javapolis « WordPress.com Tag Feed

Orakel @ Devoxx '08

Herman Horsten — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 17:21:25 +0000

Javapolis / Devoxx ‘08 – Metropolis – Antwerpen

“An oracle is a person or agency considered to be a source of wise counsel or prophetic opinion; an infallible authority, usually spiritual in nature. It may also be a revealed prediction or precognition of the future, from deities, that is spoken through another object or life-form (e.g.: augury and auspice). In the ancient world many sites gained a reputation for the dispensing of oracular wisdom: they too became known as “oracles”, and the oracular utterances, called khrēsmoi in Greek, were often referred to under the same name — a name derived from the Latin verb ōrāre, to speak.”

[ bron : wikipedia ]

Javapolis 2007 - RoundUp

Wiebe Elsinga — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 08:27:49 +0000

Na en drukke periode prive en op het werk heb ik dan toch eindelijk de tijd om een verslag te geven

Javapolis 2007 Technology Highlights

yojava — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 16:56:48 +0000

Tech highlights from Javapolis 2007:

Java Content Repository
- now supported by many vendors
- slick demo of a Jackrabbit-based commercial product from day.com
- JCR 2.0 is in the pipeline
Glassfish open source application server
- is now the reference implementation of the Servlet API
- v3 (currently in beta) is more modular. The demo had a fast startup time.
Resin (commercial servlet container) claims to serve static content faster than Apache
FindBugs will find a lot of potential Java bugs for you!
Groovy
- provides a combination of modern scripting features and tight Java integration. For example, Groovy classes can implement Java interfaces.
- v1.5 offers signficant performance gains
JRuby on Rails = Rails + support for calling Java code
JavaRebel is a commercial product that enables auto-reloading of classes without restarting the server

Short update - JavaPolis 2007, QNH James Bond Party..

Peter Berkenbosch — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 12:47:07 +0000

I should have blogging about a lot of things but work has taken all my thoughts.

So this is just a short summery of events that happend.

JavaPolis was a blast. The Parleys V2 demo was briliant and the QNH drink at TakeTwo was wonderfull. Going to Noxx until 5 in the morning was not a very wise thing to do.. but in the end I had a great time in Antwerp. (I really like those IMAX theaters!) Met a lot of nice people and had a lot of fun.

Then we had the QNH end-of-the-year-party in castle Wijenburg, James Bond Casino Royal theme. Very very cool. Played the first poker tourney and ended up 3rd (table of 9) just behind my wife! and Angelo who won the first round. I don’t know who won the complete event, so if you do… please let me know . The only problem was that it was very very busy. With only 2 poker tables, 1 roulette table and 1 black jack table it was impossible to get some action besides the first round of poker.

Tomorrow I will presenting a introduction to Ruby and RubyOnRails talk here at <theFactor.e> this will be my first talk that I give about the subject so I’m intressted to see how it goes and what the reactions are. When I feel it’s good enough I will post the slides.

So that’s it for now.

My Flickr account

jraffa — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 17:22:26 +0000

Voilà my Flickr account, where I put my first set of photos taken last week in Antwerp at the JavaPolis 07 conference! Enjoy!

May The Force Be With You

Herman Horsten — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 21:05:41 +0000

[ original size ] Javapolis

These days at JavaPolis 07

jraffa — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 23:28:33 +0000

These days I’m in Antwerpen in Belgium (“Anversa”, for the Italian people ) at the JavaPolis conference, the great european conference about Java, my development language. I’m here with my dear friend and colleague Antonio, and yesterday we had the pleasure to be at the dinner organized by the BeJUG, the Belgian Java User Group, where we met a lot of international JUG members and JUG leaders, but, first of all, we had the possibility to meet James Gosling, the Father of Java!!!
So, now I can post this photo!
The computer science world and, in particular, the Java world and all the conferences like JavaPolis, are so friendly realities that it’s so easy to know people from different countries in the world, and to meet your idols and also drink a beer with them!!

Javapolis 2007

Herman Horsten — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 18:06:47 +0000

[ original size ] Javapolis vond ik behoorlijk saai vandaag, gelukkig was er de zeer sympathieke An die mijn dag letterlijk opfleurde

Javapolis 2007 - Intermission

Wiebe Elsinga — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 15:03:34 +0000

Zoals jullie weten ben ik momenteel in Antwerpen om mijn kennis niveau nieuwe impulsen te geven. hel

JavaPolis 2007 - Here we go

Peter Berkenbosch — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 09:49:25 +0000

This afternoon I will start my journey to Antwerp to visit the Conference part of the JavaPolis 2007.

I will try to write some highlight of the event on this blog.

Conference Day 1 will start tomorrow. I’ve got the following “planning” for the talks that day:

http://www.javapolis.com/confluence/display/JP07/SoapUI

http://www.javapolis.com/confluence/display/JP07/Google+Web+Toolkit

http://www.javapolis.com/confluence/display/JP07/SOA+Development+using+JBossESB

The for-last slot is somewhat difficult to decide where to go. I just bought the book, Practical JRuby on Rails by Ola Bini and his talk with Charles Nutter should be really great. On the other hand I really like talks about methodoligy like Scrum, and there is also a talk in the same time slot with the title Scrum in practice for the non-believers. The last word of the title makes my choice a bit easier because I already “believe” So I’m going to visit

http://www.javapolis.com/confluence/display/JP07/Practical+JRuby+on+Rails

The last talk of the day that I visit will be

http://www.javapolis.com/confluence/display/JP07/The+future+of+Computing

quoting the javapolis site: “Based on the Java brain power within that panel, this is already an historical discussion panel “

Javapolis '07

Herman Horsten — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 07:06:10 +0000

Van woensdag t/m vrijdag zit ik op Javapolis in Antwerpen, zijn er nog mensen die gaan? Wie zin heeft in een meet & greet laat maar een seintje.

JavaPolis 2007

Wiebe Elsinga — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 17:48:29 +0000

Het is weer de tijd van het jaar om mijn kennis te delen met andere Java collega’s. Dat beteke

Javapolis noedels

Herman Horsten — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 19:56:53 +0000

[ original size ] Wat me de laatste dag van Javapolis bijzonder is bijgebleven, was het eten. Ik was duidelijk niet de enige die zijn noedels na één hap gewoon heeft weggekieperd. Ergste van al was dat ze de koelkasten met drank hadden weggehaald zodat ik het niet meer kon doorspoelen.

JavaPolis 2007: James Gosling, Guice, Apache Sling, and more!

OGG — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 23:09:51 +0000

I attended the first day of the JavaPolis 2007 conference in Antwerp today, after travelling from London via Eurostar, with the VYRE senior developers (Albert, Sindri, Mindaugas, and H.Stefan). We went to JavaPolis last year too, and really enjoyed it, so this is becoming a definite tradition.

The keynote speaker this year was James Gosling, the so called “father of Java”. I was really looking forward to seeing the legendary author of the Java programming language, writer of the first compiler and virtual machine, in action. He took the stage wearing a T-shirt and jeans, with his trademark grey beard and big glasses.

His talk was a “tour of the Java landscape”. He spoke about the fact that Java was all around us, and most of the time we don’t even know about it. Some of the examples he mentioned were sensor grids on bridges in the US, moisture sensors used in vineries in the Napa valley, controllers at the CERN particle physics lab in Switzerland, and the London Oyster cards being Java SmartCards.

He also spent some time talking about JavaFX (which is Sun’s answer to Adobe’s Flex/AIR and Microsoft’s Silverlight), and announced the release of Netbeans 6, Sun’s IDE.

Towards the ends he took questions from the audience, but none of the questions or answers are really worth mentioning here.

I have to admit that I thought Gosling was far from being an impressive speaker. He digressed quite often, and seemed overly preoccupied with proud statements about Java being everywhere, without really showing us anything cool or interesting.

His laptop was running Solaris 10, and his slides were handmade using Java 2D. Quite messy and unimpressive. He should have at least hired a designer to go through his presentation, because honestly it looked like s***.

Following Gosling were a couple of demos from Sun. Now this is when it got really embarrassing for Sun. First up, to show us the new and powerful plugin architecture of NetBeans 6.0, a developer from Jasper Reports showed us the Jasper designer as a NetBeans plugin. First of all, his demo was really bad, all he did was tweak some parameters without explaining what they were, and then generate a pie chart with so many sectors that I could not read any of the labels. To make things really interesting, he was chewing gum through his demo, which made understanding his English a bit hard. When Gosling realised that this demo wasn’t what he thought it was, he quickly cut it short. Good idea.

Second demo was supposed to really motivate the audience by showing how magnificent Java technology is and how it can be used outside the regular realm. This was done by a team of two, who’s job description sounds really good: write cool stuff in Java and then travel the world showing it off. Apparently they were going to show us how JavaFX could be used to control touch screens, but they did not have time to finish that demo, so instead they just did it without the touch screen! The demo was basically a few images scattered around the screen, and I must say the audience wasn’t exactly impressed as they demonstrated how these images could be moved, scaled, and rotated. The second part of their demo was using sunspots (Java based micro controllers) to control the movements of a small robot. The sunspots used had embedded gyroscopes and could therefore detect acceleration and direction. So when the Java evangelist raised his hand, the robot raised its hand (albeit quite a few seconds later). That was basically it (they did a similarly unimpressive sunspot demo last year at JavaPolis).

The main issue for me here was that no code was shown. That made a bad demo worse.

But things did get a lot better later in the day.

Next I went to see Bob Lee (“Crazy Bob”) from Google give a presentation about Guice (pronounced “juice”), Google’s lightweight dependency injection framework. After seeing this presentation, I’m definitely going to run some tests on Guice. I use the Spring framework a lot, and it is great for many things. However one of the things that annoys me a bit with Spring is the huge application context XML files, and the fact that I often end up storing configuration parameters inside the same XML file that declares injected dependencies. Guice seems to alleviate that headache nicely. Dependency injection is defined in pure Java code, making good use of Java 1.5 annotations. I’ll post my findings on Guice here once I have had some time to play around with it.

David Nuescheler gave an interesting talk about “AJAX meets JCR”. David is the spec lead of both JSR-170 and JSR-283, so he speaks with authority on the JCR subject. I was quite excited to see him speak, since at VYRE have been doing some research about using the Java Content Repository (JCR) specification to move away from our proprietary data model. We’ve been building web services (SOAP and REST) on top of JCR (we’ve used the JackRabbit implementation so far), and client APIs in JavaScript, ActionScript, etc. David’s talk focused mainly on a projects being incubated by Apache, called Sling. Sling basically provides REST based web services on top of a JCR. David showed JavaScript API (that he called microJAX) for reading content from a JCR (writing was done using HTTP POST), and also handles all the heavy lifting (especially regarding security). He then installed a JCR repository, pumped in some content via WebDAV, and created a JCR-based WebLog in 15 minutes. Very cool stuff, and I recommend you monitor the Apache Sling project closely.

What was also interesting was the points that David made about the JCR standard. In his words, JCR combines the best of the database and file system worlds, and adds a layer of services on top of that (versioning, full-text search, multivalued properties, etc.). He went on to say “I will never use a relational db again”. Quite a bold statement, but after using JCR for a few months now, I tend to agree that the data structures of my applications are now designed on JCR node types rather than as tables in the database.

I also saw IBM’s Thomas Schaeck’s talk about Web 2.0 Collaboration and Social Networking, a topic quite close to my heart these days. He talked about some of the collaboration issues that companies face today, such as hidden information being stored where only a few can benefit from it (file systems, email, etc.), lack of ways to discover people with certain skills within the organisation, and people simply not sharing information and knowledge they possess. He then went on describing the aspects of Web 2.0 that enterprises will benefit from, such as profile management, communities, media sharing, blogging, personalisation, mashups, feeds and services.

In my view, the social networking part of Web 2.0 (profiles, contacts, relationships) with tagging is the glue that binds all the other patterns (blogging, wikis, etc.) together, with search (with saved filters) being the primary interface to all content. IBM is obviously taking Web 2.0 in the enterprise seriously, but their solutions seem a bit fragmented and disjointed, and I got the feeling that to install an Enterprise 2.0 solution from IBM you would need lots of servers with lots of Websphere app servers and portals running many different applications, which means lots of hassle and lots of money. I think we need an application that encompasses what Enterprise 2.0 is all about, and is easy to set up and maintain. It looks like there isn’t one on the market at the moment, so there may be a big opportunity there.

I fell asleep at the JSR-318 (Enterprise JavaBeans 3.1) seminar, not because it was that boring, but mainly because I was simply really tired. I then saw the “Future of Computing” panel with big guns like James Gosling, Neal Gafter, Joshua Bloch, and Martin Odersky. Unfortunately the panel was badly moderated in my view, and the discussions never really got off. Nothing exiting really came up, which is disappointing considering the names that were gathered for the panel.

Anyway, overall a great day at JavaPolis, lots of interesting people as always, followed by quality Belgian beer in the evening.