Jazoon Thursday
Not being able to attend the conference yesterday, I not only missed some interesting talks, but also Bruce Willis in “Die Hard 4″ ;-(
In today’s keynote, Neal Gafter of Google talked about the possibilities of closures and how they can reduce the amount of boilerplate code and increase the readability of software. In addition, by integrating closures into Java some language feature requests would change to library (API) feature requests, which have a much greater chance to become included.
Danny Coward from Sun showed the road map regarding Java SE and Java EE. He also explained how open source complements the JCP process.
Today was also filled by a lot of networking. That’s what I like about conferences, you meet new people. And people you only know by email suddenly get a face and a voice.
One of them was Kaspar von Gunten. He gave a talk about Process-based Software Development today. He showed how the process modelled approach can change the development of software towards end-user programming. And how this approach integrates with RIA. They also showed a Software Demo of their product Xpert.ivy. The new release of Xpert.ivy is based on Eclipse and a graphical process designer. In addition it uses ULC Visual Editor to generate the UI for the RIA front-end of these processes. Quite impressive. Xpert.ivy 4.0 will be shipped in 2008.
I didn’t get much out of the talk about Jackrabbit. I almost got discouraged to use Jackrabbit, being warned to be patient and reading the spec to get the information about how to use the API.
For the closing session they decided to do some lightning speaks: Everybody could speak up for 2 minutes. Neal Gafter started showing some optical illusions from the Java puzzler book. Then Felipe Gaucho presented his footprint.dev.java.net project. We were then given the elevator story of the semantic web – basically everything is replaced with URI. Then somebody told us good reasons why to attend Jazoon 2008 (reasons like Euro 08 or because the weather will be better). And then we learned what we should read to become a better Java developer:
- Joe Armstrong’s thesis: Concurrency oriented languages.
- Functional languages explained.
- Understand your manager: One minute manager meets the monkeys.
- Shell scripting (because there are so many bad shell scripts around)
After that Gregory Murray showed how to impress managers: Do rapid prototyping with Jmaki. Some other guys followed. I was actually pretty amazed how much you can say in 2 minutes.
That was about it. Thank you to all who made this event happen!
