thoughts.iterator()

“An industry wishlist for future browsers has been collected and developed by OpenAjax Alliance. Using wiki as an open collaboration tool and with contributions from many people in the industry, the feature list now lists 37 separate feature requests, covering a wide range of technology areas, such as security, Comet, multimedia, CSS, interactivity, and performance. The goal is to inform the browser vendors about what the Ajax developer community feels are most important for the next round of browsers (i.e., FF4, IE9, Safari4, and Opera10) and to provide supplemental details relative to the feature requests.”

More on: http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/07/vote-for-browsers

After a rather long development cycle the JBoss AS 5 RC1 is only a handful of days away from its release. InfoQ caught up with project lead Dimitris Andreadis to discuss the new features and release timeline. Dimitris also comments on Java EE 6 features, the advantages of JBoss AS with respect to competition and their choice of having a pluggable components model instead of sticking just to OSGi:

http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/06/jboss-as5-rc1

The Grizzly framework is used in multiples products like GlassFish, Sailfin, RESTlet, OpenESB and many more, where it enables developers to write scalable server applications, by leveraging the Java New I/O API (NIO). Atmosphere, an evolution of Grizzly, is a POJO based framework that aims to bring Comet to the masses. Jean-Francois talks to InfoQ about this new development:

http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/06/grizzly-atmosphere

“JBoss Cache is an enterprise-grade clustering solutions for Java-based applications, that aims to provide high availability and dramatically improve performance by caching frequently accessed Java objects. In this post InfoQ has a round-up interview with project lead Manik Surtani.”

more…

Early Draft released for JavaServer Faces 2.0 - Improved Interoperability for JavaScript Libraries

The early draft for JSR 314 has been released for review under the Java Community Process Program. This JSR aims to update the 1.2 version of the JavaServer Faces specification to version 2.0. This next generation of JSF is an attempt to bring the best ideas in web application development to the Java EE platform and is already receiving positive feedback from the community, especially because of its improved AJAX support….

more on InfoQ.com…

For the last time before summer, the Java Hellenic User Group (JHUG) organized an excellent event for the Greek developer’s community. Participation was high and I was very excited to meet again several friends and old colleagues, like Panagiotis, Christos, Thanassis, Ioannis and Spyros (sorry if I forget someone).

The event started of with Paris giving out a small introductory and several Java goodies like t-shirts an books.

Here is a short outline of the talks that followed:

Mikhail Kondratyev – Netbeans (NB) 6.1 Overview

• Intro to NB 6.1
• Focused mostly on Java features
• Gave a short history of the NB IDE
• New features of 6-6.1:
  • Added run configurations
  • Better deployment for Java Web Start
  • Added test libs
  • Better support for shared libs
  • Jemmy test framework
  • Project Groups
  • Several Editor enhancements
  • Local History
  • MySQL support
  • Restful WS (generate JavaScript stub!)
  • Integrated Mercurial support
• Upcoming for 6.5 (planned for end of September)
  • Better PHP
  • Client JavaScript debugger for Firefox (IE6/7/8?)
  • Integrated Groovy
  • Even better MySQL tooling

Mark Newton – JBoss Community & JBoss AS 5

Mark gave a nice talk on the evolution of the JBoss business model and how it fits with the open source community.

Kirk Pepperdine – Performance Tuning and Java Optimizations

Kirk kicked a** as usual, explaining how multiple cores are changing the fundamentals of how we code:

• Sequential programming is hard but… concurrent is harder
• Multicore redefine the rules for coding, design and architecture
• Explained the “Quake Principle”
• We will have to adjust algorithms to hardware, as in the past
• Moore’s law revisited: Double parallelism every 18 months
• 1000 cores within this decade
• DBs don’t scale good on clusters – a 20 year old technology
• Amdahls law
• Non uniform memory access
• Transactional memory
• Cliff Clicks lockless concurrent HashTable

“WRITE ONCE, DEBUG EVERYWHERE”

Manik Surtani – JBoss Cache: Clustering enterprise Java for scalability and high availability

Manik’s visit to Greece, was a very good opportunity to chat with him and arrange for an interview/acrticle for InfoQ about JBoss Cache. During his talk he presented the benefits of caching and also the common pitfalls. He also presented several features of JBoss Cache and common architectures for high availability.

More from Paris…

Very excited to blog about the upcoming JHUG Java Day that is organized by the Java Hellenic User Group (JHUG).

At the time of this writing this the details are:

Location: Athens, Greece

Directions:

Hotel Classical Acropol
1, Pireos Street
GR 105 52 Athens
Greece

Tel: 30 210 5282100
Fax: 30 210 5282175

Start date: Saturday, June 7, 2008

Start time: 09:30 AM

End date: Saturday, June 7, 2008

End time: 03:00 PM

Agenda

• 09.30 – 10.00 : Coffee break
• 10.00 – 10.40 :(Sun) Sun Hellas OpenSolaris Session (speaker TBA)
• 10.50 – 11.30 : (Sun) Netbeans Team,Mikhail Kondratyev – Netbeans 6.1 Overview
• 11.30 -11.50 : Coffee break
• 11.50 – 12.30 : (RedHat JBoss) Mark Newton – JBoss Community & JBoss AS 5
• 12.40 – 13.20 : Kirk Pepperdine – Perfomance Tuning and Java Optimizations (TBA)
• 13.20 – 14:00 : Lunch Break
• 14.00 – 14:40 : (RedHat JBoss) Manik Surtani – JBoss Cache: Clustering enterprise Java for scalability and high availability

And you can register here and also find more details from the blogs of Paris and Panos.

From twitter users I’d suggest looking for #jhug. Also I suppose a FaceBook event would sound nice…

Article on InfoQ.com:

Will Polyglotism and DSLs make Java the Last Big Language?

At the JavaOne bookstore I got my hands on a book by Elliotte Rusty Harold about HTML refactorings. As I was skipping through contents I noticed the following refactoring:

Replace Flash with HTML: Convert Flash sites to HTML. Provide pure- HTML alternatives for Flash content.

… and it followed:

Flash is extremely inaccessible. I most cases a Flash site might as well be a black box to blind users, and is often hostile to color-blind, deaf and motion impaired users as well…

It is not a secret that I have a bias opinion when it comes to Flash/Flex and I’m happy that there other people also that are immune to this hype.

Of course the lift of the restrictions regarding the SFW/FLV spec was a very positive think on behalf of Adobe and I hope they keep it up!

The queue for this session was huge and started outside of the Moscone center. It was interesting and well organized but the characterization “advanced” was not very accurate. Of course you cannot have any “advanced” presentation on a crowd of hundreds and you should give Jeremiah and Joe the credit for keeping a good balance.

Here are some points that are not very trivial:

• You can mess with your friends Google search history with simple basic CSRF
• The OWASP servlet filter is a nice tool
• Mentioned a way to make a double cookie check both on the body and the HTTP headers and said that it was the way DWR works, but didn’t quite elaborate on it.
• They mentioned several times that there is a wrong and right way to use JSON and it would be nice to provide more details but I suppose time was an issue.
• Maybe the corner stone of JavaScript hacking is the action to override Object(). This is also a nice way to do AOP.
• There are many-many places where JavaScript is executed in a web page besides the <script> element like attributes (javascript:), event listeners, browser specific event listeners, CSS (inline and imports), etc. so…
  • … you might consider using AntiSamy
• With XSS you can grab the secret token and then launch a CSRF

Some things that I feel that should also be added in a similar presentation should be:

• • Application layer firewalls like mod_security
  • Hacking browser extensions that users typically have like firebug, Greasemonkey, etc.
  • Protecting your app from malicious JSON
  • Browser standards compliance mode (IE8 ) as a way to protect from attacks that aim at malformed HTML

A few hours ago I attended the “Java Rockstars Panel”, a press only event with:

• Bob Brewin, CTO of Sun Software
• Tim Bray, Director of Web Technologies for Sun
• Jeet Kaul, VP of Developer Products and Programs for Sun
• Eric Klein, VP of Java Marketing for Sun

I will try to summarize some key points:

• This year is about Java on the client, the ubiquity of the platform and the energy of the community.
• Tim Bray likes JavaScript’s ubiquity
• Fact of life: Ruby and Python are (almost) as old as Java (chronologically
• Alternative (scripting) languages that will be able to run on the JVM with automatically increase their potential user base
• “People love the Web platform because it has no platform vendor” – Tim Bray
• Having no real specs for dynamic languages (except JavaScript) makes it hard for people trust them.

Yesterday JavaOne 2008 kicked off:

Attendants were welcomed in the General Session by various dancing acts.

Then James Gosling was tossing his personally designed t-shirts.

The prediction that a Java Posse member made yesterday at CommunityOne that Jonathan Schwartz will make a joint appearance with Steve Jobs, hug on stage and announce that Java will be available on the iPhone was… not fulfilled.

Instead we were shown a biometric censors experiment held in Moscone during JavaOne. BTW all badges are RFID and scanned with a nokia phone. They also demonstrated the usage of sensors and Java code for measuring and manage climate inside Moscone.

Then Rich Green:

• Invited Ian Freed of Amazon on stage who talked about the Kindle and gave a short presentation that illustrated how Java empowers this device. If you didn’t know it ALL Kindle applications are Java.
• Invited Rikko Sakaguchi from Sony Ericsson on stage who showed a promotional video of a new device that will be launched later this year and said that “Java is the core strategy of Sony Ericsson”!
• Showed a demo with Facebook and LiveConnect app/plugin that uses JavaFX. Showed it also on a JavaME phone. Really impressive, even though the slow Moscone network created problems.
• Continued with a JavaFX demo that demonstrated that emphasized on the design capabilities of the technology. It was really eye pleasing. Also emphasized the 3D, HD video and sound capabilities of the platform.
• Repeated the ConnectedLife demo on the Google Android emulator.
• Talked about Glassfish modular new architecture.

One of the highlights was the appereance of Neil Young on stage. He talked about his effort to collect all his musical legacy to BlueRay and how Java enables him to provide an nice interface to it all. I would have liked it if he could stayed a bit longer and had his guitar with him

After the general session I had the pleasure of accidentally meeting Doris Chen, one of our beloved Java Evangelists that visit Greece regularly to talk about the latest and greatest in Java Land.

The conference is so huge and packet with people from all over the world that I would suggest to Sun to consider something like JavaOne Europe.

Continuying with the individual sessions that I personally found more interesting:

“The Duke and the Elephant: PHP Meets Java? Technology–the Best of Both Worlds” by Rob Nicholson

• Why use PHP (fairly obvious)
• Why use PHP+Java+Groovy: leverage the power and communities of all platforms
• WebSphere sMash: Agile application development using dynamic scripting and RESTful Web Services (based on JSON?)
• They seemed to have implemented some kind of PHP 5 runtime over Java SE. It sounds very interesting and I’ll have to look into the licensing information.

Blogger Q&A with Jonathan Schwartz and Rich Green

• How long Jonathan spents blogging and other related questions
• Bloging company policy and sensorcip
• JavaFX platform questions
• Sun/Google/Android
• Java and iPhone
• more…

“JavaScript? Programming Language: The Language Everybody Loves to Hate” by Roberto Chinnici

Outline:

• Introduction to the functional nature of JavaScript
• Mentioned that you can only have scope through functions (but later showed scope with objects)
• Suggested that some Higher Order Functions library might be useful
• Said that with no tail recursion it is easy to blow a stack
• Browser implementations are primitive
• Made a reference to Google project Caja
• Showed several examples form frameworks like Dojo, jQuery and Prototype that alienated the typical Java programmer.

For those who don’t know yet, Roberto is one of the people that brough us Phobos. As I suggested after the discussion they should really put an effort to making it work with continuation. This is a programming model quite different then the one most web developers are accustomed to and it would strengthen Phobos position as an alternative framework. Especially as we enter more and more to the era of server-side Javascript with products like Jaxter by Aptana and the long awaited Rhino on Rails by Google.

BTW Roberto some of your comments where a bit biased against the functional and prototypical nature of the language but we all know you love it

“Building Secure Mashups with OpenAjax” by Jon Ferraiolo

• What is the OpenAjax Allience
• The interoperability problems between the various toolkits
• OpenHub 1.0 -> enables multiple ajax runtimes to work together (pub/sub). Included in the Dojo framework
• Security issues in mashups
• OpenAjax Hub 1.1 -> Adds pub/sub with the server (eg. Comet) and framework for secure mashups
• OpenAjax Metadata

Today me and Panos attended CommunityOne and I have to say that the event exceeded my expectations. The sheer scale of this event was something I hadn’t seen in the past!

Moscone Center was surrounded with street signs and people holding signs that pointed to the various designated areas.

The general session that kicked off was broadcasted live on the internet, as one of the speakers informed us.

HD abuse

I’ve spent most of my time in the RedMonk Unconference and also attended the Java Posse podcast recording during lunch time. Their podcast is my favorite one second to the Software Engineering Radio.

Also I attended a session by Zend about their framework and how they are planning to implement Comet applications. I use the word “planning” because from what I understood they don’t actually have any concrete plans. For example the speaker talked about a Comet server implementation in C that a PHP app would use through CLI, but when I approached him with the question if this would be given out as a PECL module or about the licensing, he couldn’t disclose any information. Anyway, since more than 50% of web apps are made in PHP, I’d like this community to overcome the challenges that the Comet paradigm brings and do it in a timely fashion.

I was also happy to accidentally bump into Reginald Hutcherson at the stairs. Regi is a Java Evangelist that has been regularly visiting us in Athens, Greece with his team.

I still have a couple of sessions that I would like to attend and I’ll go back to the hotel to rest since I still haven’t gotten over the jetlag and tomorrow JavaOne opens. This means dozens of great sessions and even more parties

Having a pet dog I really-really enjoyed the fact that there are people inside Moscone that (are allowed to) go around with their dogs. Actually I’ve read that one out of two SF residents has dog. Two thumbs up people!

JavaOne seems to be a very big thing in San Francisco. Starting from the airport passport checking staff that made JavaOne-specific questions (like “how r u associated with Sun?”), to signs about Java on bus stations!

This was our second day this side of the pond and we’ve spent most of the morning going around on rented bikes and sightseeing.

We were so overwhelmed by the scenery and the Golden Gate Bridge that we went far out of our schedule and couldn’t make it to the GlassFish Unconference that was held in Moscone. This was such a shame since I am very excited about the Comet support and I wanted to meet the team and discuss about v3. I hope I get the chance one of the following days during JavaOne.

After we returned to the hotel and had a few minutes of rest, we visited the party that the Dutch Java User Group – NLJUG had organized at the Carnelian Room. After meeting the NLJUG leader and some of their members I was very impressed about their enthusiasm… NLJUG rocks!

At this party, besides meeting Stephan Jansen from JAVOXX (formerly known as Javapolis), it was a pleasure to meet Aaron Houston in person after all those emails. He has been a source of inspiration and his outgoing nature helped to create a lively conversation regarding all kinds of Java related issues. Aaron the JHUG will be waiting for you in Greece

My friend Panos is keeping a log of our time here in SF, on one of his blogs.

BTW a little bird told me that a SunSpot might be landing soon in Greece for all the JHUG community to play with it and to program it, but will see about that… (update: Panos what is this little box in your bag?)

“Amazon’s Elastic Computer Cloud (EC2), which delivers Hardware as a Service (HaaS), is adding persistent storage to its list of features. Werner Vogels, Amazon’s CTO, describes how storage volumes will attach to EC2 instances and how they handle failure and data consistency; he also talks about how you can store a snapshot of your storage in S3, Amazon’s storage service, as a backup.“

“Amazon upgrades EC2 with Persistent Storage” article for InfoQ -by Dionysios G. Synodinos

It is funny how a small mindmap can generate such a large volume of hate mail

Since this post on how “contemporary Adobe Flex implementations defy and adulterate the very nature of the WWW as we know it”, generated so much interest I thought of updating it and wait for the Adobe horde to hit again.

This year me and my JHUG-buddy Panos will be attending JavaOne which is held at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.

I’m very excited since JavaOne is the flag-ship of all Java related conferences and probably one of the biggest (if not THE biggest) conferences in the world for software developers. Moreover it’s a celebration where people from all over the globe:

• come together in one of the most beautiful cities in the US,
• get high quality sessions from domain experts
• exchange experiences, ideas and their vision for the Java platform and
• network with their idols and with each other.

There are several sessions I’m eagerly looking forward to attending like:

• “The Java™ Platform Portlet Specification 2.0 (JSR 286)” by Stefan Hepper (WebSphere Portal Server)
• “Asynchronous Ajax for Revolutionary Web Applications” by Jean-François Arcand (Grizzly)
• “The JavaScript™ Programming Language for Enterprise Application Scripting: Five Years of Experience” by Olivier Modica
• “Comet: The Rise of Highly Interactive Web Sites” by Alex Russell (Dojo)
• “JavaScript™ Programming Language: The Language Everybody Loves to Hate” by Roberto Chinnici (Phobos)

We have planned our visit so we can also participate in CommunityOne, one day before JavaOne, where there will be many interesting sessions concerning:

• Projects and Strategy
• Linux Communities
• Databases: MySQL, postgreSQL
• Web and Application Servers: GlassFish, Apache
• Scripting and Rich Internet Applications (RIAs): PHP, Python, Ruby, Javascript, JavaFX, AJAX, jMaki
• Tools and IDEs: NetBeans, Eclipse
• Next Generation Web Applications
• Web Scale Computing
• … and much more

You still have time to join us…

Here is the opening video from last year’s JavaOne:

As you might have noticed from the last two posts, the last days I’ve been participating in QCon London.

My impressions about the organization of the event are excellent. The facilities were more than adequate, the schedule was practical and worked out fine, and the quality of the presentations was very high.

Even the security measures showed a high level of organization and professionalism.

The venue was at a very central point of London, next to Westminster Abbey and within walking distance from the Big Ben.

One f the things that I’ve never seen in a conference was the “agile assessment” of each presentation. After the end of the talk, participants were handed green, yellow and red card and voted with them according to their experience. This surely beats the traditional method of handing out assessment forms at the end that nobody bothers to fill-in.

Another thing I liked was the presence of an O’Reilly stand, that featured some of the hottest titles from this publisher. Actually they had a 35% discount on all titles, which I took advantage to get me as many books as I could carry back home.

So a short list of the talks that I found to be most valuable follows. Of course since there were 4 simultaneously tracks, taking place at the same times, every day I didn’t have time to see all presentations, so for more details maybe you should also check what the other bloggers are saying.

Kent Beck’s keynote on the “Trends in Agile Development”

I can still remember back in ’99 when I bought Kent’s book on XP programming, how much it all made sense. He is a very experienced and entertaining speaker that has a magical ability to sell the agile concept.

“REST: A Pragmatic Introduction to the Web’s Architecture” by Stefan Tilkov

A great presentation on the basic principles of REST and why you should care about it. It is interesting to see that after so much technological elaboration the last few years, it is all coming back to the basic nature of the WWW.

“The Cathedral, the Bazaar and the Commissar: The Evolution of Innovation in Enterprise Java” by Rod Johnson

Check out my later post.

InfoQ BOF

At this BOF I had the opportunity to meet the faces behind InfoQ and learn about how it evolved and the future directions. It was a friendly interaction, were several participants gave their opinions on how this information-rich community site can grow.

The BOF was taking so long that the team from Software Engineering Radio that were holding the next BOF in the same room arrived and we all had the chance to interact together until the place had to close.

“Interactive websites: Comet and DWR”

This presentation was a nice stroll through the current state of Comet development and what DWR can provide to Java programmers.

“Haskell: functional programming on steroids” by Simon Peyton-Jones

Although the title of the presentation had changed from the one in the schedule, the part about the steroids was 100% representative of the speaker. A person of an academic background, working for Microsoft Research and maintaining a GNU licensed Haskell compiler… wow that guy was awesome:

Of course this talk didn’t change my opinion that pure functional languages like Haskell are more suitable for academic research than the real world, at least in 2008

“Behind the Scenes at MySpace.com” by Dan Farino

Nice walk through the various administrative tool that the team that handles Myspace.com have build on top of the .NET platform, to monitor a system that serves hundreds of users.

“The Busy Java Developer’s Guide to Scala” by Ted Neward

Ted’s presentations are both informative and enjoyable. He has a way to communicate his thoughts directly to the audience and a very distinctive sense of humor to sugar-coate it all.

One of the impressions that this talk left to me is that even though this genre of languages is getting much attention these days, nobody actually has much experience in the enterprise field and the actual patterns of usage are yet to be established.

So, to finish of here are some nice pictures from London:

Just a few hours ago the second day of the main QCon schedule ended. This day was even more captivating than the first and there where many interesting points which I will mention on my summarizing post, after the end of the conference.

Although there were several important presentations by people that were either well-known at their field or even considered pioneers/gurus, it was one session that I was eagerly expecting from the moment I first read the schedule. This was the presentation from Rod Johnson and it absolutely lived up to my expectations.

Usually Rod is being introduced as the father of the Spring framework. I find that this does not do him justice. Even though Spring has been adopted by several developers, I believe that Rod has influenced a much larger portion of today’s enterprise Java developers with his first book. For me this was one of the most influential publications I had the luck of coming across and it has played a great part in the path I chose as a professional developer.

On the lighter side of things, I urge you to visit amazon.com and see that the main negative points that people had in 2002 about this book was that Rod was demonstrating his concepts using his “own proprietary framework”… which turned out to be Spring

Returning back to today’s events, Rod gave the talk “The Cathedral, the Bazaar and the Commissar: The Evolution of Innovation in Enterprise Java” as part of the “Evolving Java” track. This presentation built upon Eric Raymond’s seminal paper that analyses why open source works so well, which was named “The Cathedral and the Bazaar”.

The addition was the Commissar, a role coming from the Soviet Union that was Rod’s perception of the actual role that the Java Community Process plays in the evolution of the Java ecosystem. This was a rough metaphor and he tried to back it up with several examples from the fall of the USSR.

In the past many of his preachings, like the lightweight approach of POJOs instead of EJB, have managed to influence the progress of Java. This is more evident than ever in Java EE 5 and the roadmap for the proposed Java EE 6. It will be interesting to see if his views on how the JCP should alter its modus operandi, will actually convince Sun to fundamentally reorganize the process which drives the Java future.

From the 11th to14th of March this year I will be visiting London to participate in QCon 2008. It will be my first QCon but I have high expectations. First of all the organization of the event is done by InfoQ which is a well known and valuable source of information on enterprise software, and by the JAOO people, which organize some of the coolest conferences on software technology. Also the list of speakers is quite impressive, for example you have people like M. Fowler, Erich Gamma, Kent Beck, Rod Johnson, Neal Gafter and many others that are the crème de la crème of software engineering. Finally I’ve found many sessions that I would like to participate in so I guess I’ll have 3 days packed with presentations.

If you are also participating in QCon 2008, feel free to drop me a line or contact me directly at the venue.

tags: qcon, qcon2008, qconlondon