, chocolate, hospitality and cosiness. But when I arrived and saw my hotel all these feelings went away. The location of my hotel and the conference is in an industrial part of Antwerp. There is nothing here but harbours and sea containers. So there is absolutely nothing distracting me from attending the sessions :D

So my first session of the day was about jBpm 4 and that was very impressive, I've used jBpm in the past together with Seam. I wish that I could use it with my last project. They changed a lot the API making deployment and testing easier. The console is now rewritten in GWT, and there is a web app that business people can use to create and modify processes. Also creating screens for tasks now works!

So with the new version they really focused on working together and fixing the issues with regards to configuration. So I'm definitely trying that out.

Strange thing about this fist day that I haven't seen any companies yet. Maybe they will only setup their stuff when The conference days are starting. OK update on this: they are building up their stuff now.

Another important note... I already have my 2 t-shirts and one of them is a limited edition!

Next up is Architecting Robust Applications for Amazon EC2 , let's see what they have there.

This one was not interesting at all, if I want to know how the webservices of amazon work I'll look it up myself. So I switched to a talk from a SUN guy who is clicking stuff together in Netbeans. What he is talking about is interesting. But his demos don't go further than the wizard screens of Netbeans and he is looking all the time to his webpage.

So after the break it was "Tools in Action" time, these sessions are shorter and focused on tools, hence the name. The first one I saw was about Introducing Scimpi a framework rather than an actual tool, build on Naked Objects, but the concept is a bit old and Scimpi is sort of redefining it. I've used metawidget for similar things but I think this gives me more control over the output than Scimpi and also has more powerful components that I can use.

So now the last one of day one NoSQL with Cassandra and Hadoop. That was a nice introduction and they presented a nice usecase when to throw out the relational database. But I want to know more about it. Let's see if I can find some more talks.

All in all it was a very interesting day and let's see what tomorrow brings.

JavaOne 2009 Summary: Friday (Day 4)

Related Posts so far:

• Day 0: CommunityOne, GlassFish
  
• Day 1: JavaOne, Key Note
• Day 2: JavaOne, Mobility
• Day 3: JavaOne, Microsoft and IBM
  

=== The Toy Show hosted by James Gosling! ===
Welcome back, the final day has come and it's called "Toy Show Time" !

The whole show is not about standards or technical details, it is about Java, the Java ecosystem and how Java is used in its various situations driven by innovative people around the world:

• The BlueJ team received a well-deserved special recognition for building tools that help millions of high school and college students get started with Java.
• A fellow from RuneScape dev demoed their tools, and I learned how one animates a water troll, something that will surely come in handy one day.
  
  
  
• JavaFX Demo with inversed Nintendo Wii Remote Control. See BOF descriptions in my last post. Instead of virtually painting on the wall, they used a piece of glass and it therefore looked like a scene of Minority Report :-)
  
  
  
• Tor Norbye (a JavaPosse member) showed a very impressive JavaFX authoring tool whose release is planned in December. When JavaFX was presented the first time at JavaOne 2007 it looked good already but nothing really happened after that announcement. In 2008 it was pushed again but it did not kick off (again). Since the release of Java SE 6 Update 10 and this year's JavaOne, it is now really looking much much better! The demos of the upcoming JavaFX version by end of this year looked even better!! Together with Larry's indication to heavily push JavaFX forward, it might soon be a valid competitor of Flex and Silverlight.
  
  
  
• There was a demo by the high school kids who won the FIRST robotics contest. Sun and the FIRST folks just ported the programming environment from C/C++ to Java.
  
  
  
• The Grameen Foundation showed off an open source system for helping with microfinance in third world countries.
• A fellow showed SIM cards running Java and a web server. The latest ones can interact with sensors and WiFi radios.
• At the age of 14, James Gosling was working on some satellite ground station application running on a PDP-8... as of James, it had less compute power than a modern smart card :-) His mother took this photo by then:
  
  
  He was very excited to have on stage a guy showing a top-notch cutting-edge version of a satellite ground station management application used today and running fully on Java using over 1000 OSGi modules.
  
  
• Two Hungarian university students showed off the project that won them first price in the Ricoh Printer Contest. Those printer/copiers are Java-powered and the students used them to grade multiple choice exams.
• Atlassian wins Duke's Choice Award for Clover!
  
  
  
• Another interesting guest was Visuvi: Not only can you upload (cell phone cam or hi-res) images to their search engine and have them analyzed (e.g. to answer the question "who painted that?"), but most importantly, the new image analysis technology is used for cancer research (e.g. you can search through a biopsy image database for visually similar cases). The database currently stores about 50 million images whereas a high-resolution image hold 3000 Mega Pixels and is about 60 GB !!!
  
  
  
• A musician showed off a Java-powered juke box that allows independent artists to upload their creations to a web site and have it played in bars. As James put it: “Here's Manuel. He is a musician. He has a problem.”And with the help of a touch screen, a cash reader, and Java FX, he put together a solution. James had to insert a 1$ bill in order to run the demo :-) He said: "1$ for a starving musician"...
  
  
  
• "Project Bixby" controls an Audi TT on a dirt rallye course going really fast (160 km/h) without a driver! This was very impressive...
  
  
  
  
  
• And finally, the“LincVolt” project controls a 1959 Lincoln Continental with an electric motor, this time with a human driver: Neil Young! There is a Swing-based control panel in the car and while driving around, people can follow the data on the website. Fancy stuff... If I'm right, the car can produce 500 horse power !?

=== Technical Sessions ===
I'm still suffering from this week's firehose of information! It is again 2:35am... there will be only the titles of visited technical sessions without any comments. Sorry!

• JCA 1.6 (by the two spec leads): most important take away: in addition to security context outflow there is now also security context inflow -> JCA 1.6 provides E2E security context propagation!
  
• Google Guice (by Jesse Wilson)
• Async with SCA (Apache Toscany)
  
• JMS: Performance vs Reliability
  

=== Bye Bye San Francisco ===
After the last session (5.10pm) we had early dinner at the Chieftain Irish Pub. After that I headed back to hotel for writing the two posts (yesterday and today).

On the way to the pub we spotted these here...


Finally in the Pub: Anchor Steams... aaaah


At 9.30pm, we had a quick walk around block to take some photoshoots of SF by night:

Bye bye JavaOne, Hello WWDC!












This year's JavaOne was one of the best so far, not only due to the strong focus on Java EE 6 but also because of having talked to so many people, spec leads, experts and other visitors...
As said, time passed by so quickly, it's quite a shock realizing that all this is already over again...

Looking forward to bring back lots of infos, impressions and ... gadgets back to Switzerland!

CU soon
- Balz

JavaOne 2009 Summary: Thursday (Day 3)

Related Posts so far:

• Day 0: CommunityOne, GlassFish
  
• Day 1: JavaOne, Key Note
• Day 2: JavaOne, Mobility

JavaOne Day 3 Summary

=== General Sessions ===

• Microsoft in a general session!
  Corporate VP Dan'l Lewin started with the 5 year partnership with Sun and mentioned Microsoft's dedication to the interoperability topic between Java and .NET. As of a survey they did last year, 73% out of 5 million interviewed developers work in a mixed environment.
  At JavaOne 2006 Sun announced new workforces together with Microsoft to work on the interoperatbility topic. The demoed Apache Stonehenge is certainly an outcome of it, a prove also that Sun joined the project which serves as set of sample applications to demonstrate seamless interoperability across multiple underlying platform technologies (like Java and .NET). Key message here was that given the matured WS-* standards, interoperability was "possible" but the last mile on "how to correctly configure the products/framworks on each side" was still very hard to do. Now with Stonehenge the last mile gap is closed. The demo was presented by Greg Leake, a Senior Director at Microsoft, and Harold Carr, Sun's Lead Architect for the Metro Web Service Stack.
  
  Further resources: www.interoperabilitybridges.com
  
  
  
  
• IBM: Extreme Transaction Processing and Elasticity
  Craig Hayman, IBM's vice president of WebSphere software, focused on the importance on open source and open standards development with Java. To demonstrate some of the work that IBM has been doing with open source to innovate in the middle tier, Hayman called to the stage Ted Ellison, vice president of the Apache Software Foundation and an IBM senior technical staff member, to give a demonstration of the Apache Harmony project. More details on the session see here.
  
  
  
  One particular slide in the presentation I found cool in particular: it showed again the evolution of architectures and their focus points:
  Mainframe based Architectures ->
  -> Client/Server Architectures ->
  -> Focus on Mobility Architectures ->
  -> Cloud Architectures... what comes next? Unfortunately, I was not quick enough to take a photo of the slide... This one is good too:
  
  
  

=== Technical Sessions Highlights ===

• Enterprise Integration Patterns in Practice
  by Andreas Egloff (Lead Architect GlassFish Fuji) and Bruce Snyder (Apache Camel)
  Besides the introduction of some integration patterns (like "Content Based Routing", "Pipeline Routing", "Spitter" and "Aggregator"), both presenters summarized two open source products that address this topic:
  - Fuji: The core of OpenESB v3, originating from Java CAPS, currently still beta (M6)
  - Apache Camel
  
  While both products surprised in their richness of functionality that certainly simplifies many application implementations, Fuji convinced us more and not only because it really cool web based UI (based on JavaScript!):
  
  
  
  In the Pavilion I talked to Andreas Egloff asking about clusterability: this will come next year with GlassFish AS v3.1 which by then will support clusters and Fuji will be built on top of that. Transaction Support: Fuji's focus is Ease of Development combined with strong focus on Enterprise implementations, so distributed transactions are fully supported as of the first release by end of this year.
  
  
• Dealing with Asynchronicity in Java Web Services
  by Gerard Davison and Manoj Kumar (both Oracle)
  - nothing new, it was pure JAX-WS based async stuff
  
  
• Bean Validation: Declare Once, Use Anywhere
  by Emmanuel Bernard
  Actually a very good presentation, Validation Cascadation, Groups (Subset of constraints), Partial Validation, Custom constraints, Metadata API!... Bean Validation is available across layers (JSF, EJBs, JPA): JSF2 requires zero config, JPA2: validate on entity change. In general, Bean Validators can be injected as Resources in Java EE 6.
  
  
• eBay: Best Practices for Large-Scale Web Sites
  by Randy Shoup (Lead Architect of eBay)
  I expected a special large scale Java EE architecture but it was the contradiction of it:
  - no JDBC client transactions, no distributed transactions (2PC, XA)
  - no DB constraints in the DB schema
  - no HTTP session states (the state is kept in a combination of cookie/URL-params/DB)
  - no EJBs
  - everything is asynchronously processed
  
  I was surprised about the architecture very much, somehow I could not believe it but due to the success of eBay, it is obviously like that...
  
  Some backgrounds:
  No DB Constraints: The user profiles are kept in a DB RAC, the auction items are kept in another DB RAC. The 1:many relation between user and item was not based on constraints but was solved by treating it in a bottom-up approach...
  
  The best practices in a nut shell were:
  - Partition Everything (e.g. User Profile DB RAC, Item DB RAC, split data by load and usage pattern
  - Async Everywhere: Synchronous designs must address peak load whereas asnyc designs can flatten out peak loads and compensate at time of low loads
  - Automate Everything: Based on feedback loops the systems adapt their configuration automatically (sizing). This is achieved by defining SLA between consumer and producer components. If the consumer tends to violate an SLA, it starts to scale itself horizontally.
  - Everything can fail: all systems must be tolerant of failure
  - Embrace Inconsistency: He introduced the CAP theorem: Consistency, Availability, Partitioning. As of the theorem you can have only two of them. eBay selected availability (7x24) and partitioning according to its priorities. Consistency is seen as a spectrum and is therefore not comparable to "normal Java EE" designs.
  
  Some numbers:
  - 1.6 millions of transactions per second worldwide
  - 88.3 millions of user profiles
  - 160 millions of items
  - 2 Tera Bytes of logfiles per day
  - 2 billion page views per day (ebay.com)
  
  
• Drizzle: A New Database for the Cloud
  
  
• Various:
  - SpringSource Tool Suite (STS) is now for free!
  

=== BOFs ===

• Enterprise Web 2.0 Architectures
  by Brazilian Consultancy Company Globalcode
  Goal of the session was to show how they compared different web application stacks and which stack suits best for which customer environment. Stacks considered were:
  
  1.) Pure Web: JSF 1.2, Facelets 1.1.x
  2.) Web + JMS + EJB: Compared to Pure Web: Business Logic in EJBs, not in JSF managed beans anymore
  3.) Spring: Pure Web + Spring components, Spring AOP and Spring Security
  4.) Seam: Pure Web + JSF/Ajax + Seam components and JBoss Rules
  5.) Seam + Spring: As of some customer they have in Brazil, a migration from large-scale Spring based applications was required to a Seam based model. In this very special case, they found out that both worlds can live together at the same time in the same application. They also found out that injecting a Seam component into the Spring container was possible and vice versa.
  
  It is definitly worth going through these slides and see the last table (criterias vs stacks): red cells indicate high risk, orange a potential risk.
  A big surprise was the public availability of a web based CRUD generator where you can enter the data model, select the stack and export a sample application as ZIP file containing the IDE project... Really nice!
  Check it out here: supercrud.com
  
  
• JavaFX and the Nintendo Wiimote
  Take a Wii Remote Controller, mount it near the image source (TV, Beamer) and mount the infrared sensors (that are normally mounted near the image source) on your moving objects, in this BOF a normal glove. Write some JavaFX and off you go with a virtual paint panel wherever the beamer is projecting to :-)
  
  painting on the wall by using fancy JavaFX gadgets...
  
  
  
  
  

=== After Dark Bash ===
Back in 1999, I was in San Francisco in the very same hall at the ISSCC (International Solid State Circuit Conference) presenting the diploma thesis from ETH Zurich. In the very same hall, the official JavaOne After Dark Bash party took place... impressive!! Very loud live rock band performing on a huge stage accompanied by a food buffet and various drink bars.
While Dani was still at some JavaFX labs exercise, I spent some 45 minutes there and enjoyed the short break :-) After that, I went back to the last BOF (while Dani enjoyed the last hour of the bashing party :-)...



=== Bookstore ===
As usual, the book store always attracts each day again... this time:
- JSF 2 and JBoss Seam / WebBeans


Cu tomorrow, last day!

JavaOne 2009 Summary: Wednesday (Day 2)

Back again... well I'm sorry to write this but I could not make it yesterday to publish the summary of Wednesday. It was 2:15am and I was very exhausted after having been up since 7am. So, I still hope you enjoy this summary as I try to include as much infos as a can within the given time from different sources in the net and myself.

Related Posts so far:

• Day 0: CommunityOne
• Day 1: JavaOne, Key Note

JavaOne Day 2 Summary

=== Mobility General Session ===

• Christopher David, Head of Development and Partner Engagement at Sony Ericsson, was the main speaker for the talk. During his presentation, Erik Hullman (a Senior Java Developer with Sony Ericsson) was given the task to develop a JavaFX Twitter client from scratch that at the end of the presentation should be deployed to three different devices!
  As if the task would not have been complex enough: People in the audience could send questions or comments to his Twitter accound that he answered in parallel to his programming efforts... and at the end, the same deployable artefact worked fine on all three devices. Sounds promising!!
  
  Rikko Sakaguchi, Corporate VP of Creation and Development
  
  

=== Technical Sessions Highlights ===

• Hudson: Continuous Integration in the Cloud with Hudson
  (by Kohsuke Kawaguchi --> Blog)
  - I very much like the automated distribution approach: You start the Master Instance with Hudson installed as well as with the Hudson PXE Plugin (Prebuilt Execution Environment). After that you start the Slave Instance (on another machine) and boot from the network. That's it!
  - The defined target machines can be flagged with so called "labels" and can be used to ensure that Test Units aimed for Windows machines are executed on Windows boxes (and same for Unix boxes).
  - The Hudson Master instance can run on Windows or Unix.
  - Cloud: The demo was about the creation of a CI environment in Amazon EC2. It was very impressive how quickly the setup was done and executed successfully.
  - Hadoop: Kohsuke also mentioned the rather new plugin for Hadoop which makes Hudson run on Hadoop.
  - Slides: PPT
  
  
  
  
• "Effective Java": Still effective after all these years
  (by Joshua Bloch)
  As in his other presentations, Joshua presented his content in a very nice way accompanied by his typical kind of humour... As of the end of the day, his book was again "Number 1" in the Bookstore's Top Seller List.
  
  
• JPA 2.0 (by Linda DeMichiel)
  The new Criteria API as well as the introduction of the pessimistic locking modes were interesting to follow. Overall, the session was a little bit too much on the theoretical side.
  
  
• WebBeans! Sorry: JCDI, Java Contexts and Dependency Injection: JSR-299
  (by Gavin King)
  I just like the way Gavin presents, he has his unique style, very straight forward and nice to follow. JCDI targets to support stateful objects, builds the glue between JSF and EJB, allows loose coupling with strong typing and introduces very nice concepts like BindingTypes and DeploymentTypes.
  
  After the speech we asked Gavin about the other "DI" related JSR submitted by Bob Lee (Google) and Rod Johnson (SpringSource): JSR-330. It states "This JSR targets Java SE, and it will lay a foundation for dependency injection in Java EE." So it seems that this is a big discussion at the moment as the JSR-299 has started 3 years ago and is nearly finalized now and could make it easily into the final release of Java EE 6 by end of this year whereas the newly submitted JSR would take at least 1 year until its finalization and would eventually postpone the release of Java EE 6 as 299 would directly depend on 330. I'm very curious how this gets resolved. My personal hope is that they agree on a common dependency injection foundation for SE and EE and include that one with potential EE specifics in the nearly finalized 299 (During the Java EE 6 Panel Discussion BOF, William Shannon meant that the EG would never accept two different DI specs on the Java Platform, so a common sense must be found, and quickly).
  Links around this discusssion:
  --> Bob Lee's initial post (from May 5th, 2009)
  --> Gavin King's statement (from May 7th, 2009)
  --> Bob's comment on Gavin's statement
  

=== BOFs ===

• JSF Platform and Ajax: State of the Union
  with Ted Goddard (Lead Architect of ICEfaces), Andy Schwartz (Oracle ADF Faces) and Alexandr Smirnov (RichFaces)
  This kind of panel discussion was very interesting as each of the presenters talked about the current status and the progress towards JSF 2.0. RichFaces and ICEfaces convinced most (RichFaces because of its seemless integration with Seam and ICEfaces because of its architecture and the unique feature of automatic Ajax Push based on server-side DOM-diffing (more here)).
  Woodstock was not represented. As of the presenters there are no plans for further releases. On ICEfaces there is a migration plan described from Woodstock to ICEfaces.
  
  Ted Goddard
  
  
  
• Java EE 6 Experts Discussion Panel
  hosted by Roberto Chinnici and William Shannon
  Good discussions, questions and comments... I was surprised that JSR-299 was not mentioned at all in the presentation about Java EE 6. After having asked the question why it is missing, a big *sigh* from Roberto Chinnici :-) (as expected), then responding that they were not yet sure about the inclusion of JSR-299 in Java EE 6. I reformulated my question what the current trend would be, rather "in" or "out". After eye-contacting with William Shannon, William meant "give him the full story"... Then the story around "JSR-299 vs JSR-330" has been described (see WebBeans above for more details).
  
  
  William Shannon and Roberto Chinnici
  
  

=== Pavilion ===

• At the ICEfaces booth we met Micha Kiener (also from Switzerland) who is working for Mimacom. We were introduced to the overall architecture of ICEfaces and that looked really cool (server-side DOM diffing, Ajax Push). The demo showed a very elegant way of doing Interportlet Communication (IPC) on Liferay Portal 5.2. Really nice!!
  
  
• And some pictures from the Pavilion and its entrance area...
  
  
  
  
  Dani at the SpringSource booth
  where it says "Eliminating Enterprise Java Complexity"...
  
  
  
  
  
  

Cheers

JavaOne 2009 Summary: Tuesday (Day 1)

Take a deep breath... Time is really rushing away, it is actually Wednesday night now (11pm), 50% already passed, but as promised in the previous post, there will be a summary of each day. So here it is!
Before kicking off, read the summary of Monday's ConferenceOne if you haven't done so already...

JavaOne Day 1 Summary

As every year, Day 1 started with the General Session, the key note by Sun itself and hosted this year by Sun's CGO (Chief Gaming Officer) Chris Melissinos.
Guests on stage were

• James Barresse, VP of Architecture, Platforms and Systems with eBay
  
• Alan Brunner, Senior VP for the Blackberry Platform
• Dan Eklund, Executive VP of Advanced Technologies at Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
• Lowell McAdam, President and CEO of Verizon
• Diane Bryant, Executive VP at Intel
• Ronan McBrien, JavaFX TV Architect (nice demo, video should be available here)
• Nandini Ramani, Director for JavaFX

Some pictures:

Jonathan Schwarz about BDJ and BD Live


Java FX TV Demo:

=== Key Note Highlights ===

• Oracle and the Future of Java:
  At the end of the key note, Scott McNealy called Oracle CEO Larry Ellison up on stage to address the $7.4 billion dollar question -- what will be the future of Java?
  My key notes from his answer are:
  - Oracle with a much greater R&D budget than Sun will be able to even more push Java forward. Quote: "I don't expect a lot of changes, just expanded investment and a lot of enthusiasm coming from Oracle."
  - He mentioned JavaFX many times, he wants OpenOffice to use JavaFX as UI. He also mentioned that it would be interesting to see Android based phones and netbooks from Sun running Java and JavaFX. Rumors say that pushing JavaFX will secure his seat in the UI battle between Silverlight and Flex.
  - "Look at the past to see the future": by this he most probably meant Oracle's dedication to Java since its birth, its commitment to support the community and to actively participate in Java's future.
  - Interesting Link about Larry's talk
  - Some pictures:
  
  Scott mentioning that Larry might have more luck
  to bring the JVM on the iPhone :-)
  
  
  
  
  "Mr. Oracle"
  
  
  
  
  - And enjoy the following video:
  




• Java Store! presented by James Gosling: still in beta, community is asked to give feedback on how payments should be implemented.
  
  
• Release of Java FX 1.2 !
  
  
  
• "The classpath is dead": Chief Engineer of Java SE, Mark Reinhold, said this after having shown a nifty demo on how Java SE 7 manages modules.
  
  
  
• "The web.xml is dead": CTO at Sun, Bob Brewin, said this while talking about the next enterprise release Java EE 6.
  
  
• Announcement of JATAF ! The Java Application Terminal Alignment Framework is an open, collaborative community striving for a unified Java ME platform.
  
  
• Project Dark Chat: Nice demo app for the JavaOne.
  --> Download this JNLP file (jre6u10 required)
  
  
• DJ Anna: for me as a fan of electronic music, the opening sounds mixed live by DJ Anna, a local DJ of San Francisco, are always a pleasure to listen to...
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• and of course: Gosling's T-Shirt Tossing!!!
  
  
  

=== Technical Sessions Highlights ===
As it got already very late and I am still writing about yesterday!, more take aways from the technical sessions will follow (as CTP internal Knowledge Shares or in form of upcoming blog posts):
Interesting sessions were EJB 3.1, Servlet 3.0, Java EE 6 and GlassFish v3, Spring 3.0, JSF 2.0 and others...



=== BOFs ===

• The most exciting BOF was of course the one of JavaPosse !
  Download the mp3 and listen yourself what happened!! :
  Episode 0x100 (#256)
  
  As last year, the beer got sponsored by Atlassian and started with some polls from the audience. After that, they talked about topics and news they picked up during the first day...
  After the show we joined them for some drinks at the Kate O'Briens pub near Moscone. I could finally tell Joe to accept my friend request on Xbox360 in order to see his hotlaps in Forza2 (he is actually a real race driver, watch this video if you don't believe me) and Carl told us some more details about his brand new Tesla (100% electric car)... A great moment in life indeed to finally get to know these dudes! :-) I could not talk much with Dick Wall unfortunately... One more reason to go again to JavaOne! ;-) At least one important thing I could tell him: Talk more about Enterprise stuff!
  
  
  
  
  
  

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• BOF about Lift: The Best Way to create RIAs with Scala
  (by David Pollak, Lead of the Lift Framework)
  
  to be honest, I can't comment on this content-wise... The way it was presented was cool (I like the humour of David Pollak), it was also interesting to see how he quickly implemented a fully functioning ajax based chat tool from scratch in less than 100 lines of code :-) but I could only take this one with me: Learn Scala first, then lift off with Lift.... ok! -> Scala book bought!!
  
  

Good night (oh no... in 5 hours the alarm kicks on :-),
Balz