log4p

Today I visited the JSpring conference organized by the Dutch Java Usergroup (NLJUG). I met lot’s of people I hadn’t seen for a while, amongst them the lead developer of gaphor nice to meet up again after almost 3 years.

Keynote
This year over a 1000 visitors are expected to attend the JSpring 2007 conference. The usergroup is profesionalizing; a fresh new look & feel! Short presentation of the new member registration system build by students from the Avans school; not to interesting.

ATOS Origin - Olympic games
Talk on the IT side of large sports events by Willem van Breukelen. Yes it’s a huge project, yes it has to be complex. No, without technical details I can’t be bothered.

Open Terracotta: Open Source JVM-level Clustering (Jonas Bonér)
Cool session; clustering is one of the more complex area’s in my current and recent projects. Terracotta seems to be capable of solving much of my problems. Terracotta offers a JVM-level clustering sollution. The speaker used scanned pencil drawings to illustrate common problems; nice. Although it was quite difficult to understand Jonas (bad acoustics, bad accent) his demo was very convincing. Tomorrow I’ll at least try getting our EHCache setup to run on terracotta shouldn’t be to hard, and I can’t wait to see if we can get compass to run in a cluster with it. I’ll come back to it.

Domain specific languages and MDA for Mule

• Speaker presented from a laptop running ubuntu. +1
• Speaker wasn’t really capable of explaining why he did what. -1
• Resulting code could have been impressive, but due to the example was actually not to good. -1

Ow, the speaker mentioned open archictectureware… sounded interesting; it’s on my stuff-to-have-a-look-at pile.

Concurrency & Performance (Kirk Pepperdine)
Kirk talked about processors, cores, concurrency, performance. And that fact that Java manages to abstract from the low level stuff quite well. Quite a lot of technical stuff, not a lot of code.

Java Concurrency API (Paul Kramer)
Not much news here, nice to see latches and semaphores explained again and talk about ReentrantReadWriteLock a bit.

The state and future of Enterprise Java
Alef Arendsen and Joris Kuipers talked about the evolution of JEE and it’s future. They stressed the fact that the talk would not be about spring. Surely the talk was about spring, but it was actually quite nice. They demonstrated the new annotations stuff for spring, and the java config module. They also did a little demo on AOP. And the ended with a nice demo of Spring/OSGi. I’ll certainly start using the more compact and powerful ways for configuring Spring applications and watch out for updates on OSGi.

Conclusion
So, overall it was a nice conference. Nice but not great. I really missed the ‘fun’ in all the presentations. People aren’t innovating; most of them are struggling to keep up. The fun and friendliness I noticed on the rubyenrails conference last week where hard to find amongst the Java people I met. Could it be the conference program (no ‘new’ frameworks???), or the fact that Java is professionalizing more and more? I couldn’t really put my finger on it… Javapolis didn’t really suffer from this problem; but they had JRuby, Grails, Rife, DWR, Phobos and many other interesting topics. Might be the program then. I’ll try and see if I can make it to JFall as well.

–update–
The Finalist website has a post about JSpring in Dutch