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    • JavaOne 2011 Thursday and wrap-up

    October 7th, 2011
    Opinions expressed in the post are solely my own and not necessarily those of my employer.

    Thursday started with the Community Keynote. Well, it actually started with a 25 minutes IBM presentation about their cloud story. This had obviously nothing to do with the topic of the event and later speakers pointed this out rather frankly. At least it was interesting to hear that there is a job title like “Cloud Architect”.
    The real part of the Community Keynote started with a quiet moment to honor Steve Jobs.
    Later on, various winners of the Duke choice award and JUG luminaries cared for a lighter mood again, presented their work and asked the audience for participation in their local JUGs and in the advancement of Java via the OpendJDK. The JavaPosse appeared on stage and presented a funny show.
    It was also announced that many of the JavaOne talks will be available on parleys.com, which provide by far the best experience when it comes to viewing live-captured talks.
    Afterwards I attended the ZeroTurnaround (JRebel) talk on classloader issues. The rather big room (~300 ppl) was packed and left the impression that many Java developers share a common pain around classloaders. It was a good talk, covering the basics and typical pifalls. The only surprise for me was *how* easily you can end up with a classloader leak.
    In order to improve my fathering skills, I went into Ken Sipe’s talk on “Rocking the Gradle”, where I met Adam Bien. Ken is a great presenter. However, convincing the crowd is a challenge especially as many Maven users seem to suffer from the Stockholm syndrome.
    Then onto “Visualization of Geomaps and Topic Maps with JavaFX 2.0″, which had some interesting visuals captured here.
    For me JavaOne 2011 finished with Jim Clarke and Dean Iverson on GroovyFX, where they made some really good points suggesting that Groovy is the best language to drive the JavaFX 2.0 API.
    As a side note, James Weaver introduced me to Jim Clarke by pointing out “He is from *Canoo*”. Then the discussion went into how well-known Canoo is in the community and that all employees must be true geniuses to achieve so much with so few people :-)
    Fazit: Still, JavaOne is nowhere near where it was before the Oracle acquisition both in terms of size and in terms of being an unparalleled community experience. Distribution all over various hotels just doesn’t feel right. However, meeting friends has been and still remains the most important part of JavaOne and the conference still delivers on that account.
    Important topics were new Java versions, JavaEE (+cloud), and Java for the Desktop with 50+ talks on JavaFX. Whenever the audience was asked about which alternative languages they use, Groovy was the clear winner. It appears that in the mainstream, Groovy has become the default choice for dynamic programming on the JVM.
    The topic of concurrent programming was in my eyes underrepresented. Guillaume and myself had simple usage of GPars in our demos but for such a big and increasingly important topic the coverage should be much more extensive.
    Finally, some visual impressions.
    Good-bye SF
    Dierk Koenig

    Comments Off | Grails, Groovy, Java, JavaFX, JavaOne, Swing | Permalink
    Posted by Dierk

    JavaOne 2011 Wednesday

    October 6th, 2011

    Opinions expressed in this post are totally my own and not necessarily that of my employer.

    Wednesday started with the infamous “scriptbowl”, a competition between various scripting languages. This year the contenters were JRuby, Groovy, Scala, and Clojure. I wondered whether Scala considers itself a scripting language but obviously they either do or just seek the opportunity to be on stage.

    To keep a long story short: Groovy has won this event for the third time in a row! This year the race was tied with Scala. Guillaume presented Groovy in the typical Groovy-idomatic style and explained every single line of his concurrent visual analyzer for Google+ postings. Dick Wall presented only non-idomatic Scala code. I interpret this as: to make Scala appealing you have to make it look like Groovy. Furthermore, he presented Kojo, which is a great interactive learning environment written in Play/Scala. In contrast to all other presentations, this was not specifically created for the scriptbowl, nor was it written by the presenter, nor was it clear how much effort went into it, nor did the audience see a single line the implementation code. How much this skewed the comparison, I leave to everybody’s judgement. The show was good, though.

    I felt a bit sorry for Clojure. It is a great language and deserves a presentation that is more visually appealing to convince the crowd.

    Afterwards, I attended a hands-on lab for “rapid enterprise development with netbeans”, which was essentially creating a Swing app for database CRUD actions. If I remember correctly, I did the exact same task 1997 with JBuilder. It left me with the feeling of “Yes, it works” but it is not less complex than it was 13 years ago.

    Early afternoon Gerrit Grunwald (better known as @hansolo_) presented his work on simplified custom components for Swing. Given that he speaks about an activity that is both utterly important and highly underadvertised he would really deserve speaking at the center stage.

    Graeme Rocher’s great session about Grails, polyglot datastores (hibernate, jpa, redis, mongodb, …), and the cloud was overshadowed by the news that Steve Jobs has died. Accidentally, the demo application was about showing a BBC News stream, which displayed this information live on stage. Both the presenter and the audience were equally touched.

    The day officially ended with a big event at treasure island. I decided to not go there, though, and meet the former Canooey Denis Antonioli in Berkely where we had a great evening.

    Dierk Koenig

    2 Comments | Grails, Groovy, Java, JavaOne, Swing | Permalink
    Posted by Dierk

    JavaOne 2011 Tuesday

    October 5th, 2011
    The Java strategy keynote started slowly with Juniper networks presenting their
    take on Java, which was in my eyes not really related to the topic of the keynote.
    It then went on into the Java roadmap with the announcement that new Java versions
    should come every two years, which sounded to me like an excuse for Java 8 being
    deferred until “Summer 2013″.
    The real surprise was a demonstration of JavaFX running various devices like
    tablets and smartphones running Windows, Android, and even iOS! It appeard to
    be experimental but the sheer possibility makes a difference.
    In addition, JavaFX will be fully open-source such that everybody is free to
    port it to his platform of choice.
    Over lunch, the “Java Desktop Community” assembled in a nearby restaurant.
    That was an awesome opportunity for meeting the Swing and JavaFX luminaries just like in the years before.
    In the early afternoon, I headed for the talk about custom JavaFX components
    presented by Jonathan Giles and Jasper Potts. It appears customizing any
    control is mainly done via CSS. In other words, there is no typesafe API.
    I would rather prefer to use CSS only for “skinning” and keeping an API for
    source-code integration.
    It also came out that the current JavaFX version doesn’t contain e.g. a
    ComboBox. This came as a surprise since I would expect this as being part
    of the standard widget set. I curious what else is missing.
    There also is a distinction between public and private APIs that didn’t
    make immediate sense to me – other than the private parts are not yet
    finished.
    The afternoon JavaPosse BOF was rather disappointing. They re-told the
    story of this morning’s keynote. Who needs that?
    Visiting the pavillion was nice even though it was just as small as
    last year. Anyway, I ran into a number of friends and dropped by the
    gradleware booth. They liked my animated Gradle logo, that I implemented
    with the Groovy-based FXG interpreter.
    The SpringSource friends were just shutting down the booth and invited
    me to dinner: http://t.co/LfxhjIH8 . Thanks a lot!

    Finally, late in the evening I joined Dan Sline’s talk on WebServices in the Groovy space. The major take-away for me was a repercussion of the well-known advice: “keep it simple”.

    Throughout the day, a lot of people approached me to tell how much they liked my talks yesterday. That was a really nice experience. Last year I had the very last talk of the conference and only this year I recognized how much of a difference the scheduling of the talks make.

    Dierk Koenig

    Comments Off | Groovy, Java, JavaOne | Permalink
    Posted by Dierk

    Java 7 Small Language Changes Screencast

    July 14th, 2011

    This screencast demonstrates the small language changes that are part of Open JDK 7, which is available from the Open JDK website. It demonstrates multi-catch, try with resources, strings in switch statements, underscores in literals, and the diamond operator.

    If you have any issues watching the video below, then you may have better luck viewing it on the JetBrains.tv site.

    I’ve made a lot of screencasts and blog posts over the years. If you like this, then there are many ways to see the other stuff I’ve done: 

    The screencast was created with Ubuntu 10.04, PiTiVi, Audicity, gtk-RecordMyDesktop, IntelliJ IDEA, and LibreOffice. OS from top to bottom.

    Thanks for watching, and leave a comment!

    3 Comments | Java, Screencast | Permalink
    Posted by Hamlet

    Interview with Antonio Goncalves about the past, present, and future of Java EE

    March 31st, 2011

    I got a chance to sit down and talk to Java Champion Antonio Goncalves about the past, present, and future of Java EE. I’ve been working for the last six months in a heavy EE/SOA stack, and it’s been interesting to see the advantages and disadvantages. I definitely come from the other side of the world where specifications aren’t seen as an inherent sign of quality, and frameworks not sanctioned by Sun/Oracle are not to be feared. It was fun to get his opinions about this stuff.

    The full interview is on the JetBrains Zone at DZone. We’re both JetBrains Academy Members and we’re slowly interviewing each other.

    P.S. This is the first post I’ve ever made that mentioned Java Enterprise Edition. I suspect the next time EE is mentioned will be in another few years :)

    Comments Off | Interview, Java | Permalink
    Posted by Hamlet

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