So, the Thursday got a late start. For some strange reason I didn't feel motivated to go see the Intel General Session, so I showed up for Nick's session about JRuby on Rails deployment instead. Nick did a good job of outlining both the problem and the solution, and I have to say that this presentation was a good end cap for the JRuby week at JavaOne.
I had planned to go to some sessions after that, but I ended up hacking on JRuby instead. An interesting parser bug reared its head.
So the next session I went to was the Filthy Rich Clients one. Quite entertaining, although my interest in Swing is not what it used to be.
The final session of the day was the BOF about writing great technology books. This proved highly enjoyable since joining Josh Bloch and Brian Goetz as panelists were Burt Bates and Kathy Sierra. They did a wonderful job talking about how to write books that captures the readers attention and how to correctly use the brains weaknesses against it. I am tempted to say that this was the best session of the whole JavaOne. Brilliant.
On the Friday I was up early and sat in on Goslings Toy Story. Always funny, and some cool things there. For a geek like me, the CERN stuff and jMars was especially cool.
I managed to see quite a lot of sessions during the rest of the day. More Effective Java was useful as always, the Maxine Virtual Machine looks really cool, Neal Ford did an excellent job of comparing JRuby and Groovy, highlighting both the differences and similarities between the two. Finally the Jython session talked about some of the implementation challenges we in the JRuby team have wrestled with too, implementing a highly dynamic language on top of the JVM.
All in all, this JavaOne definitely stood out as the first non-Java-language JavaOne for me. And I didn't even attend a single one of the gazillions of JavaFX presentations. It was a good year in general, and specifically for dynamic languages.
Oh, and my book is the 5th bestseller in the conference bookstore. Yay!
Visar inlägg med etikett javaone. Visa alla inlägg
Visar inlägg med etikett javaone. Visa alla inlägg
måndag, maj 12, 2008
torsdag, maj 08, 2008
JavaOne halfway point
To say that I am seriously tired of JavaFX at this point, would be a gross understatement. So let's not even go there.
CommunityOne was a nice event. I like the feeling of it more and more, and the new open spaces approach seemed to be really successful. The alternative languages presentations were well attended and good. I recommend anyone in the Bay Area, or anyone attending JavaOne, to make the effort to go to CommunityOne next year. It's definitely worth it.
Tuesday was, for undisclosed reasons, a day where I didn't attend so many presentations. In fact, I missed both the keynote and Tom&Charlies JRuby talk. Bad on me. I did manage to go to both the technical session and the BOF about upcoming language features in Java 7. Let me say immediately that I don't want pluggable type systems as a part of Java. Yes, they are useful in certain settings, but they don't fit Java. Not at all. I'm all for having it possible to have annotations in more places, but not for type systems.
Wednesday was "my" day of the conference. Started out early with the Script Bowl, where Groovy, JRuby, Jython and Scala faced off in three different challenges. I was one of the three judges. It was a actually a great fun. Some people have gotten annoyed at it, but I feel that they are taking it too seriously. This format was a good way of introducing the audience to the capabilities of four languages that are sometimes very much alike and sometimes very different.
It's also interesting to note that Charles was the only one of the panel who solved his challenges by asking the community for help with it. In fact, Charles didn't do any of them himself, while the other three did their code in isolation. My opinion is that this shows a difference in attitude between the communities, and it's very interesting.
After that I took it easy for some time, and then it was time for my JRuby on Rails presentation. It went fairly well and was also well attended. I did a serious mistake in my database configuration, but Tom helped me out and the rest of the demonstrations was good.
I did a book signing session after that and then headed back to the office for a while before coming back and holding my JRuby at ThoughtWorks BOF which was also nice.
Today I'm going to take it easy and relax. I'll go to Nick's session in an hour and then I'll go to Josh and Brian's BOF tonight. After that we host a party which I'm going to attend for a while. It's going to be a nice day.
CommunityOne was a nice event. I like the feeling of it more and more, and the new open spaces approach seemed to be really successful. The alternative languages presentations were well attended and good. I recommend anyone in the Bay Area, or anyone attending JavaOne, to make the effort to go to CommunityOne next year. It's definitely worth it.
Tuesday was, for undisclosed reasons, a day where I didn't attend so many presentations. In fact, I missed both the keynote and Tom&Charlies JRuby talk. Bad on me. I did manage to go to both the technical session and the BOF about upcoming language features in Java 7. Let me say immediately that I don't want pluggable type systems as a part of Java. Yes, they are useful in certain settings, but they don't fit Java. Not at all. I'm all for having it possible to have annotations in more places, but not for type systems.
Wednesday was "my" day of the conference. Started out early with the Script Bowl, where Groovy, JRuby, Jython and Scala faced off in three different challenges. I was one of the three judges. It was a actually a great fun. Some people have gotten annoyed at it, but I feel that they are taking it too seriously. This format was a good way of introducing the audience to the capabilities of four languages that are sometimes very much alike and sometimes very different.
It's also interesting to note that Charles was the only one of the panel who solved his challenges by asking the community for help with it. In fact, Charles didn't do any of them himself, while the other three did their code in isolation. My opinion is that this shows a difference in attitude between the communities, and it's very interesting.
After that I took it easy for some time, and then it was time for my JRuby on Rails presentation. It went fairly well and was also well attended. I did a serious mistake in my database configuration, but Tom helped me out and the rest of the demonstrations was good.
I did a book signing session after that and then headed back to the office for a while before coming back and holding my JRuby at ThoughtWorks BOF which was also nice.
Today I'm going to take it easy and relax. I'll go to Nick's session in an hour and then I'll go to Josh and Brian's BOF tonight. After that we host a party which I'm going to attend for a while. It's going to be a nice day.
fredag, februari 01, 2008
Denmark, QCon and JavaOne
Today is my last day in Sweden for a while. It's been an incredible time, and I think that my coworkers from ThoughtWorks have had a wonderful experience in Sweden. What will happen regarding a Swedish office is still up in the air, but I'm cautiously optimistic about it all. In fact, if someone knows a possible client please get in touch. =)
Next week I'm going to Denmark, visiting the castle Hindsgavl where the Danish Java User Group (JavaGruppen) is holding a conference. I will do one presentation on JRuby and one tutorial on JRuby on Rails.
The next planned event will be QCon in London where I will present about some of the more exciting upcoming features in the JVM. That's going to be great fun.
The last week in February I'll be in San Francisco, possibly helping out with some really cool ThoughtWorks events. I'll post more about that when I have the information.
I will also present at Developer Summit in April, in Stockholm.
Finally, expect me to do one presentation and one BoF at JavaOne. I might also do a talk at CommunityOne.
It's going to be a busy spring time.
Next week I'm going to Denmark, visiting the castle Hindsgavl where the Danish Java User Group (JavaGruppen) is holding a conference. I will do one presentation on JRuby and one tutorial on JRuby on Rails.
The next planned event will be QCon in London where I will present about some of the more exciting upcoming features in the JVM. That's going to be great fun.
The last week in February I'll be in San Francisco, possibly helping out with some really cool ThoughtWorks events. I'll post more about that when I have the information.
I will also present at Developer Summit in April, in Stockholm.
Finally, expect me to do one presentation and one BoF at JavaOne. I might also do a talk at CommunityOne.
It's going to be a busy spring time.
onsdag, maj 23, 2007
That gender thing
One of the foci on both JavaOne and RailsConf was the so called "gender problem"; that the current balance between men and women in the technological field is bad and that something needs to be done about it. I'm very happy about this getting awareness, but as my colleague Lars Westergren writes here (http://slashdot.org/~LarsWestergren/journal/172323) it seems like total hypocrisy when looking at the so called entertainment provided at these two events. We need to do better than this.
lördag, maj 12, 2007
JavaOne day 4: the final friday
So, the day started out quite late (since I was way tired after last night...). First session was a very accomplished, though slightly shallow, comparison between doing an application with Java EE 5, Ruby on Rails and Grails. I didn't really learn anything new in this presentation except that Java EE 5 is even slicker with NetBeans, and that Grails is maddeningly, sickeningly, seriously slow when doing simple stuff like creating scaffolds. I can't understand why this is so, since it isn't much do it. Basically just create a file with a few rows of customization.
After that I paired up with Jon to look at Mingle again. Oh boy, the ones who is coming to RailsConf will get a treat, that's for sure.
The Jython session by Otmar Humbel was really good, and had a great example. Basically the whole demo sessions were done in one single application which he started at the beginning and never stopped. He just hotswapped the Jython code dynamically. Very nice. I think the most interesting part of that talk was in the Q&A when someone asked why you should use Jython instead of Groovy or JRuby. I'm sad to say that I had to literally run at that point, so I didn't hear the answer... But still, if someone was there and heard, please tell me. For me personally, it's very impressive that Jython got started in 97, and actually is still alive (due to a recent revival of course, but even so. I'm glad Charles gave up one of his talks to let the Jython guys in). It was also interesting to see the differences in philosophy between JRuby and Jython in terms of Java integration and things like that. Very good stuff.
'
The bytecode manipulation talk was interesting; it was nice to see what (and how) Terracotta does with ASM. The TopLink parts were nice, but really way to basic to be interesting. Charles stuff was good, of course. We know Charlie always does good things, don't we? =)
I had great fun at the Java Puzzlers this year. I'm happy about there not being many puzzles incorporating generics, because those are usually boring. The main problem that these guys always exploits, seems to be mostly in the boundary between Java Objects and primitives, and interactions between primitives. That's what you get when you try to create a language meant for both system development and application development. It just shows in all the seams. A good language should not have seams, unless they're necessary for the specific domain of that language.
Finally, Rob Harrops talk about exploiting JRuby to create DSL's was really good. It was great, and Rob is a very accomplished presenter. I had great fun. That said, I think that some of the stuff still went over the head of most Java developers in the audience.
And that seems to be the theme. Most things I enjoy, I think most other people didn't enjoy. Interesting, that.
So, now it's off for dinner at the Stinking Rose with the JRuby guys, Dion, Barry Burd and Jon.
After that I paired up with Jon to look at Mingle again. Oh boy, the ones who is coming to RailsConf will get a treat, that's for sure.
The Jython session by Otmar Humbel was really good, and had a great example. Basically the whole demo sessions were done in one single application which he started at the beginning and never stopped. He just hotswapped the Jython code dynamically. Very nice. I think the most interesting part of that talk was in the Q&A when someone asked why you should use Jython instead of Groovy or JRuby. I'm sad to say that I had to literally run at that point, so I didn't hear the answer... But still, if someone was there and heard, please tell me. For me personally, it's very impressive that Jython got started in 97, and actually is still alive (due to a recent revival of course, but even so. I'm glad Charles gave up one of his talks to let the Jython guys in). It was also interesting to see the differences in philosophy between JRuby and Jython in terms of Java integration and things like that. Very good stuff.
'
The bytecode manipulation talk was interesting; it was nice to see what (and how) Terracotta does with ASM. The TopLink parts were nice, but really way to basic to be interesting. Charles stuff was good, of course. We know Charlie always does good things, don't we? =)
I had great fun at the Java Puzzlers this year. I'm happy about there not being many puzzles incorporating generics, because those are usually boring. The main problem that these guys always exploits, seems to be mostly in the boundary between Java Objects and primitives, and interactions between primitives. That's what you get when you try to create a language meant for both system development and application development. It just shows in all the seams. A good language should not have seams, unless they're necessary for the specific domain of that language.
Finally, Rob Harrops talk about exploiting JRuby to create DSL's was really good. It was great, and Rob is a very accomplished presenter. I had great fun. That said, I think that some of the stuff still went over the head of most Java developers in the audience.
And that seems to be the theme. Most things I enjoy, I think most other people didn't enjoy. Interesting, that.
So, now it's off for dinner at the Stinking Rose with the JRuby guys, Dion, Barry Burd and Jon.
fredag, maj 11, 2007
JavaOne day 3
The third day of the conference started slow, due to my being dead tired from the day before. But I still managed to get to Charles and Tom's JRuby on Rails presentation. Obviously, this was a very good presentation and JRuby is very important. But you know all that, already, don't you?
I then went on to a session giving a technical overview over GlassFish v2. Now, this seemed interesting, but wasn't really so. There was some nice information about how clustering should be setup so you don't lose to much data if you have more than one instance on the same machine, but other than that... Nah.
After lunch, I went to the Advanced Groovy talk, expecting to see cool overridings of the MetaObjectProtocol, or how to implement your own AST shufflers. But no. What we instead got was some tidbits here and there, and explanation of how to add new methods to existing Java objects (and this is really gross, you have to wrap the usage of these methods in a block, and the methods are defined on a new class as static methods...) Anyway, on to the demos. I got a real feeling of Deja Vu, since I had seen this exact same demo last year... XMLRPC communication between two Groovy instances, then ActiveX usage of Excel, combining it with Swing. So, yeah. As someone else said "It's a really great Excel demo, but what has that got to do with Groovy?".
Next, I took it easy for a while, walked around and did some programming. Finally, it was time for Tor's and Martin's talk about Ruby Tooling in NetBeans. And boy, it was an outstanding talk if you're interested in compilers, type inference, the challenges of dynamic languages and other stuff like that. I loved it, but I think most of it went over the head of most people in the audience.
Then I was of to the Sun Certified Professionals party which is always nice. I met some cool people and Lars won good swag by being smart really fast. Good for him!
The After Dark bash was quite allright, but nothing extraordinary. And it got really tasteless when the showgirl in metal corselet came onto stage with a grinder, which she turned on herself, making sparks fly all over the place.
After that, we went to the JRubME talk, about JRuby on Symbian and Java ME. A great talk and a great project. In fact, it's really really cool, and if you're interested in ME, you should download the source and start hacking a way on it! The project needs contributors.
We went back to the After Dark bash finally, took some more beer, and then decided to move on. The quest was for Aquavit, and someone thought that the Starlight Room would be a good place for this, so we headed there just to find out they didn't have either Aquavit nor any good scotch. Oh well, it was fun anyway, and the view was fantastic. Characteristically, me, Tom and Charles got into a real interesting discussion about the subjectivity of self presentation, and representation of knowledge in terms of probabilities and deltas from ideal knowledge, and how this applies to onthologies. Neat stuff. But maybe the dance floor wasn't the best place to have this loud discussion...
After that we settled down and decided it would be fun to have a JRuby summit in Minnesota! So, we'll see if that is possible... Then I crawled home to my hotel. My feet are killing me today, but there are some really interesting presentations, so I've gotta go.
I then went on to a session giving a technical overview over GlassFish v2. Now, this seemed interesting, but wasn't really so. There was some nice information about how clustering should be setup so you don't lose to much data if you have more than one instance on the same machine, but other than that... Nah.
After lunch, I went to the Advanced Groovy talk, expecting to see cool overridings of the MetaObjectProtocol, or how to implement your own AST shufflers. But no. What we instead got was some tidbits here and there, and explanation of how to add new methods to existing Java objects (and this is really gross, you have to wrap the usage of these methods in a block, and the methods are defined on a new class as static methods...) Anyway, on to the demos. I got a real feeling of Deja Vu, since I had seen this exact same demo last year... XMLRPC communication between two Groovy instances, then ActiveX usage of Excel, combining it with Swing. So, yeah. As someone else said "It's a really great Excel demo, but what has that got to do with Groovy?".
Next, I took it easy for a while, walked around and did some programming. Finally, it was time for Tor's and Martin's talk about Ruby Tooling in NetBeans. And boy, it was an outstanding talk if you're interested in compilers, type inference, the challenges of dynamic languages and other stuff like that. I loved it, but I think most of it went over the head of most people in the audience.
Then I was of to the Sun Certified Professionals party which is always nice. I met some cool people and Lars won good swag by being smart really fast. Good for him!
The After Dark bash was quite allright, but nothing extraordinary. And it got really tasteless when the showgirl in metal corselet came onto stage with a grinder, which she turned on herself, making sparks fly all over the place.
After that, we went to the JRubME talk, about JRuby on Symbian and Java ME. A great talk and a great project. In fact, it's really really cool, and if you're interested in ME, you should download the source and start hacking a way on it! The project needs contributors.
We went back to the After Dark bash finally, took some more beer, and then decided to move on. The quest was for Aquavit, and someone thought that the Starlight Room would be a good place for this, so we headed there just to find out they didn't have either Aquavit nor any good scotch. Oh well, it was fun anyway, and the view was fantastic. Characteristically, me, Tom and Charles got into a real interesting discussion about the subjectivity of self presentation, and representation of knowledge in terms of probabilities and deltas from ideal knowledge, and how this applies to onthologies. Neat stuff. But maybe the dance floor wasn't the best place to have this loud discussion...
After that we settled down and decided it would be fun to have a JRuby summit in Minnesota! So, we'll see if that is possible... Then I crawled home to my hotel. My feet are killing me today, but there are some really interesting presentations, so I've gotta go.
torsdag, maj 10, 2007
JavaOne day 2
So, my day didn't start out with the Oracle general session, which I'm quite happy with in retrospect. Instead the first talk I saw was "Quick and Easy Profiling with Integrated Tools", about NetBeans profiling support. Very useful stuff, actually, and 6.0 can do some amazing things.
After that, it was time for a packed Josh Bloch's Effect Java Reloaded, except it wasn't really reloaded that much yet. I was a little bit disappointed, since most of the stuff was the same as last year. Some parts about the Builder pattern, much info about do's and don'ts with generics (much of it having to do with type parameters and wildcards). The TypeRef pattern was interesting, but not something I will find very much use of, I think.
After lunch a went to a presentation which I really thought would give me something. "Ruby on Rails Meets the World of Enterprise Applications". Now, I really hoped this would include some information on the Enterprise problem with regard to Rails. I was very disappointed. The talk was basically about a 3-week application written in Rails that connected to SAP. So the enterprise in question was there because of SAP. That said, the presenter was good, it was just not the subject I had wished for. And by the way, what does this presentation do on JavaOne?
After that, I spent some time looking at Mingle issues with Jon. I decided to go to the upper Haights' area to shop, and then get back to my hotel room for some programming. As it turned out, I really didn't go to any more sessions yesterday. After programming, I went to a Swedish Java User Group meeting here (and what a turnout! it seems like there's over 200 Swedes at JavaOne this year.)
The plan was to get back to the BOF's after that point; there was especially one I really didn't want to miss (the Dynamic Languages BOF with Frank Cohen). But, I happened to get invited to the Google party, so I spent the rest of the evening there, meeting lots of interesting people. It was great fun.
And now I'm about to go in and see Charles and Tom do the JRuby on Rails presentation. More information later.
After that, it was time for a packed Josh Bloch's Effect Java Reloaded, except it wasn't really reloaded that much yet. I was a little bit disappointed, since most of the stuff was the same as last year. Some parts about the Builder pattern, much info about do's and don'ts with generics (much of it having to do with type parameters and wildcards). The TypeRef pattern was interesting, but not something I will find very much use of, I think.
After lunch a went to a presentation which I really thought would give me something. "Ruby on Rails Meets the World of Enterprise Applications". Now, I really hoped this would include some information on the Enterprise problem with regard to Rails. I was very disappointed. The talk was basically about a 3-week application written in Rails that connected to SAP. So the enterprise in question was there because of SAP. That said, the presenter was good, it was just not the subject I had wished for. And by the way, what does this presentation do on JavaOne?
After that, I spent some time looking at Mingle issues with Jon. I decided to go to the upper Haights' area to shop, and then get back to my hotel room for some programming. As it turned out, I really didn't go to any more sessions yesterday. After programming, I went to a Swedish Java User Group meeting here (and what a turnout! it seems like there's over 200 Swedes at JavaOne this year.)
The plan was to get back to the BOF's after that point; there was especially one I really didn't want to miss (the Dynamic Languages BOF with Frank Cohen). But, I happened to get invited to the Google party, so I spent the rest of the evening there, meeting lots of interesting people. It was great fun.
And now I'm about to go in and see Charles and Tom do the JRuby on Rails presentation. More information later.
The RedMonk unconference at CommunityOne
So, as you know, RedMonk arranged an unconference at JavaOne/CommunityOne this year. I couldn't attend all sessions, but among the ones done were one about dynamic languages, and we got some really good discussions going. We haven't really finished those discussions yet, though, and it seems we will take it onto a mailing list, but it was a very good environment to start out.
I really hope RedMonk will be able to do this next year too. More info about it can be found here: http://redmonk.com/wiki/index.php/RedMonkUnconference.
I really hope RedMonk will be able to do this next year too. More info about it can be found here: http://redmonk.com/wiki/index.php/RedMonkUnconference.
onsdag, maj 09, 2007
JavaOne: The rest of day 1
I am sitting in the alumni lounge, waiting for the sessions of day 2 to begin. I was thinking about attending the Oracle General Session, but decided to take it easy for a while instead.
So, where were I yesterday? Well, the Technical General Session was really interesting. As I mentioned yesterday, Charles and Tor did a great demonstration that was very well received. We also got some more on the technical side of JavaFX. Very nice.
After that, I attended Web Algorithms. It was a very accomplished presentation, detailing a few important things you can use to make life in computing easier, beginning with swap-XOR and credit card validation, going through public key cryptography and looking at Google MapReduce. It was a good presentation, but nothing new in it for me though, which was sort of sad.
The next presentation I went to was about the next generation of Web support in Java. The Servlet 3.0 specification and so on. The presentation was quite vague and didn't say much new things, really. Ok, so next generation servlets will use annotations, and there will be support for Rest style things and better security and more non-idiotic defaults? Not surprising.
After that presentation I was feeling really tired, so I went back to my hotel and tried to rest some. That didn't go so well so I finished writing chapter 11 instead. Then it was back to Moscone center to see a BOF on web development in Java EE compared to Ruby on Rails, with tool support. This talk was quite disappointing; it wasn't that well executed, and it was very un-nuanced in detailing the good and bad parts of Ruby on Rails. It seems that when people do these comparisons they just talk about how easy it is to do CRUD-style applications, but seems to forget that Ruby on Rails can do harder things (http://studios.thoughtworks.com/) and that the benefits from the Ruby language in development productivity scales. If you compare doing a small-sized web app in Java and Rails to each other, you will get some kind of percentage. But if you do a comparison between a medium-sized app in Java and Rails, that percentage will be greater, since the Ruby languages scales development time in a totally different way from Java. Not to mention maintainability after the fact.
Last I went to Neal Gafters BOF on Closures in Java. I really like the way Neal does presentations, but we couldn't really get into the meat of stuff, since half the people on the BOF didn't know closures from their elbows. So most of the presentation was spent rehashing what they are and why they're needed in Java.
After that, I was beat. And now it's a new day, started with breakfast meeting with Roy Singham. Very interesting and entertaining. I'm more and more convinced that I'm going to love working for ThoughtWorks.
So, where were I yesterday? Well, the Technical General Session was really interesting. As I mentioned yesterday, Charles and Tor did a great demonstration that was very well received. We also got some more on the technical side of JavaFX. Very nice.
After that, I attended Web Algorithms. It was a very accomplished presentation, detailing a few important things you can use to make life in computing easier, beginning with swap-XOR and credit card validation, going through public key cryptography and looking at Google MapReduce. It was a good presentation, but nothing new in it for me though, which was sort of sad.
The next presentation I went to was about the next generation of Web support in Java. The Servlet 3.0 specification and so on. The presentation was quite vague and didn't say much new things, really. Ok, so next generation servlets will use annotations, and there will be support for Rest style things and better security and more non-idiotic defaults? Not surprising.
After that presentation I was feeling really tired, so I went back to my hotel and tried to rest some. That didn't go so well so I finished writing chapter 11 instead. Then it was back to Moscone center to see a BOF on web development in Java EE compared to Ruby on Rails, with tool support. This talk was quite disappointing; it wasn't that well executed, and it was very un-nuanced in detailing the good and bad parts of Ruby on Rails. It seems that when people do these comparisons they just talk about how easy it is to do CRUD-style applications, but seems to forget that Ruby on Rails can do harder things (http://studios.thoughtworks.com/) and that the benefits from the Ruby language in development productivity scales. If you compare doing a small-sized web app in Java and Rails to each other, you will get some kind of percentage. But if you do a comparison between a medium-sized app in Java and Rails, that percentage will be greater, since the Ruby languages scales development time in a totally different way from Java. Not to mention maintainability after the fact.
Last I went to Neal Gafters BOF on Closures in Java. I really like the way Neal does presentations, but we couldn't really get into the meat of stuff, since half the people on the BOF didn't know closures from their elbows. So most of the presentation was spent rehashing what they are and why they're needed in Java.
After that, I was beat. And now it's a new day, started with breakfast meeting with Roy Singham. Very interesting and entertaining. I'm more and more convinced that I'm going to love working for ThoughtWorks.
tisdag, maj 08, 2007
JRuby on the technical general session
Charles O Nutter and Tor Norbye just got on stage here, and showed of deploying Mephisto as a WAR-file, and then changing it to add text-to-speech functionality, with a Java library that generates an audio file. The total code they wrote on stage was about 10 lines of Ruby... The power of Java and Ruby together: it's beautiful.
I already knew what they would do, having helped fix many of the issues getting in the way for Mephisto, but it's still incredibly cool. Charles and Tor got several impromptu applauds from the audience too, so I'm pretty sure people think it's neat.
Right now, I'm starting to get curious why people continue to use the term "scripting language". It doesn't seem to fit either Ruby nor Groovy anymore. Oh well. Nitpicking.
Next up is Arun Gupta. He's talking about jMaki and Phobos, both very nice usages of JavaScript and other languages.
I already knew what they would do, having helped fix many of the issues getting in the way for Mephisto, but it's still incredibly cool. Charles and Tor got several impromptu applauds from the audience too, so I'm pretty sure people think it's neat.
Right now, I'm starting to get curious why people continue to use the term "scripting language". It doesn't seem to fit either Ruby nor Groovy anymore. Oh well. Nitpicking.
Next up is Arun Gupta. He's talking about jMaki and Phobos, both very nice usages of JavaScript and other languages.
JavaOne: Keynote and Groovy session
I'm sitting in the general session hall, waiting for the first technical general session to begin. Yesterday was CommunityOne, where we had some interesting discussion about dynamic languages within the context of the RedMonk Unconference. Aside from that, the best parts of the day way announcing that Mingle runs on JRuby, and meeting up with all my soon-to-be fellow ThoughtWorkers. They're a great bunch of people, and we had good fun.
Today was the opening general session, where Rich Green announced some very interesting developments. Among these are the fact that the open sourcing of Java is now complete, that Sun is coopering quite heavily with UN to provide resources for education to areas of the world where this have long been a huge problem. But the most important announcements were about something called JavaFX. I can't really say I understand it completely yet, but it seems to be an effort to tackle Microsoft Silverlight, and also fix several deficiencies in Swing by providing JavaFX Script (which looks very much like F3. I'm not sure if it actually is F3 or something else.). This obviously begs the question why Sun finds it prudent to invent a new language, instead of using one of the many great efforts existing in the dynamic language communities for this problem. For example, both Groovy, Jython and JRuby have different versions of SwingBuilders, which allow you to rapidly create Swing interfaces with a specialized DSL for this.
Except for that, the general session and keynote was more or less like usual. Very flash, very markety, but still more technical than I imagine other conferences are. And it was fun to see Rich Green being compared to Steve Jobs...
The first technical session I went to was called "Cool Things You Can Do with the Groovy Dynamic Language", and was presented by Guillaume Laforge and Dierk König. It was a quite good session, but I can't get away from my general opinions about the Groovy language. So, before I say something about the presentation, I need to describe my feelings for Groovy. Remember, these are my personal opinions, and some are definitely based on feeling without any specific rationalization.
I would really like to like Groovy, but I can't. I've really tried, but I can't find the Groovy language to my liking. And believe me, for some circumstances, Groovy should be able to fill the gap between Ruby and Java better than JRuby, at least in some cases. The Java integration in JRuby is quite hard, dispatch and overloading makes calling Java code complicated (from an implementation point, not for the user). All of this would be much simpler with the Groovy approach. But no, I still can't get along with Groovy. The main reason, I believe, is the feeling I get from all code that the language Groovy have grown piecemal, adding stuff that's neat wherever. I'm not sure this is the actual way Groovy was designed, but it feels like a modern version of Perl. The syntax doesn't mesh, and there are numerous (small, but nonetheless there) inconsistencies in how things are handled; many of the things that the language provide for you is things that really shouldn't be part of the language, but part of a library instead.
So, from this point of view, the presentation walked through several new features of Groovy, and lots of things you can do with it. They talked a bit about the new support for annotations and the plans for generics. Some of it was quite cool; I like the builders (but I prefer Markaby to the XMLBuilder), and some of the features are quite handy. But looking back at my earlier feelings I still see a design process more focused on finding problems with Java, and duct taping them with Groovy. (Like this: in Groovy, all exceptions get handled automatically, making it look as if all exceptions are unchecked.) I have no problem with many of these features, but I don't think it's a good way to create a general purpose language.
I'll be back later with more info on the rest of the days sessions.
Today was the opening general session, where Rich Green announced some very interesting developments. Among these are the fact that the open sourcing of Java is now complete, that Sun is coopering quite heavily with UN to provide resources for education to areas of the world where this have long been a huge problem. But the most important announcements were about something called JavaFX. I can't really say I understand it completely yet, but it seems to be an effort to tackle Microsoft Silverlight, and also fix several deficiencies in Swing by providing JavaFX Script (which looks very much like F3. I'm not sure if it actually is F3 or something else.). This obviously begs the question why Sun finds it prudent to invent a new language, instead of using one of the many great efforts existing in the dynamic language communities for this problem. For example, both Groovy, Jython and JRuby have different versions of SwingBuilders, which allow you to rapidly create Swing interfaces with a specialized DSL for this.
Except for that, the general session and keynote was more or less like usual. Very flash, very markety, but still more technical than I imagine other conferences are. And it was fun to see Rich Green being compared to Steve Jobs...
The first technical session I went to was called "Cool Things You Can Do with the Groovy Dynamic Language", and was presented by Guillaume Laforge and Dierk König. It was a quite good session, but I can't get away from my general opinions about the Groovy language. So, before I say something about the presentation, I need to describe my feelings for Groovy. Remember, these are my personal opinions, and some are definitely based on feeling without any specific rationalization.
I would really like to like Groovy, but I can't. I've really tried, but I can't find the Groovy language to my liking. And believe me, for some circumstances, Groovy should be able to fill the gap between Ruby and Java better than JRuby, at least in some cases. The Java integration in JRuby is quite hard, dispatch and overloading makes calling Java code complicated (from an implementation point, not for the user). All of this would be much simpler with the Groovy approach. But no, I still can't get along with Groovy. The main reason, I believe, is the feeling I get from all code that the language Groovy have grown piecemal, adding stuff that's neat wherever. I'm not sure this is the actual way Groovy was designed, but it feels like a modern version of Perl. The syntax doesn't mesh, and there are numerous (small, but nonetheless there) inconsistencies in how things are handled; many of the things that the language provide for you is things that really shouldn't be part of the language, but part of a library instead.
So, from this point of view, the presentation walked through several new features of Groovy, and lots of things you can do with it. They talked a bit about the new support for annotations and the plans for generics. Some of it was quite cool; I like the builders (but I prefer Markaby to the XMLBuilder), and some of the features are quite handy. But looking back at my earlier feelings I still see a design process more focused on finding problems with Java, and duct taping them with Groovy. (Like this: in Groovy, all exceptions get handled automatically, making it look as if all exceptions are unchecked.) I have no problem with many of these features, but I don't think it's a good way to create a general purpose language.
I'll be back later with more info on the rest of the days sessions.
lördag, maj 05, 2007
San Francisco and Portland
Tomorrow morning I'll leave Stockholm for San Francisco. I'll be arriving 5:ish PM at SFO and will stay at the Handlery Union Square Hotel. I will not present at either JavaOne or RailsConf, though, so I will have a fair amount of time for fun stuff. I will attend the RedMonk unconference at CommunityOne, participate in the DynLang event, and then attend regular JavaOne. If you see me (I'll be wearing my black hat...), please say hi!
Next Saturday me and my coworkers will move out of SF and take a car to Portland, where we plan to arrive on the following Tuesday or Wednesday, just in time for RailsConf. We leave from Portland early Monday after the conference.
Hope to see many of you there! It will be exciting, that's for sure. I will also try to report as much as possible from all events.
Next Saturday me and my coworkers will move out of SF and take a car to Portland, where we plan to arrive on the following Tuesday or Wednesday, just in time for RailsConf. We leave from Portland early Monday after the conference.
Hope to see many of you there! It will be exciting, that's for sure. I will also try to report as much as possible from all events.
söndag, november 19, 2006
JRuby presence at JavaOne 2007
The call for papers went out two days ago, and we already have several good proposals in line that will be submitted to JavaOne. Hopefully we will get many interesting talks this year. As far as I know, there are at least 5 JRuby-specific proposals submitted, and there will hopefully be more.
I am sending in two different proposals this year, one about JRubyEE (it's called "Agile Enterprise Development with JRuby"). That will be interesting to do and I really believe there is much for Java enterprise development to use in JRuby.
The second proposal is for a BOF about several JVM languages called "Lambda on the JVM: JRuby, Jython and Lisp". I'll talk about how to utilize different JVM alternative languages to do interesting and useful things. Since this is my venue, I will specialize on languages that are derived from Lisp (implicitly or explicitly). (I include both Ruby and Python in this category).
Hopefully at least one of the proposals will get through.
I am sending in two different proposals this year, one about JRubyEE (it's called "Agile Enterprise Development with JRuby"). That will be interesting to do and I really believe there is much for Java enterprise development to use in JRuby.
The second proposal is for a BOF about several JVM languages called "Lambda on the JVM: JRuby, Jython and Lisp". I'll talk about how to utilize different JVM alternative languages to do interesting and useful things. Since this is my venue, I will specialize on languages that are derived from Lisp (implicitly or explicitly). (I include both Ruby and Python in this category).
Hopefully at least one of the proposals will get through.
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