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!

Making the enterprise see red - part I

Ruby trough Rails has been a poster-child for the so called web 2.0, but in the enterprise level the adoption rate hasn't been all that remarkable.

Rather than go trough an extensive diatribe about how adoption rates in the enterprise for just about any open source technology is always necessarily slow, because no self respecting OSS programmer plays golf, I'll just list some of the perceived weaknesses and shortcoming usually attributed to Ruby.
- Contrary to Perl, it doesn't come installed by default on just about every Unix-like OS;
- The treathing model used is week;
- Rails doesn't scale;
- It's just a fad, and it will go away before it matures;
- Poor Unicode support;
- No single good IDE and Text Editors are soo 80's;
- Nobody wants to learn yet another language especially when there is close to 0 employability for it;

While most of these are (at least to some extent) true, there are many projects that aim at overcoming them. And Ruby itself is still just version 1.8.6 at this point.

One such project seems to be catching enough wind behind it so that it could drive Ruby into mass (wishful thinking here...) adoption. JRuby.

Now, one might expect that the "J" would stand for Japanese, but remarkably it stands for Java. Isn't that ironic? Ruby is sometimes hailed as "What programmers should be using to still have time for a personal life" contrary to Java's "Write once. Then again, Just one more time... Ok, call your mom and cancel dinner" motto.

Jruby (which just recently reached the 1.0 mark) is a pure Java implementation of Ruby, and it's developed by Thomas Enebo and Charles Nutter with Ola Bini also being credited here and there, and, to some extent, sponsored by SUN. It aims at being more that just another implementation of Ruby (not that there are many...) which means that while still programming in pure Ruby, a coder can now enjoy the following added benefits:
- Java's scaling capabilities since Ruby code now runs inside a JVM which means parallelization in multi-processor setups ;
- An optimized Database connectivity with JDBC;
- Same level of Java's Unicode support;
- Garbage Collection handled by Java. (don't we all appreciate that?);
- A great IDE (Netbeans 6. Packed with all typical goodies plus code completion and a Swing Form Builder, it just might be the VB6 of the XXI century), plus a pretty good one (XCode + a hack);
- Access to those millions of lines of code in Java classes;

And last but not least : Integration. This is the one that's going bring it home.

With Jruby and a rails plugin called GoldSpike (previously rails-integration) we're a simple rake command away from turning any Rails app into a standard WAR file, which in turn can be deployed in either Tomcat or Glassfish or presumably just about any other applet container.

What this means is, in an enterprise environment where you have all these layers (think MVC in different LAN segments) set up and where any innovation is foreseen as potentially disruptive if not outright forbidden, we can easily introduce Ruby and Rails code, and from a manager's point of view its a win-win situation where the developers get things done faster, and the implemented structure is maintained without any hiccups. And they still get Sun's level of support.

In parts II and III I'll be showing some code and examples of rapid deployment with JRuby.