Stéphane Nicoll’s Thoughts » 2006

December 2006

Monthly Archive

I have a new laptop!

Yes, it’s finally there. I was so impatient and now so confused

I must admit it’s a bit different from Windows or Linux, especially regarding keyboard shortcuts: too many combination, it’s confusing at the beginning.

So far I’ve found very nice tools that I’d like to share with you:

growl: a powerful notification system
adium: nice chat client based on Gaim (too bad it does not handle the embedded cam and the IRC protocol)
colloquy: nice IRC client
virtuedesktops: allows to create virtual desktops (workspaces) with very nice transition effects
menumeters: allows to display nice info regarding your system status

I’ll probably add more later.

3 comments Saturday 30 Dec 2006 | Stéphane | General

Javapolis 2006: wrapping up

Javapolis 2006 is now over and it was really a great event. The organization was an example, honestly. All the things I found a bit short last year were addressed in a good way. Congrats guys.

As always, I have dozens of stuff in mind following the sessions. I’ll try to wrap up these now so that I can look at it again in a few months to see how it is going:

ehcache and in particular its ability to handle distributed/clustered cache
Java Server Faces and the stuff which are coming in to integrate it with Ajax (DynaFaces namely)
lucene and how we can integrate it with web search engines
Spring (all right, I know I already said this last year …)
Apache Geronimo

Thanks to my company for allowing me to attend this great event, I’ll try to make it as valuable as possible. And I am definitely willing to buy a MacBookPro now; those beasts are everywhere and it’s been months now that I am thinking about buying one.

0 comments Sunday 17 Dec 2006 | Stéphane | Java

Javapolis 2006: day 5

Last day, I am really exhausted and full of great ideas and tools to investigate - more on this later. Here are today’s sessions.

Automatic testing of Enterprise Applications using Open Source tools

Honestly, it was really hard to wake up that morning. But this talk was really incredible and a joy to follow. Bruno Bossola is the typical Italian guy, always smiling and making jokes. The content of the presentation was really interesting, showing various level of tests and related techniques. We covered specifically FitNesse which is an acceptance testing framework and Selenium which automatically tests web apps.

I found FitNesse really suitable for quite big organizations having a specific QA department since it allows to write test suites without knowing technical details about the test. Selenium is really impressive but it sounds a bit old fashioned to me, I am not really sure it could test Web 2.0 like applications (and since I wasn’t sure, I asked about it).

Apache Geronimo Unleashed

A friend of mine told me that Geronimo was really a cool application server and I wasn’t that convinced (why the hell do we need another app server anyway?). The presentation was good and it certainly showed very good reasons for another app server in the open source world. I really liked the modularity of the configuration and the plugins infrastructure. Too bad I am way to busy with Maven!

Next Generation Continuous Integration Tools

I knew the that speaker is a guy from JetBrains and I’ve already seen the flash presentation of Team City. The presentation starts with the flaws of the continuous integration tools which was a very good summary even if I found it was too sticked to CruiseControl (come on, there are plenty of continuous integration tools out there). The second part, of course, was about their new product which fixes most of these flaws. The product is really impressive when it’s combined with IDEA (even if the tools is about to be usable with other IDEs such as Eclipse). Check also Atlassian’s Bamboo if you’re interested by next generation continuous integration tools.

0 comments Saturday 16 Dec 2006 | Stéphane | Java

Javapolis 2006: day 4

Back on this dutch stuff. I just wanna ask a question here since I’ve had many talks with relatives over there. Do I look like a dutch/flemish guy? I mean, everyone is just speaking in dutch to me in a first place

Anyways, here are the presentations I’ve attended (it’s going tough!):

Flow of change

It was really interesting even though I found it a bit abstract (maybe it’s not that abstract for people used to work with Perforce, who knows?).

Developing Enterprise Content Applications using Open Source

Open source is really amazing. I’ve heard a bit about those fat fat fat Web Content Management Systems (documentum anyone?) and I really didn’t know that we had an open source flavor of it. Really nice. The nicer thing about this kind of open source initiative is that you can actually see how those guys glue open source products together.

Dynamic Applications With Faces and Ajax

I am not really a UI expert at all but I am just trying to improve this area. JSF has been there for a while, I just had the felling that I need to have a look to it. The presentation was nice and it gives a broad overview of those technologies.

Java Specialist in Action

This presentation was pure pleasure with very nice samples of what we can do to improve our applications.

As you can see, it’s a bit shorer than previous days. I am getting a bit tired as the week goes on I’ll probably add some more stuff later on.

0 comments Friday 15 Dec 2006 | Stéphane | Java

Javapolis 2006: day 3

I am not sure how to write this but I’ve been a bit disappointed with something that affects Belgium as a whole lately. Everything started when I noticed that lots of advertising booth were in Dutch. I just thought it was a bit strange but it was confirmed the whole day. Many people were just speaking to us in Dutch in a first place just like this was perfectly normal. Come on, it’s a European conference, right? Don’t get me wrong, I think that I am really an open guy but I just feel too bad to give such view of Belgium.

That said, here are the sessions of today. Oh yes, I won’t talk about the keynotes and stuff because It’s always a chance for the sponsors to show how wonderful they are and bla bla bla. There’s good stuff in there and lots of commercial stuff so I won’t talk much except the JSE and JEE guideline document on which Stefan is working on which sounds interesting and which will be made available on http://www.bejug.org for free.

Pragmatic Clustering Guide

This really was the kind of sessions I was expecting. Mike is a brilliant guy, and his presentation is impressive end to end. He basically explained the kind of decisions and thoughts Atlassian had made to upgrade Confluence so that it’s clusterable. Very interesting materials and feedbacks, I just wish we had a couple of hours left so that he can show us code examples and more concrete implementations (I am a bit naive on this one, I admit it). Anyway, if you’re concerned by clustering an application, watch out parleys and make sure to follow this presentation. It really helps.

The Java SE Platform Past and Future

A very good wrap up of new features in JDK6, I really liked the kind remarks to Microsoft just like it was a kind of friendly established war. Quite funny. A good introduction to what’s the consequences of putting Java to open source with web sites such as openjdk

Location based J2EE application development made simple (fraud)

Well, i am biased on this one since I am working now for IONIC Software which is the world leader in GIS interoperability. I am saying it’s a fraud because the speaker was retained somewhere and we had this giant talk by some commercial guy which said at the beginning the presentation changed a bit. I really hope it was a bit more because it’s by far the worst presentation I have attended. It basically shown the business model of ESRI, the importance of GIS systems and a few technological buzzwords involved in their implementation. Totally useless. Too bad.

Java Performance Myths

I would place this one at the same level as Heinz and Kirk’s presentation. This one really deserved more than one hour and should have been placed in the University part of the conference. Brian explained in details five performance myths with very interesting details about the kind of optimizations the JVM could do for us behind the scene:

Allocation is slow
I’ll just write a benchmark
Synchronization is slow
Making method final makes it faster
Clever code is faster code

The most interesting part of the presentation was about dead code detection where he shown that the JVM could optimize/skip method call without side effect where the returned value was not used anywhere. Pretty much interesting.

1 comment Wednesday 13 Dec 2006 | Stéphane | Java

Javapolis 2006: day 2

Day 2 was really excellent. Here’s the sessions I attended:

Java Performance Tuning

Men, this session really rocked. We do have this really handy book where we can write everything interesting about the sessions. I used 5 pages for this one and it’s really full of concrete examples that I can help me everyday tracking performance issues in the applications I handle.

Heinz is really a friendly guy, always willing to help and very quick responding to emails so I was kind of happy to see him life. I have some questions to ask, I’ll let you know later this week (well if I get an answer hopefully!). I didn’t knew Kirk Pepperdine at all but he’s really good at presenting stuff and make the session really enjoyable. Those two were really like clowns sometimes

If I would only remember one thing it would be the “Measure, don’t guess” sentence that came across the whole session. The explanations on the behavior of the Garbage Collector were also really useful. Make sure I’ll let you know as soon as I found a pointer to the slides. Check also http://www.javaperformancetuning.com which provides very nice performance tips.

Spring2 development

A friend of mine is really addicted to Spring so I guess I’ll just went there because I trust him when he says this framework kicks ass. We’ve seen the same AOP demo we’ve seen hundreds of times (hey look how I can check that the parameters of all my service methods are not null and throw a WhateverException if necessary) but also really cool stuff, namely in reducing the amount of configuration as well as make it more powerful. Same fear about Spring MVC regarding stuff happening magically even if I fell way much more confident about the control of the overall thing. Convention over configuration is really a nice idiom which saves a lot of time and could be applied in stuff I am doing at the moment.

0 comments Wednesday 13 Dec 2006 | Stéphane | Java

Javapolis 2006: day 1

Well. I have the feeling that the BeJug and JCS have done an even better job than last year. The organization of Javapolis so far is incredible and the remarks people have made last year have been taken into account, joy! (namely food, wifi access).

Regarding today’s sessions so far so good except the quickie on Maven 2.

Jini: A Java SOA that rocks!

Jan Newmarch is really an interesting guy: his presentation on Jini was really good even if I had a feeling of concepts being repeated over and over again at some point. Jini sounds a very mature technology in the sense of stability. However, I am not sure it’s able to fit everyone’s need: the interface have not changed for years. Even if it sounds like a good thing, it’s pretty much basic (talking about an execute method that is barely used for everything!).

Introduction to Java Enterprise Edition with Maven 2

Well, this sounds really interesting to me since no conference was planned on Maven this year (Vincent, Jason, anyone? ). Unfortunately, I must admit I was really disappointed by this talk. It was a really poor introduction to Maven and it did not focus on Java EE at all.

Dynamic Languages on the Java Platform

This presentation was really enjoyable since it introduces many scripting language such as Ruby and Groovy. I never worked with them before and the speakers were really able to show the power of scripting language and the reason why we need both in a complex enterprise application. I wasn’t that convinced by the JRuby on Rails thing since I am not especially attracted by web framework in a first place. In general, I am not fan of framework generating dozens of file for me: it sounds like a bad start to me. The examples shown in the presentation were very basic though interesting. I wonder if all this would work the same way with more complex (concrete?) examples.

Stéphane Nicoll’s Thoughts Welcome Guest | Login or Register