log4p

Keynote

The opening keynotes seem to involve quite a bit of Adobes’ Flex this year. I must say I’m getting less skeptical, the upcoming version of parleys.com (presented by Stephan Janssen) which is build in Flex and Air (for being able to look at presentations offline) looks extremely cool. Some screenshots of Parleys V2 can be seen here.

After the bombardment of nifty Flex stuff Sun did a presentation on JavaFX. Even-though it is getting better and better, it’s not there yet. I went out of the room when they started talking about mobile again; I’ll read up when I actually get to develop something for a mobile device.

Scala (Martin Odersky)

I had a couple of short looks at Scala during the last months, but never had enough time to have a good look at it. Martin managed to tick all the boxes: Scala rocks! It’s like a more Scientific version of Groovy; which seems to result in clearer synthax. Like Groovy Scala is full interoperable with Java.

The key features are:

• Uniform object model
• Pattern matching and higher-order functions
• Novel ways to abstract and compose programs
• Scala programs compile to JVM bytecode

The code examples looked really nice. Scala currently sits waiting in my download folder… I’ll let you know!

The closure controversy (Joshua Bloch)

Joshua Bloch presented his ideas about adding closures to Java. Joshua more or less prefers the CICE/ARM point of view over the BGGA one. Although I thought I wanted to have closures in Java I must say I’ve changed my mind. I do still like the ARM (Automatic Resource Management) solution though, which would result in something like this:

try(BufferedReader r = new BufferedReader(new FileReader(path)){
    String s = r.readLine();
}

And if you want to have closures just use a language like Scala, Groovy or JRuby… which are all fully supported on the JVM.

Apache ServiceMix

From cool languages and language related stuff to Enterprise dullness. I almost fell asleep during the 50th or so introduction to SOA… But after the introduction I got interested more and more. ServiceMix looks really great! The configuration of the bus is done using plain old Spring files; ServiceMix comes with it’s own namespace containing components for most of the integration patterns from the EIP book. New elements are added to the bus using Maven Archetypes. The upcoming graphical route builder looked great as wel. I’ll probably have a look at it quite soon.

Webbeans

The Webbeans JSR (299) was presented by Bob Lee (Author of Guice), he is the expert groud lead. If you know Seam lot’s of it might feel remarkably familiar. I do however get the feeling that people are really going to fare with annotations. Bob showed example classes with about 8 annotations on them; in real life one will probably need twice as much. And yes, I did get the part about how one can put annotations on annotations to have some sort of grouping; but I think this doesn’t make it look any better; especially since a annotations can be overridden.

Java puzzlers (Bloch & Gafter)

A really nice interactive presentation containing code, humor and educational value! Amongst many obscure ‘bugs’ in the language I learned not the use java.lang.URL, and staying with primitives as much as possible. I tried to buy the Java Puzzlers book afterwards… but they where all sold out.

Evening

During the evening we had a nice meal and visited the christmas market (turns out hot Apple Jenever is far stickier then expected).