The last day of Devoxx 2008 - just as we got accustomed to long nights with only a few hours sleep. But well next year the show will continue. So today 3 real cool sessions were up. First we attended a session with Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo presenting on JRuby. Besides showing cool NetBeans integration with awsome code completion and giving an overview on how JRuby works they pointed out that JRuby in fact is Ruby running on a JVM. That is all - just take your Ruby application and let it run on the JVM to get the speed up offered by the JVM for your applicatoin for free. For the future they seem to consider moving the source of JRuby (or JRuby itself) over to Kenai - a new Open Source hosting solution - once they get the issuetracker integrated they need.
Next Brian Leonhart from SUN Microsystems talking about "Development beyond Localhost". It focused on "WOTE - Write Once Test Everywhere" using OpenSolaris and VirtualBox. Quite interesting approach and a real cool software. It is free - so give it a try.
Last talk of Devoxx 2008 was fellow NetBeans Dream Team member Adam Bien. who came to Antwerp only for delivering his talk - thanks Adam. He talked about EJB3.x and why he thinks that this is the real lightweight solution, although he is not in favor of calling something "lightweight". He did some real cool live coding using NetBeans 6.5 and the new "Deploy on Save" feature - it worked awesome. Should have convinced the audience that Glassfish and NetBeans is the way to go for Java EE.
So much for now - off for visiting Antwerp, getting some "Mussels with fries" a local specialty and a good Belgium beer.
BTW: I took photos from the whiteboards just friday morning - have a look at them here and figure out what is going on in the Java community.
Saturday, December 13, 2008
Thursday, December 11, 2008
Devoxx 2008 - Day 4 / Java 7 and JavaPosse
So again there were two big keynotes today - the first from Josh Bloch about "Effective Java 2nd Edition" an update to his famous book "Effective Java" considering things like Enum and Generics. Well you may say this is not a keynote - and you are correct - it was a "Josh Talk". But nevertheless it was fun.
Next was Mark Reinhold giving an update about Java 7 - with a focus on Project Jigsaw. This is the codename for a modularized Java - not only with respect to the libraries, but also down to the VM level. It seems to be a large, complex and very ambitious thing but I think it is the way to go. BTW none of the existing module frameworks won, there will be one especially tuned for this problem field. Pictures taken from slides shown are here. You are thinking this will take a long time? Well, Mark said the delivery of Java 7 will be in early 2010, that is quite soon (measured in Java dimensions).
The first technical session was Brain Goetz and Alex Buckley talking about the way towards a dynamic VM, so that other languages can make themselves more at home on top of the JVM. It seems the changes to be done are not so big, they invented some real clever concepts for letting the language decide about method resolution - and it will be part of Java 7. So that will give a major boost for your favourite language besides Java - Scala, Jython, JRuby... Next was a seesion about the new NIO API's in Java 7. They should really simplify the way to use NIO and reduce the need to write your own layer on top of NIO.
Now for the fun part - JavaPosse Live Recording. The Posse guys were as much fun as always discussing JavaFX, Java 7 and all the other things around Devoxx. Tor and Joe were live via video - just listen to the podcast to imagine the fun we had.
Next was Mark Reinhold giving an update about Java 7 - with a focus on Project Jigsaw. This is the codename for a modularized Java - not only with respect to the libraries, but also down to the VM level. It seems to be a large, complex and very ambitious thing but I think it is the way to go. BTW none of the existing module frameworks won, there will be one especially tuned for this problem field. Pictures taken from slides shown are here. You are thinking this will take a long time? Well, Mark said the delivery of Java 7 will be in early 2010, that is quite soon (measured in Java dimensions).
The first technical session was Brain Goetz and Alex Buckley talking about the way towards a dynamic VM, so that other languages can make themselves more at home on top of the JVM. It seems the changes to be done are not so big, they invented some real clever concepts for letting the language decide about method resolution - and it will be part of Java 7. So that will give a major boost for your favourite language besides Java - Scala, Jython, JRuby... Next was a seesion about the new NIO API's in Java 7. They should really simplify the way to use NIO and reduce the need to write your own layer on top of NIO.
Now for the fun part - JavaPosse Live Recording. The Posse guys were as much fun as always discussing JavaFX, Java 7 and all the other things around Devoxx. Tor and Joe were live via video - just listen to the podcast to imagine the fun we had.
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Devoxx 2008 - Day 3 / All the remaining things
Ok - since there are already to posts available for today I will just try to summarize the remaining events. In the afternoon we went to Bill Venners talk "The Feel of Scala" - one of the few highlights.
He showed Scala vs. Ruby, how ducktyping works and a lot of further features. Seems OSGI is getting into the market.
Here are some pictures I took during the talk:
Aftwards there was the reception for all the developers.
He showed Scala vs. Ruby, how ducktyping works and a lot of further features. Seems OSGI is getting into the market.
Here are some pictures I took during the talk:
Aftwards there was the reception for all the developers.
Devoxx 2008 - Day 3 / How NetBeans Saved the Day
... at least for a real unlucky - or perhaps a real lucky guy - read on and fond out for yourself.
Emil Ong from Caucho was up for a talk about PHP on Java showing how to use Java's abilities (and the performance of the underlying JVM) to make PHP integratable/coexisitng with existing Java WebApps on one application Server. This approach is based on Quercus, which is Caucho’s 100% pure Java implementation of PHP.
At the start of the session he already had difficulties getting his laptop to work, but finally got it up and running showing his presentation. Then suddenly somwhere right in the middle of the session his system got stuck switching to the next slide. Rebooting did not really help - so he asked the audience if anybody would lend him/hers laptop. The first try failed (seemed to be some problem with the USB-Drive) so he went for another one.
This is where the story gets interesting. Toni Epple from the NetBeans Dream Team had already met Emil last night on the Devoxx dinner and they had set up Resin/Quercus/NetBeans to work together during a break at the Cauch booth, so that PHP can be deployed with NetBeans to Quercus/Resin (read Toni's blog for more details). So he lend Emil his "trusty new and shiny MacBook" and having figured out the difficulties with the language of the operating system and one display-cable-adapter later the presentation could continue. At the end of this real interesting talk (come on PHP developers - give it a try) he was sorry to announce that the prepared demo could not be shown, since his laptop did not work. So Toni took the opportunity and proposed to show their setup with NetBeans/Quercus and Resin. So Toni just showed the PHP project he had created for Wordpress in NetBeans and just clicked "Run" and that's it - Wordpress was running on Quercus and Resin. What a cool Demo. So that is how NetBeans saved the day - and I think Emil is a lucky guy - he learned about NetBeans and the always helpful Dream Team.
You do not believe this? See for yourself
Emil Ong from Caucho was up for a talk about PHP on Java showing how to use Java's abilities (and the performance of the underlying JVM) to make PHP integratable/coexisitng with existing Java WebApps on one application Server. This approach is based on Quercus, which is Caucho’s 100% pure Java implementation of PHP.
At the start of the session he already had difficulties getting his laptop to work, but finally got it up and running showing his presentation. Then suddenly somwhere right in the middle of the session his system got stuck switching to the next slide. Rebooting did not really help - so he asked the audience if anybody would lend him/hers laptop. The first try failed (seemed to be some problem with the USB-Drive) so he went for another one.
This is where the story gets interesting. Toni Epple from the NetBeans Dream Team had already met Emil last night on the Devoxx dinner and they had set up Resin/Quercus/NetBeans to work together during a break at the Cauch booth, so that PHP can be deployed with NetBeans to Quercus/Resin (read Toni's blog for more details). So he lend Emil his "trusty new and shiny MacBook" and having figured out the difficulties with the language of the operating system and one display-cable-adapter later the presentation could continue. At the end of this real interesting talk (come on PHP developers - give it a try) he was sorry to announce that the prepared demo could not be shown, since his laptop did not work. So Toni took the opportunity and proposed to show their setup with NetBeans/Quercus and Resin. So Toni just showed the PHP project he had created for Wordpress in NetBeans and just clicked "Run" and that's it - Wordpress was running on Quercus and Resin. What a cool Demo. So that is how NetBeans saved the day - and I think Emil is a lucky guy - he learned about NetBeans and the always helpful Dream Team.
You do not believe this? See for yourself
Devoxx 2008 - Day 3 / JavaFX Keynote
The theatre was packed for the keynote this morning.
Wow - those guys from Sun really showed the community how to sell the technology. Only few slides and many real cool demos and even a world premiere - the "Fox Box", which was so mindboggling cool that I just missed taking a picture. So here is one of another application shown - with a mobile version
The key note was done by Danny Coward
with help of the JavaFX-Team guys (Joshua Marinacchi, Richard Bair, Jasper Potts and Martin Brehovsky)
... and they used NetBeans
The only thing more cool than this was the "Beatboxer".
The second highlight this morning was Brian Goetz giving a talk about "From Concurrent to Parallel".
He discussed in some detail how the JSR 166y works behind the scenes and how easy it is to use (and how better it might be with "Closures") - Josh may disagree ;-) .
Wow - those guys from Sun really showed the community how to sell the technology. Only few slides and many real cool demos and even a world premiere - the "Fox Box", which was so mindboggling cool that I just missed taking a picture. So here is one of another application shown - with a mobile version
The key note was done by Danny Coward
with help of the JavaFX-Team guys (Joshua Marinacchi, Richard Bair, Jasper Potts and Martin Brehovsky)
... and they used NetBeans
The only thing more cool than this was the "Beatboxer".
The second highlight this morning was Brian Goetz giving a talk about "From Concurrent to Parallel".
He discussed in some detail how the JSR 166y works behind the scenes and how easy it is to use (and how better it might be with "Closures") - Josh may disagree ;-) .
Tuesday, December 9, 2008
Devoxx 2008 - Day 2
Being early as everyday Florian and myself got interviewed for the Parleys magazine. It was a surprise seeing that those guys still remembered us from last year. So it still seems to be a small conference - even with 3200 Java enthusiasts.
The second University Day started with the session Java Performance" by Kirk Pepperdine and Holly Cummins. A quite interesting presentation showing a lot of new and old aspects for performance analysis (remember everything you learned is wrong). One new tool that may be of interest is The IBM® Monitoring and Diagnostic Tools for Java™ - Health Center™ in Early Access. It provides the possibility to get monitoring directly from the VM without using bytecode injection. To use this you will need the latest IBM JDK as well. So give it a try.
For the afternoon session we picked "Advanced OSGI", but actually there was not so much new in the talk. During his presentation Peter Kriens talked about the classloading issues you could have and visualized it with a photo
So the highlight of the afternoon was meeting with Aaron Houston from Sun. We took a photo of the dreamteam members and did a small podcast recording.
For the BOS's we selected Meet JSR Spec. Leads, Effective code reviews in agile teams and The magic of JXLayer component .
All in all a lot of interesting stuff to try out and evalute.
Quotes of the Day:
The second University Day started with the session Java Performance" by Kirk Pepperdine and Holly Cummins. A quite interesting presentation showing a lot of new and old aspects for performance analysis (remember everything you learned is wrong). One new tool that may be of interest is The IBM® Monitoring and Diagnostic Tools for Java™ - Health Center™ in Early Access. It provides the possibility to get monitoring directly from the VM without using bytecode injection. To use this you will need the latest IBM JDK as well. So give it a try.
For the afternoon session we picked "Advanced OSGI", but actually there was not so much new in the talk. During his presentation Peter Kriens talked about the classloading issues you could have and visualized it with a photo
So the highlight of the afternoon was meeting with Aaron Houston from Sun. We took a photo of the dreamteam members and did a small podcast recording.For the BOS's we selected Meet JSR Spec. Leads, Effective code reviews in agile teams and The magic of JXLayer component .
All in all a lot of interesting stuff to try out and evalute.
Quotes of the Day:
- "You do not have performance requirements? So you have no further goal in life!", Kirk Pepperdine
- "A mouse move has been detected. Do you want to keep it? Please reboot!"
Small Language Changes for Java 7
Did you still believe language changes for Java 7 would be coming? Well here is the announcement from Joseph D. Darcy and some in length discussion what may be in there from Stephen Colebourne.
So any ideas? Just help Joseph and Stephen and put them on the whiteboard.
So any ideas? Just help Joseph and Stephen and put them on the whiteboard.
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