Java SE 6u10, RIAs, Java EE Hacks, Martin Odersky (Scala), Dalibor Topic (openJDK), Ted Neward (.net & Java) - JAX 08 afterglow 📎
I really enjoyed JAX this year. I had to reschedule the trip and arrive earlier at Wednesday - the reason was: GreenFire, the OpenSource Heating Control (the name OSHC would be nice as well) was nominated for the JAX innovation award. The bigger surprise was the 4.th prize and the ...audience award (see the german posts (1, 2)). I got so many emails and questions about GreenFire afterwards, that we decided to launch a spontaneous BOF at thursday - 60 geeks interesting in heating systems and Java participated. We discussed further possibilities to save energy - it was fun.
Just after the nomination Martin Odersky gave a great talk about Scala - and explained the principles (functional programming, closures, operator overloading) and mentioned "reactive design" and "context switching of this", what somehow attracted me. After the talk we discussed it more deeply - it turns out that "reactive" can be compared with "bind" in Java FX or declarative PropertyChangeListener in Java. What's cool as well, in Scala it is possible to switch the context of "this" via mixins, so it opens some interesting approaches and patterns - it's almost dependency injection.
At Thursday I gave a talk about the impact of JDK 6u10 to the RIA landscape and pragmatic approaches for maintainable RIAs. It turned out, that only a fraction of the audience knew Nimbus and JDK6u10 - so it was easy to impress the participants hacking in real time a small Desktop app with data binding and switching to Nimbus afterwards.
Although Dalibors Key Note at Thursday was rather high-level, you have to know, that Dalibor is the creator or Kaffe.org - an alternative implementation of Sun's JDK. We used in several embedded projects - and it worked great.
Thursday evening we had a lunch together. I started a intense discussion with Ted Neward about Object Relational Mapping (if you have the chance ask Ted about this :-)), and Dependency Injection in EJB 3.0. We chatted with Dalibor Topic about interesting strategies for desktop java as well.
I gave a whole day workshop about Pragmatic Java EE 5 at Friday. It started with an experiment - instead introducing Java EE 5 in theory with slides, I wrote a sample CRUD application - from scratch (workshop management :-)) with WebServices, JMS, Interceptor, JPA-persistence and Dependency Injection in the first out and deployed it several times to the server. I tested the application outside the container as well. I explained the principles on real code.
At Friday came Juergen Petri to me and gave me the O'Reilly book "NetBeans RCP" - it turned out, that he participated at the EntwicklerTage Workshop 2007 in which I used Netbeans 6.0. After the workshop he decided to write a book about Netbeans RCP... I reviewed the contents of the book already - it seems to be good.
I'm already looking forward to Jax in ...San Jose in October - hopefully the JAX-spirint will not get lost.