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J’ai la chance énorme de pouvoir partir à nouveau pour donner une formation à mes collègues à Singapour. Mon collègue Jean-Marc et moi sommes partis hier soir de Liège direction Paris (aéroport Charles de Gaule). De là, nous avons pris un vol direct pour Singapour avec un bon vieux Boeing 777-300. C’est quand même la rolls roys des cages à poule (respectivement 3 sièges, 4 sièges, 3 sièges pour une rangée en économique). Malheureusement pour nous, on a écoppé des plus mauvaise places à savoir les 2 places du milieu de la rangée de 4 sièges.

A la droite de Jean-Marc, un gros Américan qui ne dit mot mais qui prend pas mal de place. A ma gauche, Oncle Picsou. Ce gars est assez exceptionnel. En arrivant il me dit “bougez vous s’il vous plaît”. Je sais pas si c’est moi ou si mon Français de base est obsolète mais j’ai trouvé ça plutôt rude. Pendant le vol, les hotesses nous ont apporté un repas acompagné d’une boisson. Notre homme choisit un verre de champagne et “une bouteille de blanc et une bouteille de rouge“. La tête de l’hotesse valait le coup d’ailleurs qui lui donne péniblement une bouteille de blanc en lui expliquant qu’il n’était pas seul dans l’avion et qu’on verrait plus tard. Sur ce, il engloutit l’entièreté de son repas à une vitesse jamais égalée (j’en avais le tournis d’ailleurs et ça m’a coupé l’appétit). Au moment du café / thé, il ne se gêne évidemment pas pour rappeller qu’il n’a toujours pas reçu sa bouteille de rouge!

Cela dit, le voyage a été bien moins pénible que ce qu’on anticipait: on a dormi pas mal de temps en réalité et on s’est réveillé à 2h de la destination finale (un record en ce qui me concerne!). Isabel m’ayant offert le guide du routard du coin, j’avais déjà pu lire toute une série de choses sur la ville-état

• Non, traverser en dehors du passage clouté ne coûte pas 50€! On a vu une floppé de locaux traverser partout sans problème. Cela dit, bien que le nombre de voiture est important, le traffic est très fluide et il n’y a pas formation de bouchons
• Non, les restaurants ne sont pas si bon marché que ça. Bon ok, c’est pas la ruine mais ce n’est pas les prix riducules affichés dans le routard non plus, particulièrement lorsqu’on veut accompagner son repas d’une bière
• Oui, l’aéroport et le métro sont d’une properté chirurgicale!

Pour ce que j’en ai vu pour l’instant, je dirai que Singapour est une ville magasin. C’est hallucinant le nombre de magasins et de centres commerciaux qu’il y a sur Orchard Road! Il y a aussi des petites rues perpendiculaires remplies de bars et d’animations, très très sympa!

Là, je fatigue mais j’essaierai d’ajouter plus d’info dans les jours à venir

From Marc.
1. Take a picture of yourself right now.
2. Don’t change your clothes, don’t fix your hair…just take a picture.
3. Post that picture with NO editing.
4. Post these instructions with your picture.

Ce mardi, j’ai fait 20 km de promenade avec mon père à la côte Belge. Je dois bien avouer que je n’avais plus l’habiude de faire une distance pareille à pied d’un coup et j’ai un peu souffert sur le retour! 

Cela dit, on a pris des forces entre-temps! 

This is amazing one can find on YouTube sometimes…  

Even more …

Ca fait plus de 5 ans que j’ai un bon vieux Nokia 6310i. A l’époque, c’était un modèle assez cher, je ne me souviens pas du prix exactement. Très vite les téléphones ont évolués, avec l’arrivée du MMS, de technologies de première génération pour accéder à l’Internet et de jeux divers et variés. Je me souviens à l’époque avoir bien rigolé vis-à-vis de tous ces gadgets. Un téléphone, c’est fait pour téléphoner quoi.

Le mois passé, j’ai acheté un iPhone, malgré sa non disponibilité officielle en Belgique. Technologiquement, on a fait du chemin … Je me souviens de mon premier walk-man (un sony, lecteur de cassette bien pourri). Puis un lecteur CD portable qui bouffait à l’énergie comme pas possible. Puis un lecteur CD capable de lire les mp3s. Puis un petit lecteur portable iRiver avec 256Mo de mémoire pour stocker les mp3s. Et enfin le bon vieux iPod. C’est là que j’ai attrapé le virus des interfaces apple. Dès le début, je m’étais toujours dit que je n’utiliserais pas l’iphone pour écouter de la musique (je ne le considérais que comme un téléphone évolué à l’époque). Et force est de constater que le son est meilleur, que l’interface est plus riche et que le casque doté d’un micro / télécommande est super pratique en rue lorsqu’il faut couper le son ou passer au morceau suivant.

Regardez moi ça … Ca se passe de commentaires non?! (si ce n’est le reflet sur la droite qui fait penser à des vilaines traces de doigts)

Javapolis 2007 is already over and it was too fast; I barely had the time to look to the booths this year. Regarding the conference itself, the level is still highly valuable. Technologies that draw my attention are:

• Adobe Flex: waiting for the final release of Flex 3 and I’ll have a look to create a simple Proof Of Concept around our technologies
• Mule and ESBs in general: again waiting for the next major release that will be out soon and start with simple samples to see if it fits our upcoming use cases
• JCR implementations, mainly Apache Jackrabbit

Regarding more practical stuff now, some thoughts in no particular order:

• Too many folks: yes Javapolis is great and it’s affordable but I’d say it was less convenient than last year. I’m happy that the steering committee decided to stay at the same location though;
• Hot food is not the best idea I think since it’s not always good and the lines are huge. The last day I had to wait more than an hour to get something
• Real software thanks you for supporting Javapolis and for your involvement in Thursday’s movie but
  • Watching your commercial stuff 14 times is not fun
  • There’s not even an URL to your web site in it, I know there’s google but there’s another Real company you know!
  • Either you use the 24-hour clock system or the AM/PM but not both (so telling that your presentation was between 13PM and 14PM was at least fun…)

As you can see, the Real guys’ve pissed me off, no biggie though. Final note, many thanks to the BeJUG for organizing this event: it was great and I hope to be there next year.

Location Based Services: Latitude, Longitude and BEYOND was obviously a talk I had to attend since we use similar technologies at work. Most of the presentation was an overview of OpenLS and related concepts so it was nice to see this from another perspective. I am glad to see that a standardization exists for that kind of technology (JSR 293).

Java for high performant 3D and 2D graphical applications was presented by Luciad,  a belgian-based company that is working on the same area as Ionic so I was very interested to see what they have to propose in the talk. The talk was full of advices about 2D and 3D rendering as well as realtime-like applications. Very interesting.

OSGi has been around for a while now so I really hoped that the OSGi, the future of Java? talk would provide a complete introduction and answered the few questions I had. In theory, what OSGi provides is almost a must have for the Java virtual machine altogether: ability to have application scopes, use different versions of a particular library, ability to communicate between applications, component lifecycle callbacks (start& stop), ability to hide internal implementations, etc. What is a bit scary about OSGi is that it is a layer on top of the virtual machine and should therefore be supported by the application server in which you deploy your OSGi bundles. For a desktop application this is an easy choice though.

Test Driven Development: Beyond the Acronyms was a no choice for me since I’ve been used to Test Driven Development for a while now and I wanted to see if I apply the principle the right way. Well, it can be improved! Half of the session was a live coding demo with some guy from the audience, very nice.

Day four’s keynote was mostly focused on Adobe Flex and related technologies. At first, I was a bit afraid because they started with exactly the same content they showed during the Thinking in Flex session. Hopefully it starts being very interesting when Bruce asked naively (yeah once again) if Flex had any problem with complex image rendering! Remember the quotes from James Gosling yesterday? They basically showed us an independent tool that calculates the same image rendering with different technologies and obviously Flex was better than any Java-related technology. Well, watch out their respective blogs / web sites, it may be fun. The second part of the keynote was about the Parleys v2 web site; it is not yet online at the time of writing but the live demo we saw was just amazing: smooth, features rich, completely integrated with the existing back-end. I wonder how many man day this thing took. But we went crazy when they presented the desktop flavor of the tool with immediate communication with the web version and the desktop version. This sounds a bit cryptic to me on a technical point of view but for the end users this is just pure joy.

Mule 2 and Beyond talk was very much expected since I have a direct interest in that kind of tool and the university session gave already a good insight about it. They apparently did a very good job to ease the configuration file (mule 1.x configuration files are a bit scary!) and the overall technology seems very mature. What I really like about this talk is that the speaker insisted on the fact that not only the tool is not intrusive but also it adapts to your existing infrastructure. Sometime I get a bit discouraged of some talks when they present the latest super genius technology that would imply us to refactor half of our code base to switch to it efficiently. With Mule and a new project, this sounds more affordable: I have some use cases in mind and it fits.

Enterprise RIA with Flex and Java was nice overall but still cryptic. I had this constant feeling the whole week about it, something like “Wahou this client feature is terrific … Wait, how do they do that?!’”. I mean, they have this ability to push updated content on other client editing data and this is done with a boolean flag that you switch. On one hand this is easy, very cool but on the other hand how do I configure this? What about network roundtrip? Performance? I am not saying it isn’t there, I am saying it sounds too easy to be true.

Close Customer Collaboration - the BMW case was interesting and very practical. This talk showed the success of introducing Agile methodologies and Scrum in a project. Finally the Java Puzzlers session was enjoyable, like every one I’ve ever the chance to attend.

University day two started with the Thinking in Flex session. I actually expect Bruce Eckel to look different but I like his style, asking naive questions to the other speaker just like he didn’t knew (well at least I hope I got it right!). Most of his questions were very helpful for the overall comprehension of the talk. Regarding flex now, I’ve been amazed how easy the UI can be built using Flex Builder and the overall reactivity of the tool. However it’s pretty much hard to figure out how that kind of tool will help in very complex projects with a non state-of-the-art server implementation; not that the server-side stuff I practically use suck but they just show very nice RESTfull web services or simple XML return streams. With more data, session and all that kind of stuff, I wonder if it would be that smooth and easy. Anyway, as Bruce Eckel said, the first idea of Flex is to provide a UI framework in contrary to most systems out there. And it shows!

Struts2 was very much expected since the Web Toolkit on which I am working on with the team right now is using Struts1 and we are wondering what would offer Struts2 compared to the current implementation. I’ve been a bit disappointed by this one since we focused a lot on this very legacy JSP paradigm (JSP invoking an action on the server, then we have the processing, then we forward the result to my-cool-result.jsp). On the contrary, I was expecting information regarding annotations and especially the ability to completely remove the struts configuration file. When using overlays for instance, it’s very common to have server-side actions in separate war projects and the reconciliation is currently a pain since we need to touch the web.xml file to add our custom struts configuration file. I was also expecting examples of asynchronous requests handling, typically with JSON messages coming back and forth. The next version of Struts2 will actually have annotations (well I hope) and the Ajax-related stuff are underway but … when? I kinda have the feeling that this annotation change request has been there for ages now. I hope we’ll have it soon. Final note, that Ian Roughley guy really looks like to Kiefer Sutherland (Jack Bauer in the 24 tv series).

Developing Software like a band plays Jazz was the final sessions (in two parts). I actually didn’t knew Jazz at all but this sounds like it’s addressing a more and more common use case in distributed teams: how can we work efficiently and how can we react to issues (in its broadest scope)? Access to the tool is still a bit secret for the moment but what we’ve seen in the demo is really interesting: issue tracking, scm integration, instant messaging, build integration system, project management capabilities, etc. I have to wonder if all these tools are IBM stuff or if they integrate with external systems. I am expecting my favorite third party company, Atlassian, to solve that kind of use cases. And apparently, they are doing this with Jira Studio eventhough I am not sure the scope is as broad as Jazz has. Anyway, Mike’s around so I’ll just ask if I can.

Et oui, enfin j’y suis allé aux Etats-Unis. Pour ceux qui ne le savent pas encore, la société pour laquelle je travaille (Ionic Software) a été rachetée récemment par Leica Geosystems Geospatial Imaging (quel nom à rallonge!). Ses bureaux principaux sont localisés a Norcross, au nord d’Atlanta en Géorgie. Cette semaine, je suis allé là bas avec deux de mes collègues.

Cette première visite ne m’a pas vraiment impressioné positivement à vrai dire. Au fil des années, j’ai de plus en plus accordé d’importance à l’écologie et à chaque geste quotidien qui mène à un impact important si il est collectif. Et là, le choc : des routes immenses, des voitures immenses, un flux continu de voitures. Les endroits où je suis allé n’ont pas de trottoirs et il n’y a dès lors pas de piétons. C’est un changement immense parce qu’il me semble difficile de pouvoir aborder l’esprit d’une ville sans pouvoir s’y promener (à pied s’entend).

J’ai aussi eu l’occasion de voir mon deuxième match de NHL (Atlanta vs. New York Islanders) et le stade d’Atlanta est tout aussi impressionant que celui de Montréal (moins de monde et moins d’ambiance cela dit).

La nouriture dans les restaurants était assez mauvaise. Pour tout dire, elle a été horrible deux fois sur trois. Je me demande quelle en est la raison car nous sommes allés dans des restaurants pas spécialement bon marché du tout. C’est sans doute une question de goût. En tout cas, je n’ai encore jamais vu une sauce parmigiana remplacée par un concentré de tomates (très concentré) et 2 pincées de basilic chimique.

En définitive, ce premier voyage m’a plus et ça a été une riche expérience. Je serai plus que probablement amené à y retourner et j’espère pouvoir mieux aborder l’endroit.