Session title: Java Rule Engines (JBoss’ Drools, IBM’s iLog)
From: Raed Haltam, WEGA Informatik

Claim: Rules engines can reduce development time.

Raed makes the valuable clarification that a usable Rules Engine needs to address storage, versions, security etc. and is therefore best described as a Business Rules Management System (BRMS). He also takes care to distinguish the Business Object Model (BOM) from the Execution Object model (XOM).

Both iLog and Drools use the algorithm RETE. All rules follow the format:
when X then Y

Rules can be grouped into packages.

Both iLog and Drools allow higher level business language descriptions of rules.

Business rules can be made secure on various levels down to the statement level. In other words different editing privileges can be assigned to to different roles, which control the parts of a rule which can be edited under a given role.

Both tools support Complex Event Processing, which amounts to responding to patterns of conditions in a predefined way.

Raed presents a convincing sounding car financing case study from (JPMorgen Chase.) Rule deployment takes place at 8pm and are executed from 8am the following day.

Conclusion: Quite a nice, objective short summary (it was a short talk after all) on business rules for those unfamiliar with the technology.

Title of this session: Development for the iPhone from a Java Perspective
From: Software Architect Ognen Ivanski, Netcetera

Note: Netcetera developed the wemlin app for the iPhone – a useful tool for navigating public transport in the Zürich area.

Ah… it’s become apparent to me that Ognen will tell us about his personal experience with becoming an iPhone developer, having previously been a Java developer. I have gone through this process myself and so it will be interesting to compare notes…

Ognen states that the first realisation was that performance, startup-time and UI were kind of new priorities for him. Not really the case for me, I must say. Canoo is known for its RIA experience and therefore these are issues we’ve been dealing with for some time. For the record: The issues which I found most difficult when switching to the iPhone SDK and XCode were:

- No garbage collection: Clearly I’ve been spoiled by Java
- XCode: Powerful but nowhere near as comfortable as a typical JavaIDE
- SCM support: We managed to get Subversion working, but kept running into trouble with things getting out of sync anyway. Best to use the command line

I certainly agree with Ognen’s observations on XCode: Like me, he missed features such as refactoring and the countless options for viewing, navigating and outlining code.

Ognen notes that XCode’s visual builder is difficult to get used to but delivers in the end. Possibly like many Java/would-be iPhone developers, I shied away from the visual designer, opting to code from hand instead. Perhaps for my next iPhone app I’ll take a look at it again.

I agree with Ognen’s observations on Objective C syntax. It’s got a “familiar and yet somewhat strange” feel to it. The behaviour around “nil” seems odd at first, but one quickly learns to appreciate that it pays not to have to check for null values all the time, as in Java code.

There follows a lot of examples of Objective C Syntax.

Patterns of note in the iPhone world: Delegate pattern, Target/Action pattern, MVC – which is perhaps truer to the original Smalltalk concept that what we typically see in Java swing, say.

In summary: A good presentation, but no new insights for someone who’s gone through the process of switching from Java to iPhone development already.

Hi everyone and welcome to Jazoon ’09!

At Sihlcity just a few tram-minutes away from Zurich’s city center, Jazoon ‘09 begins in the biggest auditorium (now full) with some very loud video sequences. Chris – from I don’t know where – tries his best to wake up a clearly very sleepy audience. He fails. More coffee for the audience please!

Next up a rerun of the Monty Python-esque “Brief History of Java” featuring JG… who now takes to the stage!

We’ve already seen James “the man thanks to whom I could purchase my first house” Gosling hanging around the exhibition center this morning. Title of his keynote: “Where we’re heading”.

JG puts the network at the center of things; emphasises the ubiquity of Java (nice observation: more Java devices than humans on the planet!) Other rough estimates: 6M Java developers (most of them rubbish, I should note – OK I suppose that was a bit harsh) and 15M JRE downloads per week on average – not including the PC’s that are rolled out with a JRE!

Some impressive examples of major Java apps: Brazilian healthcare, Large Hadron Collider (at the physics research institute CERN near Geneva etc. etc. This is indeed true: Java is everywhere. I don’t know how many JavaCards I have in my wallet.

JG now emphasises the VM, giving it more importance than the Java language. I naturally think of Google’s Android and the completely re-architected VM called Dalvic.

Next up: JG demos Glassfish V3 and in particular talks about the simplifications that have taken place since V2. Annotations and injections are basically the key to this. I’m reminded of a project I did on V2 a little while back. Other than the integration with MQ Series (which proved a little tricky) Glassfish turned out to be one of the most satisfying App Server experiences I’d ever had. Glassfish succeeds in combining the characteristics of being super-easy to install and configure, and yet it is clearly highly scalable; IBM please take note. I’m not on Sun’s payrole, I promise!

JG now demos the Hudson integration server as well as Kenai, which he describes as a cloud service for development. Amongst other things, this allows development for hardware which one may not actually own or have access to.

Next up: Java Real Time. The challenge: How to garbage collect (GC) deterministically. JG talks about the balance GC designers needs to find between performance and determinism. Rightly notes that there are even stock exchange apps, which require this level of control.

Talking of “control”, JG describes Neal Young’s LincVolt car and the degree of control that Real Time Java has and how this leads to superior efficiency.
And on the subject of efficiency, JG compares Java performance with C++ and is happy to note that in most everyday situations Java is way ahead.

A subject close to my heart: JSR248, the Mobile Services Architecture which is designed to unify a bunch of individual JSRs. The motivation for this is that to-date mobile hardware vendors have consistently delivered different combinations of JSRs, which basically makes a joke of write-one-run-everywhere. The bad news from JG: MSA still has a way to go. Good news for Android?

Changing direction, JG notes that the Web is now the face of the organisation. JavaFX will (apparently) deliver a Flash-like (to use JG’s expression) experience to address the expectations of the next generation of end-users.

JG describes some of the basic JavaFX features and talks about the graphical design tool that was demo’d at JavaOne – but stresses that it’s a long way from GA. Back to what can be done today: Using Photoshop and Illustrator to create a static UI design, which can be subsequently programmed out by the JavaFX developer. This is precisely what I talked about at J1 a few weeks ago.

Exit JG stage left to applause.

Well, it’s now off to the sessions. Tune in later for some more live session blogging!!!

At the Jazoon, the international conference on Java technology (Zurich, June 23-25), James Gosling, the father of the Java programming language, will deliver the opening Keynote. So if you missed JavaOne this year, just attend Jazoon’09 and benefit from inside information and updates, but also get latest news about the future of Java. 

Besides James Gosling, Jazoon’09 features many other interesting speakers from the Java world including Neal Ford, Ivar Jacobson, Adrian Colyer and Danny Coward. As a special guest we are pleased to announce Linda Cureton, CIO of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Goddard Space Flight Center in the USA. She will deliver the Jazoon’09 closing Keynote.

Moreover, as the first developer conference in Europe, Jazoon’09 launched a competition for young speakers aged 26 and under. Out of the several dozen submissions, an expert jury has selected the three most promising. The finalists of the Canoo sponsored “Jazoon Rookie 2009” are:

João Arthur Brunet Monteiro - Brazil
Bettina Polasek - Hungary
Deni Lukmanul Hakim - Indonesia

On 24 June 2009, the conference audience and the jury will vote on the winner. Canoo is very exited to be involved in such an event, as the contest is an opportunity for creative minds under the age of 26 to present their ideas to a broad public of experts. Facing the present shortage of skilled IT specialists, it was an obvious decision for Canoo to actively support the advancement of young professionals and new ideas. 

Here are some quick notes on the sessions I attended yesterday at Sihlcity. I believe Jazoon will be uploading videos and slides very soon:

First in my lineup was a talk on using Google Web Toolkit for a business application in a typical enterprise environment. This was kind of like a case study. Dmitry Buzdin talked about the experience his company gained and listed the various pros and cons.

Next, I listened in to Bruno Schäffer’s talk together with Christoph Henrici and Daniel Buffet of APG. The talk described the migration of an Oracle Forms application to Java forms for the advertising industry. Main requirement: development and application performance had to remain just as fast as with Oracle Forms. A requirement that the migrated application managed to over-fulfill.

Canoo’s Andreas Hölzl and Christian Stettler presented their Google Android experience report. They showed an application they developed for the Android Developer Challenge called Mobile Zoo. Their baseline: “What’s here looks promising. Let’s see the devices!”

Brian Sletten’s presentation on data-driven applications was very interesting. I particularly liked the analogy between resampling music and data.