Devoxx (half)day 2

First talk of the day:
java ee 6 platform
- java ee 6 and Glassfish 3
- history
- new features of jee6: jax-rs, jcdi, @inject, bean validation, interceptors, managed beans
- less xml
- pruning of jax-rp,c jax-r and entity cpm 2.x (jee 7 might kill them totally)
- ejb lite
- managed beans 1.0
- jpa 2.0 annotations (are cool)
- servlets 3.0
- ejb 3.1
- live coding again (have I said how cool this is?)
- jsf 2.0 (mojarra)

Second talk of the day
SOA in practice
- loose coupling is not always an answer
- technical driven vs business driven services
- esb is not always an answer
- meet the SOA stack
eam + bp + esb/web services + services (business driven self contained interfaces)
- conway's law

organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations

- satir change model

- you can't buy SOA
- reuse is not a valid business case for SOA
- distributed process development brings added costs
- SOA needs to be supported from the top down and established from the bottom up

Whoa… that was heavy! Very nice presentation from Nicolai Josuttis (I even ran to buy his book afterwards).

In unrelated news… 2 days. That's how long my project lasted without me. I am going back to the office tomorrow to help fight the chaos demonstrated in the graph above... but hopefully will be present in the last 2 days of the conference!

Tot ziens!

Devoxx day 1

First victory: Got here on time despite the dutch traffic early in the morning.

First talk of the day:
jBPM in Action
Introduction:
- What are business processes;
- History.. hey it started in Belgium (humm figures);
- What is BPM and jBPM in particular;
jBPM Concepts
- BPMN 2
- BPEL 2
Demo Examples
-(cool, live coding :-D)
- how to configure Eclipse for jBPM4
- custom activity types.. nice!
- (should I have been in the cloud computing session instead? well, RH did pay my ticket…)
What's next
- Insame amount of new features in the incubator

Second talk of the day:
SOA, OpenESB and OpenSSO Programming with Passion
- Based on http://www.javapassion.com/soaprogramming
- WSDL
- BPEL
- JBI
- openESB
- Java EE Service Engine
- IEP
- EDM
OpenSSO
- SSO within an enterprise

Third talk of the day:
The Jungle of the Web - A Way to Survive by Detecting Fast Flux Botnets
- botnets
- different flux types: single, double, hydra flux
- detecting fast-flux botnets
- fluxy a tool to help detect fast-flux botnet

Fourth talk of the day:
The Next Generation Profiling and Diagnostics Tools
...
Ok, this turned out to be just a pitch for Oracle's JRockit toolset which made it pretty useless for me. As far as alternative JVM's go I'll stick with Azul. :-D

Still, I have to admit that the Mission Control toolset is pretty impressive, and the promised new features in the upcoming version 4 are making me think on how I can fit this in my Architecture.

BOFs
Unfortunately I am too tired to attend. I would have enjoyed this one and specially The Java tuning puzzlers talk. A well, I'll have to check the screencasts when they come up.

Tot ziens!

News of the world

What an exciting week this has been!

We started of with a native Mono release for OS X, which you can read more about at Miguel's blog.

Then it was Netbeans 6, which is IMHO the best IDE for Ruby and Rails development and it's yours for free. Here.

And today we can rejoice at the launch of Rails 2.0.

Hurray for us!

On a side-note, I just wanted to share with you a conversation I had with a mono hacker regarding the look of Mono on Mac OS X, even if in a somewhat twisted way for better reading :

Me > People are complaining it doesn't look "native".
She > Well, there are two answers for that:
Novell is currently concentrating on making Mono on the Mac a stable development platform. The System.Windows.Forms layer has support for theming and we could accept contributions for a Quartz theme that uses the HIToolbox APIs. Or, in a shorter version, we accept patches.

And then she said goodbye with the funniest tagline I've heard this week :"nothing like a linux forum to complain about how a windows technology looks on a mac"

Leopard Tech Talks

Last monday we've had the first Leopard Tech Talk in Lisbon, but much to my regret I didn't made it.

That's not at all unexpected since I'm having so many "shitty work days (tm)" but what's surprising me the most is that even with such a loyal and committed Mac fan base here, I haven't read a single post or e-mail about it.

Did anyone go? What was it like?

What is it about the 19th of April?

Red Hat Storage Management
Indie Lisboa
Linux 2007
E-MKT 2007

And what about the rest of us who don't have the gift of ubiquity?

Perl Tech Meeting

Yesterday I went to my first Perl Tech Meeting and I can't stress enough how geeky those guys are.

Having lots of easy going, funny intelligent people talking about something they like is always fun, but this was actually very informative, since there were some tech talks that covered areas such as better debugging, replacing bash with perl, using C to improve Perl scripts benchmarks (dam, this guy was awesome!).

I specially enjoyed meeting Francisco Cabrita hearing Miguel Duarte and José Castro and some others whose names elude me right now.

Anyway, thanks to SAB(offline for _way_ too long) and Penantes for the invite.

May the Camel be with you!

Long time no see

I was forced to observe the shutdown day for over a week (not really, but i'll get back to that) because my Macbook died on me.

It's never a good experience to be away from your mac, but to deal with the Apple support around here one must be prepared for the worst.

From telling me that the customer service guy wouldn't reply my e-mails because he had personal problems (hey that's funny,i have a personal problem too! MY MAC IS BROKEN! what a coincidence) to taking some 20 phone calls to finally get some answers (I have witnesses. And they're still laughing) i've seen it all with these guys.

If we consider that a large part of Apple sales come from mac owners showing off the “superior hardware and the user experience a mac gets you” to their friends and coworkers (I myself am responsible for at least 4 switchers over the past 6 months), one should expect a better level of emphasis on customer satisfaction right?

Thankfully I still have my trusty Asus laptop that managed to deliver the daily fix of web surfing, and getting most of my work done so I really didn't had to be offline for so long. I was just too negative to write anything useful.

Anyway the XVI Jornadas de Informática an event hosted at UBI went by, and this year at least I heard something about what happened there. In Ruby in Portuguese website there are even some of the presentations given there available for download.

My humble 2 cents however would be to manage to get some more publicity before it happens.

While on the subject of great events happening in this little
fascist square of dirt by the sea, the fifth national encounter on Open Technologies will be happening in Lisbon on the 19th, and although the organization is hosted by Sybase and seems to be very professional and extremely interesting, my favorite Solaris Admin - slash -Farmer boy already managed to find a bug on the event page.

Also, today I'm going to my first Perl Mongers tech meeting and I'm hopping that I'll be able to learn something from those guys, 'cos the Perl I know wouldn't move the proverbial mountain.