Thoughts on morning sessions
I went to a couple of sessions this morning. The first was Josh Bloch's "Programming Puzzlers". If you've not seen this format before, the session consists of 10 short programs that don't work as expected. Given a handful of possible answers, our job as the audience was to figure out what the output is. All of the puzzles were based around the content from Effective Java. I really wanted to go to this session to hear Josh present as I've heard lots of good things. It was a fun session and I even picked up something during the process. ;-)
The second session that I went to was entitled "Design Patterns for High Performance Web Sites". To be honest this session wasn't all that great. The presenters themselves were good and the content that they were presenting was also good. My real complaint was that they didn't actually talk about performance, just about how they used MVC and extended Struts to provide them with the additional facilities that they needed. There was some interesting stuff about XML, XSLT and security but I was still disappointed.
It's true, James does use a Powerbook
Okay, the photo isn't great (I was at the back of the hall) but you can just see the glowing Apple logo on James' Powerbook.
Annual shirt throwing
James had some mad shirt throwing machine this year. I was too far away to see clearly but it looked like some kind of mechanical monster! It really worked too.
Oh, and finally (it's only taken five years!) I got a shirt! :))
Project Rave
During the keynote we saw a demo of Sun's new Project Rave. It's basically an IDE with which to build web applications based around the new JavaServer Faces API and components. I'm not sure whether it can be used to build other stuff but we did see them build a webapp. In fact we saw them build it twice because the Tomcat server threw out a 404 the first time! Poor guy doing the demo.
Anyway, if you've done any programming with a 4GL environment like PowerBuilder, VisualBasic, etc then this is pretty much the same, albeit for the web. You can drag and drop components on to the canvas (the web page) and hook them up with event listeners, datasources and web services. All in all a very quick way to build webapps and certainly aimed at the corporate developer market that Sun is trying to bring over to the Java world in an effort to significantly increase the developer community. Good demo, nice tool. We also saw Oracle's JDeveloper tool do something very similar yesterday so it seems as if Sun aren't the only company backing the whole quick webapp assembly game.
JavaOne Wednesday keynote
Today's keynote was fairly good although it did drag on a bit towards the end. I actually think that they were overrunning by about 30 minutes! Again, we saw lots more about Java everywhere and there was lots more information on java.net, mobility and how Java is being pushed out to the (more mainstream) corporate developers through companies like SAP and the JSR that is combining scripting languages with Java web apps. Essentially, Sun want to take the Java developer community from 3M to 10M over the next few years and see the corporate developer/scripting type applications as the way to really acheive this. Possible? Probably, but only if Java can win over the more casual VB style of developers and applications from Microsoft. Not an easy task.
The big news today was around the distribution of Java to consumers. Microsoft have now said that they will (next year I think) stop shipping Java with the Windows platform. Although this is a killer blow to really getting Java out there to regular computer users, Sun have just signed deals with HP and Dell for these two companies to ship the latest version of Java on every desktop PC and laptop computer that they sell. Wow. I bet Bill's not happy! ;-)
Monster queues for today's keynote!
I'm in the Alumni room now because it's wet and cold, but the queues for today's keynote are absolutely massive and snaking around the block. Didn't seem that long yesterday. Perhaps something to do with James Gosling making an appearance at this one?
Photos from the Certification Roundtable BOF
Here are a couple of photos from the Certification Roundtable BOF that we ran last night.
The session itself went really well and as expected there were a whole load of people that were certified Java programmers and very few (only myself) that were certified architects. The session started with an overview of the 5 certifications before Q&A. We then wrapped up by giving away some books that covered each of the certs. Congratulations to those that won and thanks for everybody for coming along.
The JavaRanch moderators do exist in reality!
I've met up with a whole bunch of the moderators from JavaRanch and I can confirm that they do exist! ;-)
From left (closest) clockwise they are Jessica Sant, Cindy Glass, Mark Herschberg, Jim Yingst, Mark Spritzler and Michael Ernest.
Thoughts on Tuesday technical sessions
I've been to several sessions this afternoon and thought that I would quickly post my thoughts on them. The first was a session about how to build web services applications with J2EE architectures. This started out with a look at the various web services standards and basically the point of the session was to provide an insight into which standards to use for the various flavours of web services. For example, simple XML-RPC for basic web service integration versus asynchronous messagin integration for commercial B2B. Overall this was a good session, although it was pitched at people who really know web services technologies.
The second session I went to was about .NET vs. J2EE. This was a great session (run by a brit!) and instead of simply comparing the various components that make up the architectural layers on both platforms, the session was about making a business case and comparison at a much higher level. Topics covered included total cost of ownership, vendor lock-in, future expansion and so on. Much of this has been covered over and over again, but this session really looked at .NET from a different perspective and highlighted that J2EE is a community driven platform. One of the key messages from the session was not to let .NET take the presentation tier of enterprise systems since this just relegates J2EE to the business tier. Sound advice IMHO since you can be productive when building J2EE systems, albeit not with a single tool such as Visual Studio.
The final session that I went to was about how eBay.com are running a massively scalable system for their core business. Essentially their architecture is entirely stateless and is running on top of IBM Websphere 4. The project started 3 years ago and is now running about 1 billion page views per day. Absolutely amazing! In addition to looking at the high level architecture, the session also covered some of the J2EE design patterns that were used in the construction of the system. Some of these we've seen before but some are new and cataloged in the newly published Core J2EE Patterns, 2nd edition. I'll try to dig out some details of this book and post another blog entry later on.
Overall I've been impressed with the sessions that I've attended. Perhaps I just picked the right ones? Who knows, only time will tell. My only complaint so far is that I couldn't get into the JSF session because it was full. Nevermind. Right, I'm off to our Certification Roundtable BOF at the Argent. I'll post some photos tomorrow as there's a Borland party tonight. :-)
