log4p

This year I visited Javapolis for the second time. I won’t even try to write an accurate journal of everything I’ve seen/heard; it’s just to much. I did however make some notes and pictures to give you an impression of the conference.

Opening Keynotes

Javapolis 2007 is sold out with over 3200 visitors from around the globe and over 100 speakers.

Bruce Eckel

Introduction to Open Spaces. Why travel if you can watch from home? Hallway conversations. Conferences with only hallway conversations are called unconferences. The law of two feet => just leave if you’re not really interested! I’ll certainly be trying to have as much hallway conversations as possible.

Gossling

Gossling, the father of Java. With a kind of boring (netbeans!! netbeans!! netbeans!!) presentation. Some of the highlights where:

• Ruby is present on two of Gosslings’ slide!
• realtime stuff…
• Java wordt steeds sneller, nu sneller dan c/c++
  * Java is getting faster and faster, many benchmarks show it’s faster thenk C/C++ now
• Gossling wants closures!!

The rest of the presentation was actually quite horrible:

• JavaFX => Technologies and tools, forthcoming open source programs, consumer facing… but not there yet
  * Jaspersoft presentation: genererate a report from netbeans… snore
  * JavaFX demo door het Sun evangelism Team… the interface is just ugly bad antialiasing etc.

Talks

Groovy by: Guillaume Laforge and Dierk König

A resenable presentation of groovy. Nothing to execiting. Some highlights of the recent 1.5 release. Most of the changes are related to adding Java5 features (Generics, Annotations, Static import) to Groovy. Mostly to allow hooking groovy code into frameworks. Guillaume also noted the recent enhancements to the Expando metaclass.

GWT

Dick Wall and Didier Girard managed to give a horrible presentation about a great product: GWT. I’m not to sure if Dick Wall had actually seen the presentation before presenting it. Didier clicked through a couple of GWT examples and started creating a simple open social application.
Everybody (well, at least I was) was waiting to see some GWT code, but Didiers’ presentation lacked a bit op depth.

That said, I saw some really interesting features of GWT and will certainly be giving it a go when I have some spare time.

JBoss ESB (Mark Little)

Next to Mule and ServiceMix (more on ServiceMix in one of the followup posts) JBoss ESB still doesn’t seem to be there yet. I really hoped this presentation would change this view; but the presentation was far to superficial and was mainly focussed on high level ESB/SOA concepts.

EJB 3.1 (Kenneth Saks)

Kenneth talked about making EJB development simpler. Important changes include:

• Removal of the requirement for a separate local business interface.
• Support for direct use of EJBs in the servlet container, including simplified packaging options.
• Singleton beans.
• Support for asynchronous session bean invocation.
• Support for stateful web services via stateful session bean web service endpoints.
• Specification of concurrency options for stateful session beans.
• Application-level callback notifications, including for container initialization and shutdown.
• EJB Timer Service enhancements to support cron-like scheduling, deployment-time timer creation, and stateful session bean timed objects.
• An ejb-jar level component environment to simplify the specification of shared dependencies among components.

No real surprises here, all proposed changes sound great to me: remove the clutter!

The Future of Computing (Gossling, Gafter, Bloch, Odersky)

I think I expected far to much from this talk. I know this wasn’t supposed to be about Java;

Unconferencing

Through the day

I talked to some interesting people in the hallways; The whiteboards containing statements and polls attracted people with various opinions and I had some nice discussions about new language features.

Through the evening

We went back to the great place where we had some beers last year called “het 11de gebod” (the eleventh commandment). JTeam, VX Company, Profict, VPRO and of course Finalist where presented. Nice!