After successful exhibitions in 2007 and 2008, Jazoon’09 drew a record 1,100 participants from 37 countries. Now, we’re currently seeking sponsors and exhibitors to take part in Jazoon’10.

Indeed,

Starting today the clock is running towards the submission deadline for the Jazoon’10 Call for Papers. Java and Open Source Experts from all over the world are called upon to actively participate in the steering of the program of Jazoon’10.

Proposals for short (20 minutes) and long talks (50 minutes) can be submitted within the scope of the technical sessions until 3 February 2010. Presentations can be held individually or together with a co-speaker. Speakers profit from preferential terms – details to be found here. Proposals for Jazoon Rookie (20 minutes) can be submitted until 4 April 2010. Participating criteria and benefits can be found here.

Other News

I am making a comeback on this blog with this post, hope to continue doing, what I love doing..

Last day of this years Jazoon.

• The Android Runtime Environment by Joerg Pleumann from Noser Engineering (which contribute a lot to the Android codebase)
• Android Application Model by Dominik Gruntz
• Ed Burns on JavaEE and JavaFX integration. Entertaining and interesting as usual. Thanks Ed !
• Daniel Seiler on the ZK Ajax framework. Thanks for the confirmation of my choice of framework.

My final resume and feedback:

• A very good location in terms of conference room quality, since this is a movie theatre with great accoustic and projection.
• Good mix of topics and tracks. Anyone who is doing something with Java will find his cup of tea (eeer.. Java).
• Some “famous” folks to get hands on them and discuss face to face.
• As in all conferences: some speakers cannot present. Sorry to say so. It is boring to read slides with tons of text.
• Not enough wireless “plugins”. Seems some of the attendees were operating datacentres during the conference and hacking away during the whole time. Thanks for not sharing wireless space.
• Maybe a bit too expensive, but location, catering and speakers cost money I guess.
• I will join this event again next year.

Skipping the keynote I joined the following sessions:

• Securing AJAX Applications by Moritz Kuhn and Philipp Färber from AdNovum Informatik AG
• A complete Tour of JSF 2.0 (again by Ed Burns)
• SLF4J and logback by Ceki Gülcü from QOS.CH. I will definitely look at this logging framework soon as an powerful alternative to standard java.util.logging (link)
• Short introduction to JavaFX Rich Internet Applications connecting to GlassFish Java EE 5 services by Ludovic Champenois from Sun Microsystems.
• Gaming with JavaFX: Developing the Next Generation of Casual Games

New to Jazoon was the Jazoon Rookie Contest, where the 3 choosen finalists presenteded their concepts, ideas or application. This years winners is João Arthur Brunet Monteiro with quite an impressive wizard to verify sourcecode against design conventions (read more at jazoon.com).The day ended with Jazoon Party.

More info on Jazoon 2009 at jazoon.com.

I’m a huge fan of wikis. Not necessarily MediaWiki (holy ugly, Batman, the syntax!). I dig MoinMoin. I just heard the talk by Vincent Massol about next generation wikis. Okay, I can hear you moan under the load of buzzwords but give me a moment. XWiki looks really promising.

Wikis basically allow to publish mostly unstructured data. I say “mostly” because wikis give them some structure but not (too) much: You can organize it in pages and put it into context (by linking between the pages). Often, this is enough. But recently, MediaWiki has started to add support for structured data. See that infobox in the top left corner? But that’s just half-hearted.

XWiki takes this one step further. XWiki, as I understand it, is a framework of loosely coupled components which allow you to create a wiki. The default one is pretty good, too, so most of the time, you won’t even get into this. The cool part about XWiki is that you can define a class inside of it. Let me repeat: You can create a page (like a normal text page) that XWiki will treat as a class definition. So this class gets versioned, etc. You can then add attributes as you like.

After that, you can create instances of this class. The instances are again wiki pages. You can even use more than a single instance on a page, for example, you can have several tag instances and a single person instance. Instances are versioned, too. Of course they are, this is a wiki!

Now you need to display that data. You can use Velocity or Groovy for that. And guess what, the view is … a wiki page. So your designers can create a beautiful look for your the boring raw data. With versions and comments and everything. While some other guys are adding data to the system.

In “normal” wiki pages, you can reference these instances and render them using such a template. The same is true for editors. With a few lines of code, you can create overview pages: All instances of a class or all instances with or without a certain property or you can use Groovy to do whatever you can think of.

Now imagine this: You have an existing database where your marketing guys can, say, plan the next campaign. They can use all the wiki features to collect ideas, filter and verify them, to come up with a really good plan. Some of that data needs to go into a corporate database. In former wikis, you’d have to use an external application, switch back and forth, curse a lot when they get out of sync.

With XWiki, you can finally annotate data in your corporate database with a wiki page, with all the power of a wiki and you can even display the data set in the wiki and edit it there. Granted, the data set won’t be versioned unless your corporate database allows that but it’s simple to do the versioning in the data access layer (for example, you can save all modifications in a log database).

Suddenly, possibilities open up.

It’s late, so only a very short summary of today.

James Gosling gave a broad overview what is currently happening at Sun. Nice video but little meat. I asked about what happened to closures but I’m not sure whether I can repeat his answer here. My feeling is that, behind the scenes, there’s a lot of emotions and that’s bad. Oh well, maybe some will simply implement something reasonable in the OpenJDK. Otherwise, Closures are probably dead in Java which is a bit of a pity.

Dirk König showed a the most common use cases for Groovy in a Java project. Nothing really new for anyone who had been in contact with Groovy for nicely packaged and showed some cool stuff you can do with this mature language.

After that, Neal Ford explained how Design Patterns started to disappear. We didn’t really notice but things like Iterators or Adapters have become features of the language itself. In Java, you still have to query a container for an iterator, in Groovy, you just container.each { … do something with each item … }. Really nice talk, as usual.

Missed most of the next talk because I talked to Dirk König but if you’re using Maven or Ant as a build system, you should have a look at Gradle. It fixes most of the issues with Ant and some of the ones with Maven. Later that day, Hans Dockter (a Gradle developer) and I tossed a couple of ideas back and forth how the build could be improved. If any of these could be implemented, we’ll see a new way to build software.

At 15:00, Jason van Zyl told us what is happening in and around Maven. His talk was so full of information, it was impossible to follow the slides and him. Maven 3.0 is due early 2010 and it will solve a lot of the issues in M2. One of the most important features: You get hooks to run stuff before and after a lifecycle phase. Ever wanted to calculate a build number? Now you can.

M3 is based on SAT4J, just like Eclipse p2. Now, if you followed my blog, you know that I hate p2. p2 is a piece of banana software, delivered green, ripes at the customer. Which is a pity. p2 solved a lot of the issues with the old installer and it could solve all the other issues but apparently, there are forced behind the scenes which make this almost impossible. So when you meet Pascal Rapicault next time, don’t blame him for all the misery he has caused you. He has to solve a mission impossible and that only works in movies.

Later that evening, Thomas Mueller talked about Testing Zen. Nothing really new but I’ll probably have a look at H2 next week or so. It could replace my favorite in-memory Java database HSQLDB.

The closing session was by Neal Ford again. I wish I could create slides that were only a fraction as great as his. *sigh* Anyway, he drew a large arc from how technologies can become obsolete within a few years (as we all know), how good intentions pave the road to hell, about our responsibilities as software developers which go beyond what’s in our contract and predicting the future. Well, Terminator is probably not a good example but everyone knows it. Still, I find it troubling that the military is deploying thousands of automated drones for surveillance. You don’t? How would you feel about a robot equiped with a working machine gun that is programmed to automatically fire on any human that isn’t wearing an RFID tag? Samsung installed a couple of them along the northern border of South Korea two years ago. Skynet, here we come!

What they don’t teach you about software at school: Be Smart!, the last talk of the day, was disappointing. I’ll give Ivar that he had to compete against Neal but … The topic was okay and what he said was correct and all but the presentation could use some improvement. ‘Nuff said.

The opening session of day 1 of this years Jazoon conference (which seems to be no.2 in size following Javapolis, now called Devoxx) was opened with a keynote by James Gosling (wiki link), the famous brain behind or father of Java. An impressive person and it is an unique experience to hear him talking live, even I am sure he is used to this publicity fuzz, treated like a rockstar (take note of the book Secrets of Rockstar Programmers by Ed Burns that also covers James Gosling).

Further tracks I attended:

• Dierk Koenig (author of Groovy in Action) on Usage Patterns for Groovy (link). Who is not looking yet at Groovy should be doing so soon.
• Design Pattern in Dynamic Languages by Neal Ford (blog).
• Hand Dockter about the build-system Gradle (link). The build system without stable release yet, tries to find its place somewhere in the ANT and MAVEN landscape offering some more dynamic features.
• Next generation Builds for Enterprise Systems with Maven, Hudson, Nexus and more by Jason van Zyl (bit too complex and too many features for me)
• Java Rule Engines. ILog versus Drools. A short overview.

Keynote by Neal Ford on how to stay up-to-date with technology and predict upcoming hits and flops. This is my third time I joins his sessions on various topics. He is definetly very experienced and entertaining presenter. Followed by Ivar Jacobson (one of the 3 amigos, link) on agile and smart methodology/strategies.

More info on Jazoon 2009 at jazoon.com.

Before the official start of the 3 day conference one could join either an OSGi conference or the Glassfish Community Day, I selected the later one and got some updates on Glassfish V3 and upcoming Java EE6. Alexis MP on Glassfish, its roadmap and features of the Enterprise Manager (you get as subscriber). Roberto Chinnici (JSR lead) on the the latest developments in EE6 due to be out in September this year. Marek Potociar on Metro, the Webservice stack in Glassfish. Jerome Doches on Glassfish V3 (now out as preview version). Ed Burns on JSF 2.0.

Definitely a day worth attending (even it was free), this year surely gonna be interesting with some new releases around the corner.

Notes:

• Polling the crowd I noticed the majority uses Eclipse, followed by Netbeans and some using IntelliJ IDEA.
• Glassfish has the steepest download rate of all application server, the competing products are even declining. (Not sure about that)
• Seems the final releas of Netbeans 6.7 will be out this week.
• There will be a Netbeans 6.8. I thought we are walking towards version 7.

James Gosling’s only 2009 European appearance

Here you are the slides from Giampiero’s presentation on the architecture and features of the latest Alfresco release.

• Slides (PDF)

The meeting also included a presentation by Christian Frei about the upcoming Jazoon 2009 conference.

Thanks to all who attended, including a few members from other JUG Milano.

• Android SDK 1.5
  The new release is on its way and a early version is available for download. Some new features (onscreen keyboard, home screen widgets) will be in the API. Have a look at the Android Blog (link).
• Jazoon 2009
  Today is the last chance to grab a seat at a reduced early bird price of 1035 Euro for the 3 day Java conference in Zurich, Switzerland. (link)
• Netbeans Collab Server
  The service at share.java.net is discontinued from April 20th 2009. You better start looking for an alternative. The only one I know is to setup your own OpenFire Server (link). More information on the topic at netbeans.org (link)

Eagerly waiting to know what’s latest in Java industry, right? You might have subscribed through email for latest feeds from many leading websites. How about attending an event and in return, getting all you want to know about the recent developments in the Java industry.

Jazoon Cutting Edge

If you are interested in the latest topics on Java don’t miss Jazoon Cutting Edge .
These 20 minutes (incl. Q&A) talks address the most recent developments in the Java industry.

Selection by program chair, mainly based on expected interest and availability of slots.

All the best, guys!

I am pretty late to announce this, however its still worth a read.. Jazoon Rookie Submissions Deadline got extended and you can now submit by 15th March, 2009 .

Hurry up, you still got more than a week to submit your proposal for Europe’s first Java Young Developer Speaker Competition . Here’s a quick review of the contest and benefits the winners will get.

Participation criteria ;

• Aged 26 or younger (on 22 June 2009)
• 20 minutes technical talk
• Submission Deadline: 15 March 2009

Companies are invited to assist their Jazoon Rookies.

Procedure ;

• Submit until 15 March 2009
• Program Committee selects the top 10 submissions
• Jazoon Rookies record a part of their talk on video and submit it
• Voting of the videos
• Top 3 Jazoon Rookies will be invited to Jazoon’09, where they present their 20 minutes talk to the audience and Jury (incl. Q&A)
• Audience and Jury evaluate the talks and select the winner

Benefits ;

• Free invitation to Jazoon’09
• Free Conference pass
• Free Travel and accommodation to attend Jazoon’09
• Jazoon Rookie Cup
• Each Jazoon Rookie participant receives a diploma

All the best, guys!

Exactly 6 months to go…

In June ‘09, Zurich will host an International Conference on Java Technology (for the 3rd consecutive year since 2007) known as Jazoon.

The first ever Jazoon in summer 2007 attracted 800 participants and speakers from 28 countries. Already the very first accomplishment of Jazoon turned Zurich for four days into the epicenter of the Java and open source community.

What’s Jazoon?

Jazoon is an international industry conference on Java technology in Zurich. It addresses software developers and architects, IT decision-makers and consultants throughout Europe and around the world. Jazoon gives Java experts a platform in the heart of Europe where they share their ideas and experiences.

Check out Christian Frei’s Blog for more details, as he’s the co-organizer of Jazoon.

Hurry, Call for Papers still open!

The international conference on Java Technology hosted in Zurich, Switzerland. It will take place from June 22-25 2009. More info at link

Jazoon was a blast! Here are some pictures:

My presentation is available for download on the Jazoon site here.

Can’t wait until next year!

At this years Jazoon I presented an introduction to JSFUnit. The presentation is now online.

• Jazoon website
• Talk 5380 JSFUnit introduction
  • Abstract
  • Presentation

Jazoon turned out to be, once more, a great conference. The presentations are held in movie-theaters with comfy seats and good acoustics. All over the place a free WLan is available. In the exhibition the speakers and other esperts from the sponsors are easily approachable. Those that were there, I think, will agree to this opinion. And those that were not there surely missed a nice conference and definitely should note the already published date of next years Jazoon.

See you next year in Zurich at Jazoon 2009

That was my talk. Attendance could have been better but I guess with Joshua Bloch presenting Java Puzzlers, Cédric Beust with “A quick guide to modern languages and interesting concepts for the busy Java programmer” and Adam Bien with Glassfish at the same time, it wasn’t so bad.

Here is the link to the presentation as OpenOffice document. Feel free to post any comments or questions below.

Time for the next big Java conference… the Jazoon 08.

I’m gonna talk about JSFUnit. It will be an introduction to this JSF testing framework (presentation info).

Hope to see you there and have a chat together… my company’s (Credit Suisse) booth seem to e close Netcetera’s, let’s hope their coffee is as great as last year (was a really good coffee, even by italian standards). From our coordinator I heard, that we will distribute our good chocolate goodies… That should make a good combo: good coffe and good chocolate.

It’s official. I’ll be giving a talk at Jazoon 2008: the European Conference on Java Technology!

My talk will be on customizing applications for a range of (MIDP) handsets. It builds on some of the ideas from the last chapter of my book, but there’ll be plenty of new stuff. (I spent the holiday weekend madly programming some demos and sample code in preparation, which I plan to post here soon.) For details on my talk, look here.

For those of you who are bored of MIDP and want to live on the not-even-released-yet bleeding edge, my colleague at Greenliff Peter Wlodarczak will be giving a talk on Android.

JUG Genova is a sponsoring JUG for the Jazoon’08 conference which will take place in Zurich, 23-26 June 2008.

Genova JUG members can receive a special 25% discount voucher for the conference by sending their name and contact details to juggenova AT gmail.com.

You can download presentations from last year’s Jazoon (including the one by JUG member Emmanuele Sordini and Fabrizio Giudici) from http://jazoon.com/jazoon07/en/conference/ts.html

If you are interested, the deadline for submitting talks for Jazoon’08 is still open:

• 2007-12-31
  Submission for Jazoon Labs
• 2007-12-31 Submission for Technical talks, both long and short talks

Since my presentation at the Jazoon is only available as a PDF (and it looks horrible, too), I’ve uploaded the source OpenOffice presentation to my own website. It includes all the additional comments which are missing in the PDF. You can find it here.

For all those who couldn’t attend my talk: This document summarizes a few weaknesses of Java which are solved in Python and Groovy and why I think that Java is now at it’s peak. From now on, it’s going down. Not overnight, of course, and there is no need to rush into any kind of action. But in ten years from now, Java will be where C is today: Something you don’t want to build your career on (that’s Java, the language, not Java, the VM).

The rating of my talk at the Jazoon just came in: 2.74 on a scale from 1 to 5. That’s even below average (3 would be average). Hm. Okay, I was sick and tried to put too much information into my 40 minutes. Anything else I can do better next time?

Breve presentazione (convertita in Flash grazie al servizio SlideShare) di Emmanuele Sordini e Fabrizio Giudici sul viaggio, sulle impressioni e i principali spunti dalla loro partecipazione alla prima edizione della conferenza Jazoon ‘07 (Zurigo, Svizzera).

Il prossimo meeting del Java User Group genovese si terrà

lunedì 23 Luglio 2007 ore 19.00

presso la NIS s.r.l. in Corso Torino 14/3 (zona Foce)

presenteranno:

* Emmanuele Sordini e Fabrizio Giudici “Update su Jazoon 2007″
* Fabio Bonfante “Aspect Oriented Programming con Spring”

I need to cover some of my “blog debts”. Just didn’t around to persist my other Jazoon notes.

On Thursday afternoon Terrence Barr one of Sun’s Java ME evangelists gave a talk on “Developing Java ME applications using Sun’s open source platforms”.
Said but true, what I mostly remember is Terrence’s rush through his slides. He mentioned in the beginning that it was gonna be tight (time-wise) as the sessions at Jazoon are 10 minutes shorter than at other conferences. Be it as it may, can’t I expect a speaker to prepare accordingly? After all he seemed to have noticed beforehand that time constraints are different. You can’t just take your standard PowerPoint slides and squeeze them into a much smaller time box. As a listener I felt being served luke-warm Java.
Hot was the topic, though. Open-source Java ME is appealing. As I’m a novice to the Java ME world I’ll have to dig deeper to see what it can do for me. http://www.mobileandembedded.org will see me soon!
As a share holder of a major provider of commercial Java implementations for mobile devices I’m also eagerly following the market share of Sun’s open-source alternative…

Later that afternoon Simon Hefti, managing director of Zurich-based Netcetera AG, gave us an insight into what he calls “artificial complexity build-up”. He started with wonderful analogy for the problem:
Assume you bring in your car for maintenance. A few days later you’ll find yourself looking at a horribly high invoice although only a minor part in the engine had to be exchanged. However, since the faulty component was buried so deep down in the engine it had to be taken apart completely.
Artificial complexity imposes extra constraints on a problem solving process as it does not allow you to proceed straight forward. The problem itself may be easy to solve, but the context in which it lives makes it difficult. One key issue here is that weakening separation of concerns increases artificial complexity. This is true not just for the software industry. Simon talked a great deal about choices we make in terms of (third-party) components we bring into a software project. One might call this artificial complexity, of course; however, one might just as well speak of dependencies that complicate matters – something every developer will agree upon.
For a given set of desired functionality component A might cover 75%, component B another 20% while overlapping with what A does in certain areas. This still leaves you with 5% missing features although you’ve already introduced two external dependencies. Nonetheless, sometimes the bad boys are inside i.e. your own code. Simon cited from a study that showed that in more than 50% of cases where developers tried to anticipate future requirements and prepared accordingly (e.g. over-engineered or overly flexible APIs and thus increasing complexity) they were wrong.
Of course, there’s no generic solution to that, but raising awareness certainly helps. KISS!