I’m very glad to attend Javapolis; to me it’s the best conference I’ve ever attended. Lots of people this year again, met already a couple of colleagues and folks I see once a year. So far, the organization is as amazing as last year.

Open Source ESBs is the session is was expecting to be the most interesting for day one and it was. I’ve been playing around with Mule a couple of months already and I really thing that kind of tool can help us a lot in what we are trying to build. The use case they demonstrated was an automated billing system for cars driving in the center of London based on camera recognizing the plate number. We basically got the idea on how we could link and chain loosely-coupled components to implement the use cases, using various technologies such as EJB and JMS. Two other ESBs that implements the JBI spec were also discussed: ServiceMix and OpenESB. I wasn’t that much convinced especially because the JBI specification sounds to complicate the job.

Google API’s wasn’t really what I was expecting. I actually didn’t read the summary and thought naïvely that it will all go about Google Maps but we talked about the Google Collections API and the Google Data API. Dick Wall is a funny guy and this one was really a joy to follow. The Google Collections API sounds like a real-value on top of the Java Collections API:

  • BiMap: a bi-directional map; I know at least a couple of places where I’ve been implementing this with two Maps and some extra code to handle it “properly”;
  • MultiMap: a collection similar to a Map, but which may associate multiple values with a single key; very handy to implement a Map whose values are Lists;
  • Predicates which allows to filter the content of a Collection;
  • Constraints add the ability to check objects before being added to a collection (non null, state of the object, bla bla);
  • Immutable lists;
  • and more.

The Google Data API demonstrated how easy one can update a google calendar or query cells of a spreadsheet.

SoapUI was very short and straight to the point. I had the feeling that the tool is kinda a must-have for anyone working heavily with Web Services. I really liked the ability to start a test web services based on a mocked SOAP response. Testing and load testing integration capabilities seemed neat as well.

Addictive code reviews with Crucible is about a code review system. I already had a look at the online demo and the presentation was quite similar. I am not yet convinced by that kind of tool since we have a couple of steps to reach before making this efficient.

So far so good! I hope day two will be as exciting as day one. I’ll let you know.