CRYPTOCHAOS

I have to admit that I surfed a few sessions today. Basically there were a number of interesting session running concurrently so I started with the most interesting and sometimes cut out to catch the tail end of another....

Here are a few:

TS-3513 Think MDBs Are Only for Java Message service? J2EE Connectors Demystified.

This one would have probably been interesting if the speaker was intelligible. Incomprehensible, English as a third language

TS-7659 Runtime Aspects with JVM Support.

This was an incredible session and I'll post more about it in a separate entry

TS-3268 Java Technology Performance Myths Exposed.

Very informative presentation. Basically, the new JSE 5.0 features have no appreciable impact on performance... so use them. Object pooling only makes sense for very large objects that require long setup. Multi-core chips will shift some of the performance issues to lock management and require much more synchronization then most developers would expect.

TS-7849 Omnisicent Debugging

A technology more for retrospectively stepping through a program run and inspecting memory. This works by instrumenting applications and recording each execution step and all memory state changes. Interesting, but sounds really slow.

TS-7212 Clustering, Consistency and Caching: An Implementor's View of JSR 107

Thought this would focus more on clustering, but actually focused on caching so I bailed on this one 1/2 way through

TS-1073 The New Weblogic Server 9.0

Interesting but basically a laundry list of features expected in 9.0... Think quick fly over a city, but I would have preferred a walking tour.

TS-7725 Java EE Ease of Development: Platform Specification and Tools Perspective

Basically just a walk through a number of tools and how they currently support Java EE development... no insite here so I bailed and walked over to the next talk.

TS-3281 Finalization, Threads, and the Java Technology Memory Model

Incredibly complex, but interesting. The bottom line here is "avoid finalizers at all costs!"

BOF-9385 Apt Usage of APT: When and How to Use the Annotation Processing Tool

Compared APT to other templating tools. I walked away feeling that APT needs more work. Can't wait till this is standardized though.

BOF-9467 Latest Trends in Java Technology Management and Monitoring

Waste of time... the latest trend in management and monitoring???? use JMX. I didn't need a BOF to tell me that.

BOF-9161 Exploring Annotation-Based Programming Through the APT and Mirror API's

Great talk on APT usage and upcoming standardization. The BEA guys also demonstrated Eclipse support. Annotations will be real useful in a few years;)

BOF-9441 Practical Application of Aspects in Everyday Development

Interesting talk about some uses of AOP. Also points out that AOP will be really practical and useful... in a few years;)

The most attended session on the first day of JavaOne was Java Business Integration: A Foundation for SOA

Sun purchased SeeBeyond this morning. Scott McNealy stated:

This is not an example of stunt acquisition!

Java owns the Mars Lander market.

It's taken 10 years to achieve 1 billion Java smart cards on the market, but it's expected to reach 2 billion within 3 years.

Brazilian HealthCare has standardized on Java for the nations healthcare systems and has written 2.5 million lines of code in 4 months

There are 4.5 million Java technology developers and 550 user groups and 912 Java Community Process program members.

While attending BEA's general session yesterday, I fully expected that I would hear all about the proprietary features that differentiated Weblogic from the rest of the J2EE container crowd. Of course that's part of what I heard, but Chief Technology Officer Mark Carges also discussed issues that Enterprise developers have been struggling with since J2EE was first released. Mark, pointed out that the Open Source community is pointing the way to a kinder more gentle J2EE development strategy. Features like:

 

POJO - Simplify enterprise development by using plain old Java objects.

Dependency Injection - Support for inversion of control, where the container provides the resource instead of requiring the component to wire the resource in. Dependencies are resolved declaratively, simplifying code and unit testing. Supports test driven development.

Meta Data - The ability to leverage annotations for inline meta data to avoid seperate XML descriptor file proliferation.

AOP - leverage Aspect Oriented Programming to support seperation of concerns and simplify implementation of cross-cutting concerns.

I then expected Mark to announce a new BEA product that would address this... or at lease reposition an old one. But to my supprise, he announced that BEA will formally begin to support a set of Open Source Frameworks. The Spring strategic partnership is the first strategic anouncment.

BigDecimal is, by default, unlimited scale. This could cause unexpectedly long string representations of floating point numbers to be transfered.

There is virtually no impact when moving from simple types to complex type

When only a small amount of xml needs to be processed in a large document, use XML attachements.

Error codes perform better than SOAP Faults. If your going to be throughing alot of SOAP faults, consider using error codes instead.

Ed Yourdon, Foreward to "Managing Software Requirements, A Unified Approach"

The data shows that some software project failures are indeed caused by sloppy programming, but a number of recent studies demonstrate rather convincingly that poor requirements management may be the single largest cause of project failure.

As it was, I wasn’t aware I’d set foot in the middle of one of the bloodiest and most protracted battles ever fought in the UNIX world, so I replied in kind. Vi, I argued, is for masochists and lickspittles on some sort of bizarre kick that causes second-year college students to run away to monastic cults until they get tired of eating porridge and sweeping the floors with rush brooms that are too short. Emacs, on the other hand, is a comfortable tool meant to be used by people who want a hand in personalizing the text-editing experience, the most important thing a real UNIX user ever does. People who use vi, I posited, are backwards and probably use the word “new-fangled” while they tug on their suspenders.

from - "The Joy of Linux"