Thomas Ferris Nicolaisen's blog

I didn't really get around to take any notes the last day. Or well, I did take some notes but I lost them.. Here's what I attended at least: Neil Gafter's keynote about closures A slightly booring talk by Danny Coward on the future of Java OSGi embedded <- good talk. Interesting topic, good speakers and demos Q & A about Web 3.0 with Henry Story <-good talk Discussed Jackrabbit performance with David Nuescheler so I was late for the last, and most interesting talk of the day: The build-up of artificial complexity <-- good talk In the last talk, I asked the speaker whether he thought extensions of Java as a platform was a fair way of increasing complexity vs new languages better fit for the job (a more powerful platform does reduce the need for new components), with a particular regard to AOP and Closures. He answered that AspectJ in runtime would be considered a foreign component increasing complexity quite a bit, but closures would be more of a welcome add

The last thing we attended yesterday was Neil Gafter's Java Quiz BOF. Will have to take a look at FindBugs.sf.net. Keynote with Erich Gamma. Eclipse Jazz looks mightily impressive. It's an Eclipse workbench addon that integrates *a lot* of groupware functionality in Eclipse. Think task-tracker, project members, svn commits and activities, the quick tour made it look really impressive (live demo). Unfortunately, Jazz is a commercial product. And would you really pay for anything that is based on Eclipse (being the obtrusively bug-filled platform it is)? First session. SAP talk . Memory is split in heap space (objects) and perm gen. Heap dump content, objects, classes, classloaders, GC. Currently alive in memory objects. Retained size of an object is not the same as the shallow size. Retained size includes the underlying chars for Strings f.ex. Retained size can be calculated by simulating a GC and see what objects remains. By looking at dominator trees (parenting objects and th

The chronology of this post isn't entirely correct, but I went to one product presentation last night, being Boris Kraft's Magnolia presentation . There weren't too many attendees (mostly likely because of late announcement ), but it was still a nice presentation. I spent a lot of time with Magnolia last year and the year before, and I have to say it is quite impressive to see how far they have come since Magnolia 2.0 in the recent 3.1 version. The user interface is much nicer, Document Management, lots of new paragraph types, workflow stuff, as well as a pretty slick site-designer for the enterprise version, just to mention a few new features. And in my personal opinion, the price isn't bad compared to other proprietary CMS'es, and you still get a long way with the open source version. From a few years back their number of reference projects has been multiplied by the hundreds, and traffic on Magnolia-powered sites all in all is probably sky-high by now. I've e

After lunch I dropped in on Øystein Grøvlen's intro to JavaDB /Derby . Supports some cool things I didn't know about, like support for external authentication mechanisms, encryption, calling java from SQL (for whatever reasons you want to do that for). Different persistence mediums (file, jar, memory). Derby must be started as a networkServer in order for other applications to connect to it outside the runtime . SQuirrel is a nice tool for browsing the db. Had a quick talk with him afterwards on HSQL vs Derby in typically JUnit tests (like in a subclass of Spring's AbstractTransactionalDataSourceSpringContextTests ). HSQL is still faster, and in-memory implementation of Derby is still in the experimental phase. It can be tuned by turning off some logging, and doing setup in @ BeforeClass ( junit 4) should help. ... David (Day) Nuescheler's talk on AJAX on top of JCR . At the same time as this was pushing their CRX content repo thingie , it was actually qu

Disclaimer: I'm just splashing in the notes I'm talking while listening to the talks here. All notes are not stated facts. Just stuff I manage to pick up. Keynote by former Apache foundation chairman Roy T Fielding about the ideas and origin of REST, the re-discovery of REST (after SOA/SOAP). Fielding published the REST architecture in his dissertation 7 years ago, and advises us to be aware of buzz. Second part of the keynote was an ELCA talk about integration between heterogenous systems and how Spring has helped them with that.. Very 2004'ish. ... Glassfish V3 talk . V1 was released at JavaOne last year. V2 is still in development (clustering, load balancing), most development will happen in V3. Lotsa changes going on. It is essentially the same demo that was held at JavaOne some weeks ago. Quickly in demo. Startup is in 800 ms and still able to serve static pages. Started off with deploying a RoR application. asadmin deploy -- path ~/ror/mephisto Deploying a RoR appl

Great, I managed to do a java Black Belt attempt on Java 5 and ended up with 0/5 points. I've never even heard of that Scanner class. Think I better get started on that certification (again). ... Went to a talk by Red Hat's Jan Wildeboer . Virtualization. RH now delivers a full stack with JBoss server and clustering. Most OS'es are built being able to dynamically use CPU and memory (not Windows of course). Some keywords: VMWare invented x86 virtualization. Hypervisor, ring zero. There were performance issues (20% with heavy io, which is especially overhead intensive). Now there is something called para-virtualization with minimal overhead (1 - 5 %). Talking about perfomance, live migration, upgrades.. Jboss clustering is still the solution for scaling up memory exploit as the JVM is not dynamically using memory or CPUs. Virtualization offers us a lot of better perfomance, especially as more CPU's and memory are fitted onto boards. The talk was a bit out of my league, bu

And we're off. I'm listening to the keynote session. Taking place in a movie theater, seems like the conference is taking place inside some cinema metroplex called Sihl-city, or Movie-City. We weren't really aware of the size or scale of Jazoon up front. Seeing the amount of people in the theater, it's not too positively surprising. The theater is about 2/3rds full, I think I can count the number of attendees in the hundreds. There is an okay amount of stands, many of which are naturally Swiss companies that I've never heard of, and I'm guessing most of the attendees are Swiss as well. I've only counted 6 Norwegians so far, the three of us from Objectware included. The other three are from Sun, two of them are doing talks on JavaDB later on. After some welcomes and intros there were some (dry) words from the sponsors, including Andreas Knöpfli, manager Sun, Switzerland, a guy from Elca, Swizz IT service company. Red Herring, some magazine. Farley Duvall i

So after a slightly delayed flight and some easy public transportation, we've now arrived in Zurich. Jazoon starts tomorrow, and it seems like we've (accidently) managed to book ourselves into the same hotel as where the conference takes place (Sheraton). Sweet! Unfortunately, our power-adapter won't fit the chargers of our laptops, so I've got approximately half an hour of battery time before I'm out. Will try to get a charger and post back frequently with reports on various talks through the week. Give me a shout if there are any particular talks in the program you think I should attend! I haven't really had the chance to sort out the schedule.

Today I decided to do a small experiment. I was scribbling up a tiny todo-list when I thought "Hey, why don't I do some rough estimation on how long these things will take?". This is what the list looked like at first (at 18:00): Short bike trip - done at 18:30 Do some planning for Objectware-uni (training for the new folks) - done at 19:00 Fiddle with personal bank-stuff, bills, etc - done at 19:30 Write this blog entry - done at 20:00 Do some maintenance programming for a customer - done at 22:00 So off I went on my little bike trip, trying out those new bike-shoes that click on to the pedals (did I mention that I cycle to work and I think everybody should do the same?). Naturally, I bumped into my neighbour that I had to help out with moving a fence, and neighbour-chat with for a while. By the time I got back it was 19:20. Darn. So I had to re-arrange my estimate: Bike and neighbour - done at 19:20 Objectware-uni - done at 19:30 (would have to be quick!) Bank business

Coming up, Jazoon, a four day conference filled with interesting talks on various Sun-self-bragging campaigns, Java 6 and 7 stuff, and some interesting things about JavaDB, Java Content Repository, scripting languages, etc. Me and two colleagues from Objectware are heading down there on sunday the 24th of June. My first time in Switzerland, so it's definitely going to be a cool trip. And if I get some chance I'll drop by some old friends in Basel. Oh, speaking of which. You Jazoon guys might want to change the default Magnolia log-in on your website ;) Regarding my JavaZone work, I'm not going to put too much effort into it before I know whether the abstact has been accepted. Will probably get feedback before the 20th of June. That's all I have time for today! Need to get some sleep.

Today I've been busy playing Starcraft against some old mates (we haven't played that stuff in like 7 years or something). I did however get some feedback on my JavaZone abstract. Turns out I've been a bit too fluffy in the abstract, and I have until thursday to elaborate on some key points. Just to let you know I'm busy enough :)