Bert Ertman

Impressions from Oracle OpenWorld: “Is Oracle good for Java?”

2009-10-14T00:53:00Z

Here’s a little write-up of my Oracle OpenWorld impressions so far. I’ll try to make it a complete, logical story, but first I would like to second some excellent observations made by fellow Java Champion Cay Horstmann (yeah, the hero that wrote ‘Core Java’), who blogs about his first day of OpenWorld at java.net.

The big question for me is: “Is Java safe in the hands of Oracle”? Unfortunately, I cannot answer that question based upon my impressions so far, but I can say that the message (or lack of) that Oracle is sending out so far is giving me some shivers down the spine. Here’s why:

Oracle is positioning Sun as the hardware company that they are: especially interested in it’s Sparc servers, storage, and of course the new Exadata flash hardware database machine. The latter being undoubtedly very awesome. In other areas of the new portfolio Sun’s software is being positioned, especially MySQL and Solaris. However, when it comes to Java, the official statement being made by Sun’s Scott McNeally and Oracle’s Larry Ellison is: “Java speaks for itself”. But does it? In fact, I seriously doubt that it does so within Oracle. So far the people from Oracle that I met express a friendly, almost fatherly interest in Java, but they compare it to integrating the Hyperion Query Language into the Oracle stack. They see Java as just another ‘product’ from Sun and not as the Java platform and ecosystem that it is. So, if Java is speaking for itself within Oracle, than it’s no doubt sending them the wrong message! I really hope that James Gosling, considering the position that he seems to head for within the new organization, will be able to make this clear to them before it is too late.

The other thing is that Oracle regards it’s technology communities (user groups) as rather top-down. I could be very wrong here but under my impression the Oracle user groups are doing an ok job in spreading the Oracle technology, but Oracle technology equals ‘products’ (equals ‘licenses’, but that’s another story). I don’t really see where the real Java community thing fits in. “Sun gave Java to the world” (to speak in the words of James Gosling’s cartoon video) and after that they gave the world the right to innovate on top of the Java technology platform. This is exactly what got Java as big as it is now. Sun knows, and even states so that they could have never pulled of that trick on their own. Meanwhile Sun has been stewarding Java to keep it going in the right direction, and they have been some sort of ‘referee’ where specification innovation was concerned. The latter being somewhat troublesome lately (i.e. Java 7) but let’s not put the focus too much on that, as it must be stated that stewarding Java is in no way an easy job given the maddening political climate of having so many competing companies, and opinionated individuals onboard the JCP. This is not only true for JCP members but applies to the wide and diverse user group community and the Java Champions as well. To my knowledge Sun has never taken away the freedom of speech of those people. Speaking of opinionated people... ;-)

In three days of the main conference keynotes I haven’t seen a single line of (Java) code. Which apparently proves that Oracle OpenWorld has nothing to do with being a developer’s conference. In the light of the discussions taking place of whether or not there will be a next ‘real’ JavaOne or it being merged into the next OpenWorld, I sincerely hope there will be a ‘real’ JavaOne. Not in the least because it will be the fifteenth edition and this calls for a huge party. Especially since Oracle has more than enough money ;-) They could even close down the entire block between Moscone North and South, so a little birthday party will definitely not hurt them in the wallet. But seriously, JavaOne is a developer’s conference and Oracle OpenWorld attracts mostly ‘suits and ties’.

To sum things up so far, Oracle’s message is about integrating everything into a single (bright red colored) solution. They deserve credit for the way their current stack seems to deliver to that promise. However, Java’s promise has always been about opening everything up for innovation and boldly go where no-one has gone before (lame quote alert, but it holds the truth). I don’t see where the latter fits in within Oracle. Oracle is not about bringing new technology to the world, they’ve always bought it and integrated it into their existing solution. In fact Oracle is very good at this. You could even consider it their core business, regarding the massive amount of acquisitions they’ve done in the past ten years or so and the vast amount of money they have been able to made from it. The big question remains if Oracle will be able to steward Java like Sun did. More importantly, will they be able to keep the JCP from falling apart. Especially since this type of activity is not making you lots of money. Larry Ellison’s promises for stockholders were very clear. The Oracle / Sun combination is going to make lots of money. So let’s hope that somewhere along the line enough money can be preserved to be invested in Java’s future. Although certainly money will not be the real problem, but it’s more like how ‘others’ can fit into the ‘business model’ that Oracle sees for Java.

In the meantime it is very important that Java will be perceived as the platform and ecosystem that it is. So, if you’re part of a Java community, speak up! Because Java needs it and at the moment it definitely doesn’t do so for itself.

Is Java Update visually preparing us for Oracle?

2009-08-12T14:21:00Z

It has been a while since I last used my Vista box at home. The Apple MacBook Pro that I own since January has been my primary workhorse ever since. Anyway, while I was updating my Vista machine with the necessary updates of all sorts, the following catches my eye:

Java Update was trying to convince me to update my Java version to the latest JDK 6 update 15 or so. Nothing special there, but notice that gradient on top of the Welcome screen that was next. Especially the colors. Apparently Sun is slowly fading to red. It's probably a subtle hint to prepare us for Oracle. In general I'm not particularly fond of the color red. Most of the time it stands for no good. Traffic lights, bank account balance, socialism, ... Oh well, I make an exception here for red lipstick ;-) So, let's wait and see how this color suits Java.

DevDays talk: Web Service Interoperability with WCF and Project Metro is now online!

2009-07-14T20:07:00Z

The first of my two DevDays 2009 talks titled 'Web Service Interoperability with WCF and Project Metro' is now online at Microsoft's Channel 9 video service. The video, with slides and demos is freely accessible in a variety of formats, so go check it out if you missed it. However, because the DevDays are a local event, the talk is in Dutch. (slides are in English btw)

In the talk, that I co-present with my coworker Edwin van Wijk, we look into the current state of web services interoperability between the Microsoft .NET and the JAvA platform. We start off by looking back at the conclusions of a talk that I did back in 2003. I ended that talk with a reflection on the state of interop back then and made some forward looking statements about the directions that web services in general and interop in particular were taking. In the current talk we see that those past 6 years have brought us a lot, but not all of it being standardized and interoperable across a variety of platforms yet. After zooming in on the web services technology stacks a bit the talk turns into a series of demos of most of the WS-* technology interop that is available today. We conclude with a number of pointers and pitfalls and some references to check out for yourself. We marked the talk as a 300-level talk, but all in all it gives a nice overview of interop without requiring alot of technical depth. Demo-wise we're showing way beyond a similar talk that Microsoft and Sun did during their keynote session at JavaOne.

In case you wonder why Edwin, the .NET guy is wearing his own clothes and me, the JAvA guy, is wearing a Microsoft DevDays speakers shirt...that's just to mess with your mind ;-)

Hi-res WMV version here.
Lo-res WMV version here.
Ipod mp4 version here.
Or check out the overview page with all available DevDays videos.

Btw - We did a second talk during DevDays that covered interoperability in the Windows Azure cloud, with Azure .NET Services, Access Control, the Service Bus and what have you not. I expect this talk to be available anytime as well. I'll post an update to this blog when it is.

Conference-fever - DevDays and JavaOne here I come!

2009-05-25T15:15:00Z

What has a Java Champion got to do at a Microsoft conference you might wonder? Well, first and foremost I’m not changing my beliefs now that Oracle plans on buying Sun, that’s for sure. The sole reason for my DevDays appearance is that I’ve been asked by Microsoft Netherlands to do a couple of Java - .NET interoperability talks. And thus I will be joining my coworker Edwin van Wijk and present two talks on Webservices interoperability using WCF and Project Metro, and another session on developing Java services and clients for the Windows Azure cloud platform using the jdotnetservices SDK. Additionally, I was asked to join an expert panel on Open Source Software and Open Standards for the Dutch Government.

Personally, I think its a good thing that vendors acknowledge the existence of a multi-vendor world that is a reality nowadays. Moreover it fits the trend of Microsoft appearing on a number of Java related conferences like Devoxx, and JavaOne in the recent past. I even heard that next week’s JavaOne conference will feature its first ever Microsoft keynote. Can’t wait to see that!

All-in-all, this will be a crazy week preparing for both conferences. My DevDays sessions will all be on Thursday. Friday morning I’ll be flying off to San Francisco for my yearly pilgrimage to JavaOne. During the weekend a number of NLJUG activities will be organized for Dutch Java User Group members that attend the conference. The economic downturn has hit the number of Dutchmen quite hard. Last year we had a steady 120+ pilgrims, but this year that numbers has significantly slimmed down to 30. I’m really anxious to see how this translates into the total number of attendees. Nevertheless it will be a great conference, no doubt about that!

Meanwhile, behind the scenes of J-Fall 2008…

2008-09-30T15:06:00Z

J-Fall preparations are in full effect by now, and pavilion space is rapidly selling out. We are geared towards producing another 1,000+ attendees Java community event in the Netherlands on November 12th! Adobe Systems will be the main sponsor of J-Fall 2008 and will kick off the conference with a keynote. Besides Adobe, we are also proud to announce that Sun Microsystems has committed to a co-sponsorship of the event.

We have just closed the call-for-papers and session selection is currently taking place. It will be a tough job for the six-headed independent session selection committee to carefully select the sessions from the total number of submissions that top about four times the number of available session slots.

There is about a 80/20 ratio between regular sessions and sponsored sessions this time. With sponsored sessions we mean session slots that have been “bought” by business partners or conference sponsors. Although buying a session slot guarantees sponsors a presentation possibility, they still have to send in a paper submission by the deadline so the selection committee can still root out pure product pitches. As you can see, we do everything in our power to make the conference program as attractive as possible with the current formula.

Stay tuned for more, J-Fall registration is planned to open in the weekend of October 11/12.

JavaOne 2008 – Prologue

2008-04-21T20:10:00Z

A lot of great things are called prologue these days ;-) My thumb still hurts from driving the Audi R8 for three consecutive hours trying to beat my lap time on the Eiger Nordwand. Still gotta buy one of these.

JavaOne 2008 is around the corner and closing in fast. It’s gonna be quite the busy schedule. It would probably be a wise idea to take the week off afterwards, but somehow I guess it ain’t gonna happen. Besides the regular schedule there’s a couple of BoFs at night that I want to attend too. Then there is the “party index”, courtesy of Wilfred Springer.

Rumour has it that this year’s Afterdark will feature SMASHMOUTH, an alternative rock band from San Jose, California. Never heard of them, but sounds great, so time for some bittorrent research ;-) Actually, it’s not rumours, but taken from an official Sun web page.

Coming Thursday, Sun Microsystems hosts a NLJUG JavaOne warm-up event in their local HQ in the Netherlands. A few dozens of Dutchmen will meet up and discuss their pilgrimage to San Francisco. If you’re reading this, you’re Dutch, and you’re going to JavaOne as well…please sign up at the NLJUG/JavaOne web site and you can also enjoy a Sonoma County wine-tour, and a great party on Sunday! But be quick...we're closing deals with the tour operator tomorrow. If you ain't Dutch…we cannot be bribed…but, you can always give it a try ;-)

breaking news I've become a Java Champion!

2008-04-17T14:31:00Z

Breaking news here folks! Yesterday, at the J-Spring conference in Bussum, Netherlands it was announced that I have been honored by being awarded the coveted title of Java Champion by an international panel of Java Leaders. The announcement was made during the keynote presentation of the J-Spring conference by Klaasjan Tukker, president of the NLJUG and a founding Java Champion himself. Besides Klaasjan I'm now the second Java Champion in the Netherlands.

Currently, there exist less than a hundred Java Champions out of a pool of over 6 million Java developers worldwide. Needless to say that I'm extremely proud of being selected into this special group of Java advocates! I'm thrilled!

If you're not familiar with the Java Champion program, check out their web site at java.net or read what Matt Thompson - Director, Technology Outreach & Open Source Programs Office of Sun Microsystems - has to say about it in an interview for Java Developer's Journal, below:

"The idea is to build a community of Java Champions that reflects the top echelon of contributors to the Java Community. I look at these folks as the heroes of the Java platform ... They are truly both a wealth of knowledge for us to tap into, as well as a great resource to work with in making the Java platform easier to adopt worldwide".

The Java Champions program is sponsored by Sun Microsystems and is an effort to recognize leaders in the Java Community and invite them to participate in the development of the Java platform in collaboration with Sun engineers and Java Luminaries. Read the entire interview here.

JavaPolis 2007 - Day 3, 4, 5: Conference

2007-12-16T14:22:00Z

This blog entry is a combined piece of coverage for JavaPolis days 3, 4, and 5, in other words: The Conference. I have several reasons for doing this not in the least because of the very busy schedule and the bizarre problems I ran into with the wireless provider at the hotel. It appeared that the access that I bought from within my hotel room was not working when I sat in the lobby. This is strange, right? Must be some sort of a router thing. Anyway I’m only able to login to my account when I’m at the third floor of the hotel :-S

Besides the significant amout of time spent at the lobby and the hotel bar discussing everything we got out of the conference, I also spent most of the nights at the conference venue, attending BoF sessions and participating in all other sorts of get-togethers. Quite a busy schedule and most of the time when I finally saw my hotel room – and specifically the bed – I had little to none energy left to put anything on the blog. So I decided to craft up some snippets during the conference days and put it all out at once in a single blog entry.

First thing that really got me impressed at the conference is that they succeeded in getting wireless internet to work! This is quite amazing compared to past years. Imagine 3200+ nerds inside the venue with laptops, wifi enabled phones, pdas, watches, and even pacemakers all connecting to the internet at the very same time. Great job, guys!

Another great thing is the massive number of interesting speakers gathered at this conference. Not only the keynotes feature A-list speakers, but also a lot of the regular conference sessions feature rock star speakers, well-known authors, and JSR spec leads. A perfect opportunity to get the information from the source.

Day 3 and 4 both featured keynotes in the morning. Speakers included Stephan Janssen, James Gosling, Bruce Eckel, and the Sun Java Evangelists team. Topics included JavaFX, Flex, OpenSpaces (UnConference), Mobile Java, and James Gosling presented an overview of what’s happening on the Java platform. He talked about lots of anecdotes on customer visits and mad scientist-like projects that involved some sort of Java.

After the keynote on Wednesday, the actual conference part of JavaPolis took off. The conference consists of 1-hour sessions with from time-to-time very hard choices to make what session to attend since there are quite some interesting topics to choose from. Amongst others I picked the following sessions that I will comment on in the remainder of this post: Guice, Java Content Repository, Java EE 6 Overview, EJB 3.1, JPA 2.0, JSF 2.0, Hibernate Search, Web Beans, .. and finally a panel that featured e.g. James Gosling, Josh Bloch, Neal Gafter and Martin Odersky that talked about the future of computing. A lot of interesting stuff as you can tell from just the list of topics.

Besides in-depth sessions there is also a nice, but far too crowded pavilion. Especially around lunch time one can have a hard time getting across the pavilion floor in order to get something to eat or find a toilet in time ;-) The pavilion floor featured dozens of product vendors pushing their product or recruiting new employees. One of the booths featured a setup with Gran Turismo where you could win some prizes by driving a BMW 1-series around the track. As I’m a big fan of the game and can spent quite some time playing it every now and then I gave it a try, but unfortunately drove a disappointing time.

Just like last year my blog was featured on the backpage of the daily JavaPolis newspaper, which is nice of course!

So off to some session content:

Actually the first conference session that I attended was on the dependency injection framework Guice by (Crazy) Bob Lee who works for Google. My expectations were some sort of introduction but instead Bob had labeled the talk “Expert Guice” and took off with such speed that I had a really hard time figuring out the merits of the framework during the presentation and I’m still not sure if I got a grab on it yet. Anyway, it gave me an impression.

The second talk I attended was titled “AJAX meets Java Content Repository” by some Swiss guy and boy, he did a great job presenting. Not only did he do a perfect job talking about the subject but you could tell he was into all of the secrets of Keynote on the Mac as his slides were a feast for the eyes as well. He concluded the presentation by having a stopwatch counting down 15 minutes and coded a demo against time. Impressive job! And by the way JCR is impressive stuff as well.

Next was a session on Java EE 6 that did feature lots of news around the developments within this JSR. At JavaOne there was only some vague information available as the expert group still had to start. As they are currently under way for about 6 months quite some work has already been done in defining the roadmap and the global features of the platform. Of course, since it’s still early in the process a lot of it is still subject to change. Amongst the more interesting developments within this JSR is the concept of Profiles. These should be regarded as subsets or supersets of the Java EE platform cut to the need of specific domains within enterprise development. These domains can be thought of as either technical, like a Web Profile, but can also be functional like e.g. a Telco Profile. The Java EE 6 specification will define a process for specifying profiles and this process will of course focus on keeping everything compatible. The plus side of profiles is that it allows for certain technologies within the profile to independently evolve from the Java EE spec itself. This enables the possibility for technology to evolve much faster than the approximately two years that it takes to produce a new version of the EE platform. The latter being one of the main arguments for rebel frameworks to battle it. The process is too slow. On the other hand, profiles might just fragment the EE world into an infinite number of profiles that nobody can keep track off. So for now I consider it both a promising and a dangerous feature as well.

Another interesting development within the Java EE 6 expert group is the process they call “pruning”. Pruning is like the deprecation mechanism for certain parts of the Java EE platform that are either superseded with new technology, e.g. Entity Beans and JAX-RPC or root out stuff that should have probably never belonged in Java EE anyway. Think JAXR or JSR-88. The pruning process marks these APIs or technologies as optional for the following release. Once they’re optional, application server vendors are free to choose whether they keep on implementing them in the next version of their products.

And of course the ease-of-development trend is being continued. APIs that have no annotation support yet will be extended to do so and furthermore most configuration and packaging requirements will be either loosened or made obsolete. Java EE 6 will include an interesting list of new and updated APIs e.g. JAX-RS (RESTful Web Services), Servlet 3.0, JSP 2.2, JSF 2.0, JAX-WS 2.2, JAXB 2.1, and many, many more.

In order to unleash the full power of Java EE 6 you’re required to run it with Java SE 6 underneath. Actually, a lot of speakers working for Sun surveyed the crowd to find out who was still developing on Java SE 1.3, 1.4, 5, etc. Most of the time they were surprised with a rather large number of people that were still developing on SE 1.4. They urged everybody to move to Java SE 6, or at least Java SE 5. The problem is of course that the customers that we work for dictate differently :-(

Finally a timeline was presented for when to expect the Java EE 6 stuff:

Q1 2008 – Public review

Q3 2008 – Proposed final draft

Q4 2008 – Reference Implementation (beta) release

Q2 2009 – Final release

So, lots of cool things but a long wait until Q2 2009 :-(

During the remainder of the conference I attended quite some sessions that went in-depth on the APIs involved in Java EE 6. A good example of this was EJB 3.1 by Kenneth Saks who is the spec-lead. Compared to the talk he did at JavaOne not much had changed yet. Mostly details. A public draft can be expected around Q1 2008.

In contrary to the EJB 3.1 talk, the talk by Linda DeMichiel on JPA 2.0 did contain a lot of updates. Much of these consisted of more concrete examples of the advanced modeling stuff that will go into the new JPA. Think Collections, Embeddables of embeddables, collections of embeddables, embeddables having relationships…argh! Dazzling! Great topic for trick questions :-) No, but seriously it’s becoming very advanced complicated stuff. About time I update my talks on the subject! Also for JPA a rudimentary public draft can be expected somewhere Q1 2008.

At Thursday night, while most conference attendees enjoyed the JavaPolis Movie (BeoWulf) in the THX-certified Metropolis theatre, I attended the JUG Leaders Birds of a Feather session instead. Lots of JUG leaders were present – representing around 30+ JUGS from all over the world including European countries like Belgium, Netherlands (me!), France, Greece, Poland, Italy, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden but also representatives from a few US JUGS and even a JUG leader from Fortaleze, Brasil. Quite an atmosphere! Besides the JUG leaders the Sun Technology Outreach Office was present and of course the Sun JUG contacts Aaron Houston and Nichole Scott were there. Even Patrick Curran, currently head of the JCP showed up. All of the JUG leaders got the chance to introduce themselves and their JUGS and I hope I did a good job defending the colors of the NLJUG myself. Discussions were lively and were about the legal entity to run a JUG, and how to tackle some of the “problems” that JUGS face worldwide. As I listened to the other JUG leaders I got the impression that we’re definitely doing a great job with the NLJUG ourselves as we managed to overcome most of the things that other JUGS seem to still struggle about.

On the final day of the conference things start winding down a bit. The pavilion floor is now closed and a lot of people are heading home already. Still, there are quite some talks with at least one that makes it into the top three talks of the conference: Scott Ambler on “Evolving Agile”. Scott is a great speaker with lots and lots of real-world experience in his talks. Instead of kicking the light out of non-agiles he this time turned the thing around and put the spotlight on challenges in agile projects. Scott also mentioned “..he joined a little startup called International Business Machines..”, or even better “..I didn’t join them, they actually joined me!”. Quite a surprise, I wonder where this is going and what his influence will be on the Rational stuff, especially Jazz.

During the remainder of the (short) conference day I attended two more talks. Both were sponsored talks and were not that much spectacular to mention.

So, and with that another year of JavaPolis comes to an end. As I mentioned in this blog before: conferences equal inspiration for me, I think I can easily say that there is much to think about and much to investigate after this year’s edition of JavaPolis. That’s like a bare 5 months before the next big pile of inspiration: JavaOne 2008. Hope to see you there!

JavaPolis 2007 – Day 2: University

2007-12-13T06:59:00Z

Day 2 started off with some coffee and a session titled “SOA using Java Web Services”. I must say that I had high expectations for this talk as I recently had been in lots and lots of discussions about SOA and web services in general. This talk – at least by the title and the abstract – seemed to be interesting in that light. Besides, the talk was done by Mark Hansen who also authored a book with the same title and I knew some of my colleagues really appreciated that book. The session itself turned out to be a deception. Mark was clearly not prepared for the talk. His demos were not setup and failed when he tried to get them to run anyway. The title and the topics on the agenda seemed interesting at first. Topics like Web Service Platform Architecture and parts on REST and JAX-WS looked promising, but he managed to translate such topics into very basic 101-talk. Apparently he assumed the people in the audience to have never heard about web service at all. Then, only minutes later he assumed we were all subject matter experts as he assumed that everybody in the audience by now definitely knew the difference between REST and SOAP. Not that I didn’t, but the swings in the level of the talk were strange to say the least.

Actually the only thing I took from the talk was a one-liner: “sometimes it seems as if the ease-of-use effort serves the single purpose of ease-of-demoing”. I think he’s very right with that. During the break I decided to switch to the session on Flex with Bruce Eckel and James Ward. Much, much better presenters and a nice talk that I could seamlessly blend in although I’d missed the first part. They pretty much kept it at basic stuff and some demos. No real advanced or mouthwatering GUI stuff that I expected to see. But then again there are more Flex sessions this week, so I think the fair share of GUI extravaganza is still to come. The big difference with the web services talk was that this talk made sense.

The afternoon session I picked was by Kenneth Saks and Linda DeMichiel and covered practical programming with EJB 3 and JPA. Actually this session was some sort of a deep dive into the darker parts of the specification. Ken started off with Session Bean related topics, like e.g. distinction between the component environment and the global JNDI namespace, intra-component method delegation, transactional behavior of Timers, application clients and mixing EJB 2.x and 3.0 technologies. After that Linda took the stage and talked amongst others about the removal of orphan entities, inheritance hierarchies, and fetching strategies. Especially the latter made me think. The examples illustrated the impact of the fetching strategy on the number of (unnecessary) joins and database roundtrips. She tested the audience by asking some trick questions about it. Great stuff!

The university part of JavaPolis ended with two shorter sessions just like the day before. Only this time I took a two part session on Jazz by Erich Gamma. I’d seen Erich speak about Jazz the previous year and a few weeks back I attended a session at IBM where Jazz was also one of the topics. Erich didn’t really show any new stuff that I hadn’t already seen but did a nice talk on the rationale behind the whole idea and how it’s coming down. The second part of the talk was supposed to be a live demo but because of some network router problems this turned into Erich showing some videos from his laptop with him doing live voice-overs. The session once again fueled my mixed feelings on the subject. On the one hand it all seems like a great idea. Team-first development and a set of integrated tools that support the process of choice instead of dictating it. On the other hand IBM is determined to ship it as a commercial product. And worse, the real power of Jazz only comes with the total stack that offers maximum integration. So if you’re stuck on another version control system or another issue tracker you get much less out of it.

The story sounds a lot like they are trying to copy the Eclipse success but since this is a commercial product I’m really wondering if the market acceptance is going to be huge. All in all I have to admit that on slideware it is a very interesting product so I’m definitely going to sort it out.

With that another day of JavaPolis University ended, but the highlight of the day had yet to come. As I wrote yesterday, I was invited to the JavaPolis Speakers and JUG Leaders diner, being a co-lead of NLJUG myself. As I walked towards the restaurant a taxi pulled over and James Gosling himself stepped out of it. Not everyday you meet people like this. But James was not the only one present. About 100 speakers and JUG leaders joined the party and there were lots of people that you normally don’t have access to.

Discussions were diverse e.g. OpenJDK, JRuby, fragmentation in the mobile world, the iPhone, and of course enterprise computing in every aspect. As the restaurant turned out to be a former Beer Brewery you can image there was lots of it. Unfortunately I came by car so I didn’t want to risk a crash somewhere in the center of Antwerp. Other people didn’t have that problem so conversations got lively ;-) A lot of funky pictures were taken at the party and even some video. So right now I’m wondering where this stuff will be showing up :-)

Lastly, two more things to say on my previous blog post:

When I read the posted entry on the web I noticed some *** in the text. It got me puzzled for a second, but then I realized it was the dirty words filter that we installed. I promised myself not to joke about it, but a name like D*i*c*k Wall does not seem to pass the filter :-)

And the other thing…I got the link to Paul’s blog wrong. I sort of deducted it from the URL to my own blog, but it appears that Paul got a totally different URL. Don’t know why but it’s fixed now.

JavaPolis 2007 – Day 1: University

2007-12-10T22:19:00Z

Ehrm… ok got to admit it… this blog has been pretty much brain dead over the past few months. But, according to tradition I got to cover at least a few conferences a year and since its JavaPolis time again that is just barely enough of an excuse to bring this blog back to life. So here we go…

As usual a week of JavaPolis kicks off with two days of University. During the day 3 hour sessions offer an in-depth glance at a selection of popular topics. For today I picked a session titled “Open Source ESBs” for the morning session and “Google APIs” as the afternoon pick. Afterwards there were some 30 minutes short sessions that were mainly sponsored sessions.

The Open Source ESBs session was presented by Jos Dirksen and Tijs Rademakers, both familiar to me because we had them to talk at NLJUG events as well. During the talk they covered Mule, Apache ServiceMix and OpenESB. Mule wasn’t entirely new to me. I have been experimenting somewhat with a previous version earlier this year. I had never looked at ServiceMix before. At JavaOne I attended some talks on OpenESB and JBI but since I had done nothing with it afterwards it kind of slipped from my mind. All in all this session was a very interesting teaser to all three solutions. Both Mule and ServiceMix involve a lot of XML and no (graphical) tooling to help out in defining transformations and mediations. OpenESB on the other hand has a lot of backing from the various NetBeans plug-ins that come with it. My ESB experience besides Mule consists of WebSphere ESB and tools like WebSphere Integration Developer and from what I saw of OpenESB and NetBeans it was quite comparable.

The session was pretty much Spring infested with Mule 2 being Spring based and ServiceMix offering Spring bindings that were used in the various code examples that Jos and Tijs showed. If you happen to know me, or have read earlier installments of this blog it might not be a total surprise that I’m not really a fan of Spring. So in fact I got to admit I was quite relieved when I first saw the JavaPolis schedule and noticed there were hardly any Spring talks on it. Unfortunately, it seems as if Spring has gone underground and pops up in totally unrelated talks. Just to annoy me ;-)

Anyway, besides the Spring nightmare it was actually a very interesting session with just enough information on all three solutions to get the high level picture. On first impression I think I like the Mule approach best. Just a plain EAI solution without all of the fancy and formal stuff around it.

After lunch I attended the Google APIs session. One of the reasons for picking this session was the session abstract that talked about the OpenSocial Container and I’m quite curious about that. Not in the least since I’m still planning on becoming a billionaire by inventing the next piece of fantastic social networking software that everybody wants to use. Unfortunately my dreams were shattered by the fact that *** Wall – who presented the session – mentioned that the abstract was mixing up this talked and the talk on Google Web Toolkit and the OpenSocial Container on Wednesday. Luckily there was enough of other interesting stuff happening at Google to talk about so I decided to stay. What the session did feature were actually two separate API level talks on the Google Collections API and the Google Data APIs. Interesting stuff that tickles your imagination! *** did a typical developer-to-developer kind of talk and did a good job evangelizing these APIs.

Late afternoon was covered by two shorter sessions of 30 minutes each. I picked two with the common theme of Continuous Integration. The first was about Atlassian Bamboo – a product they recently acquired from Cenqua – and the second session was about Hudson. Funny how two tools that share a common theme can be so totally different. A lot of that is perception caused by the presenter. The guy from Atlassian that did the Bamboo presentation was either terribly jet-lagged or lacked presentation skills at all. I admit his way of presenting does not really encourage my feelings about the product. A few weeks back I got an e-mail from Atlassian – since I’m the technical contact for Jira within my company - trying to convince me to take a look at Bamboo. As I had found no time to do so this was my first experience with it. My first impression is that it features some very nice functionality for build telemetry and trend analysis but as usual with Atlassian products it is very much centered on their other products. What I am actually looking for is a more open approach to build information and trend statistics since our Software Factory “Endeavour” uses its own project portal and data warehouse. With Bamboo I’m under the impression that it is possible to get anything IN but getting stuff OUT seems impossible. I think I’m going to stop by their booth anytime this week to ask them a few questions about it. Hudson on the other end does seem to promise a far more open solution since it’s entirely built to be extensible. In fact everything – even the basic functionality of Hudson - is a plug-in. Also the strong Maven integration sounds promising. This is definitely a topic to look into after the conference. To be continued.

Another highlight of the day was the Parleys Newspaper that was handed out to all attendees. It featured an article on the NLJUG and how we are trying to reach out to the student community. The article talked about the project that I ran at the AVANS Hogeschool in the Netherlands where a team of 25 students built us a new administration system.

By the way, I’m not the only one from Info Support attending JavaPolis. I’m accompanied by Paul Kramer – a trainer at our Knowledge Center - and Paul Bakker – who also has his own blog.

In summary this first day was definitely alright and I’m really looking forward to tomorrow. Not in the least since I’m invited to the JavaPolis Speakers and JUG Leaders diner!

*update* fixed the link to Paul's blog which appeared to be totally different that mine. Thank to my faithful reader Wouter for pointing it out :-)

JavaOne 2007 - Slides online!

2007-05-22T19:24:00Z

Most of the slides of the JavaOne conference are online by now. They were temporarily taken offline after the conference and moved to the JavaOne Online site where you can download 'em free of charge. Multimedia session will be added to the same site over the next month.

JavaOne 2007 – Days 3/4 it’s a wrap!

2007-05-11T20:55:00Z

So this time a combined blog entry for conference days 3 and 4. Right now I’m thinking about explaining why I did that and come up with some lousy excuses for not filing a separate day 3 report, but the truth is that the conference has really taken it’s toll on me and the hangover from last night isn’t really helpful either. We ended up in a place called The Holy Cow…and holy cow, my head is still spinning ;-)

JavaOne day 3 is like the most regular day of the conference. It’s like taking technical session all day long. No real ‘specials’ during the day part. The morning keynote was by Motorola, but I decided to skip that session since I couldn’t take the risk of becoming inspired by the mobility stuff because I simply have no time left on my rainy Sunday afternoons. So you can see it as an act of self protection. For the same reason I have been evading everything Blu-ray related as well. Actually, this isn’t true, but I’m just trying to fool myself here so bear with me. All of that stuff is so incredibly cool that the best and only advice here is to stay far from it ;-)

The technical sessions highlights of the day were: NASA’s World Wind project, interoperable SOA with Java EE and .NET, a business panel on Service Component Architecture and a session on Seam by Gavin King who made a cool one man show out of his presentation. Some stand-up comedy on unit testing as well. Maybe this guy should consider a career change?

The evening part of JavaOne day 3 is special. In fact it is so special they actually have a name for it: AfterDark Bash. And yes, there was heavy bashing involved. The evening featured a round of Comedy Central’s BattleBots. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a must since its robot free fighting ‘till death. And kinda deadly it is, so that’s why they have that huge glass plated cage around the arena, because parts were literary coming off. Those bots are on a killing spree!

After BattleBots there was a smashing performance by the Unauthorized Rolling Stones. They played some classic Stones’ songs and they really rock! So AfterDark Bashing continued in the snake pit in front of the main stage…yeah rite…image a snake pit of nerds with oversized JavaOne backpacks slamming into each other. So you should consider the snake pit imaginary.

For me, day 3 and day 4 sort of collided somewhere and I didn’t really experience a transitioning of days. When I sort of woke up I found myself with some colleagues at Lori’s Diner where I made a futile attempt at having some greasy stuff for breakfast. Then off to the General Session. Friday’s General Session is actually the best part of JavaOne. It’s also known as James Gosling’s Toy Show. The two hour session featured 12 cool demonstrations of innovative ways of using Java technology. There was lots of robotics and funny devices involved. Have you ever thought to see a Java operated meat scale? They probably have the video stream of the session up at the JavaOne web site somewhere soon, so check it out if you’re into the geeky stuff. And oh btw, all of the PDFs from the presentations are now available as well.

The remainder of the day until about 5pm is left for attending technical sessions and trying to stuff in as much knowledge as is still possible. For me highlights were a comparison of Ruby on Rails, Grails, and Java EE 5, and a session on the new validation JSR.

And with that, JavaOne 2007 officially ends, but will probably still last for a while in my head as I’m processing all of the ideas and inspiration that I got during the show. Because that’s what JavaOne is all about: inspiration and endless possibilities! Amen!

JavaOne 2007 – Day 2 Half way

2007-05-10T07:02:00Z

As I’m just returning from the JUG leaders BoF session and the hour is late, I will probably keep this entry short.

Day 2 of the conference was another interesting day. The morning keynote was presented by Oracle and they did a good job at making it a show. They had two announcements. One is the additional open sourcing of a new set of rich internet components and the other being Oracle’s application server is officially certified for Java EE 5. Apart from that no real exciting stuff here. Just a lot of demo’s focusing on the richness of user interfaces and the user experience as a whole. A lot of clicking around, but no real message underneath.

After the keynote it was off to a very special event for NLJUG members. A specially arranged Q&A session with James Gosling. The obvious first question to be popped was about JavaFX. James told us he is very excited about this specific piece of technology and that we had only seen a glimpse of it yet. JavaFX is currently only in prototype stage and a lot of hard work was needed to get it ready just in time for the show. A full blown version of it is to be expected within a year or so, probably released during next year’s JavaOne. Apart from the JavaFX stuff there were questions about backwards compatibility, the rise of scripting languages versus a statically typed language, about Apple and the iphone, and then a whole bunch of other questions. I asked James about the new Java Realtime 2.0 that was announced during yesterday’s keynote and why an enterprise developer should care about it. James mentioned the NASDAQ case where on average about 150.000 transactions per second take place. This was the perfect example of an enterprise realtime system and also the perfect illustration of a system you cannot do with things like Ruby and Rails. Afterwards we took some group pictures that will be up on the NLJUG site any time soon and some t-shirt signing as well. James told us that he would sign everything except for blank cheques ;-)

Back at the regular program I attended some sessions on the new ideas for Java Persistence API 2.0, Enterprise interoperability in SOA environments, and about the OpenAjax Alliance. At around 17.30h Intel’s general session kicked off and they told us how they rock Java. The session was about giving developers a glimpse of the participation Intel does on all sorts of Java related projects, like JVM porting and optimizing applications running on particular hardware for performance. Somehow informative but a little bit boring as well.

After the afternoon general session it was party time again. Together with my coworkers and some other people we attended the JBoss, IBM and Eclipse parties, all conveniently located next to each other in the Metreon building right next to the conference venue. At around ten o’clock I left the party for the JUG leaders session. I met some interesting people there and got the opportunity to introduce myself as the co-lead for the NLJUG. Afterwards we took a picture with all of the JUG leaders present on the stairs in the main hallway.

It’s been a long day and I’m pretty much tired right now. The conference is already halfway and still there is so much to see and learn. Time flies…

JavaOne 2007 – Day 1 - Conference Kick-off

2007-05-09T06:22:00Z

I once again have the privilege of attending JavaOne in San Francisco. This morning the official day 1 general session kicked off and with it comes 81 hours of JavaOne. If you’ve been there before, it’s easy to tell what the first 20 minutes of the conference were like. If you’ve never been there, imagine John Gage, head researcher of Sun Microsystems having his yearly rant on meeting people and being a Brazilian. If you happen to be there like 6 times before, like me, then the kick-off tends to be a little annoying. But as soon as those 20 minutes had passed, things got interesting. Very interesting! The keynote was exciting and entertaining. Something it hadn’t been in the past few years. The 2 hour show was designed along some major announcements. It had music, videos and some interesting speakers making it a very entertaining show to watch. The larger part of it contributed to the “Community, community, community” thing and the open sourcing of Java as was to be expected. With a symbolic announcement mail Rich Green, VP of Software, declared the open sourcing of Java and the OpenJDK project to be finalized as of today. I think the main message from this conference is the “Open equals Possibilities” quote. And indeed, open it is. Ranging from cell phones, to Glassfish, to Blu-ray, Java is everywhere and couldn’t be more opened up than it is today.

Then came the major announcement of the show. JavaFX. What is it? I can’t get myself of the idea that it is a total rip-off of what another company tends to call Flex and Flash. That same company, being a serious sponsor of previous JavaOne shows, was nowhere to be seen. Strange? I think not. JavaFX is THE new kid on the block and regarding the amount of spotlight it gets is the new horse Sun bets on. If by now you still have no clue what I’m talking about: think script, think scripting language for RIA, think formerly known as F3 (form follows function). Is it cool? Yes, sort of, but is it new? No, definitely not. Even Microsoft has something like it (Silverlight). This stuff runs on desktops as well as on mobile phones and believe it or not there is even a oval-shaped, completely new designed phone shown that demonstrates its capabilities. Boy, does this image look familiar. Some guy in a black t-shirt announcing a new oval-shaped gadget. Where have I seen this before? So, at the moment I’m still a bit confused about what to think about this stuff. I’m sure this won’t be the last that will be shown of it at this year’s conference, so I have still some days to refine my opinion.

The afternoon technical general session had some more cool things to show. Take a look at NASA’s World Wind, or project IRIS to see what I mean.

The rest of my day was pretty much EJB 3 related. I attended some tips ‘n tricks and best practices session and got a taste of things to come in EJB 3.1. I will be sharing this information in my J-Spring presentation, June 13^th at the J-Spring conference in Bussum, The Netherlands. So stop by if you have the chance.

At about 7 pm technical sessions ended for today and I went to the Derby BoF/party at Jillian’s. Had some good food and a few beers and talked to some interesting people. Now I’m off to get some sleep and prepare for the second year in a row special Q&A session tomorrow with James Gosling. Boy, what should I ask him this time around? You’ll read about it tomorrow, so stay tuned!

JavaOne 2007 - Afterdark scoop!

2007-04-22T15:24:00Z

Read the scoop on the JavaOne AfterDark Bash on Klaasjan's blog!

Battlebots...yeah! :-)