Its about 6.30PM here in Prague and the day 1 of The Server Side Java Symposium (TSSJS) is wrapping up for the day with an award ceremony (sponsored by GigaSpaces). I am too tired and sleepy to carry on after yesterday’s long flight and lack of sleep but thought of posting a few interesting things that I noticed here at the symposium today.

Firstly the venue and the setup is pretty cool and there are over 300 people from many parts of Europe. The day started with a brilliant keynote by Stephan Janssen. His topic being: Supporting the RIA Space. (A Java conference kickstarts with a talk on RIA — interesting! isn’t it?). If you were at JavaOne this year and attended Stephan’s talk then you probably heard a lot of this. I had to step out of his talk a little early to get setup for my own talk, which followed Stephan’s. I spoke about JPA/Hibernate and RIA integration. Was happy to have a house full of attendees at my talk but was surprised when I saw only a few hands go up on my question: “How many of you are familiar with RIA?”. In fact a few were getting familiar with the subject only from the keynote that had preceeded my talk. Very interesting, again!

TSSJS speaker lineup is quite impressive. There were talks by many well known people, including Nati Shalom (GigaSpaces), Alexandru Popescu (InfoQ), Michael Keith (EJB 3.0), Guillaume LaForge (Groovy/Grails), Holly Cummins (IBM) and Geert Bevin (Terracotta, UMYN & RIFE) on day 1 itself. There were many other good speakers today: its just that I presume the ones I listed are better known than others. There are many more good speakers in the next couple of days to come. Obviously I could not attend all the sessions today so it would be unfair for me to comment much about the ones I never even peeked into.

Both the Groovy talks (Alexdru’s and Guillaume’s) were cool and well attended. Java Performance (Holly’s) and JVM Clustering (Geert’s) were very popular as expected.

These days when you go to a Java conference its a lot about dynamic languages (and their existence on the JVM) and the first day here reinforced the same feeling. However, one interesting change was a company called ZeroTurnAround , which promised dynamic redeployment of Java applications (far better than the JVM HotSwap). Their tool is called JavaRebel (I spoke with Jevgeni — who carries a fascinating title of Lead Rebel in the company) and he was kind enough to walk me through a lot of examples where Java code could be redployed effortlessly. There message could be interpreted as: “Java can be dynamic in some ways too, without being dynamically typed or interpreted!” If you are a Scala fan, you will be happy to know that JavaRebel comes built-in with Lift, the emerging Sacla framework. Talking about frameworks, there are too many in the world of Java to catch up these days and that is the topic of my next presentation at TSSJS this Friday. I am not going to miss the opportunity to express my frustration dealing with over supply then! Wish these framework makers found a way to create alternative energy sources; with their commitment there with be no oil crises today :)

More tomorrow!

Tom Baeyens (jBPM / JBoss workflow project lead) has a good post on the jBPM (JBoss workflow) community day held at the Guinness brewery in Dublin. Warning - slides may contain pictures of people drinking beer.

In case you missed How to combine (jBPM) Workflow and (Drools) Business Rules (what do you mean that you were at Java One instead?) - here’s the summary. Slideset is available on this blogpost.

• Workflow (e.g. JBoss jBPM) is great - it allows you to take spaghetti code and draw it as a workflow diagram (flowchart) so that it can be reviewed by the business (the nice people who pay our wages). You then attach standard (Java) actions to these steps.
• Only problem is when you come to a decision node (the one circled in red below): How do you decide to go left or right (in the workflow)? Normally this is coded in Java - good for us, but hidden from those nice business people (which means that this is more room for errors-in-translation).
• Business Rules allow you to keep those decision making rules in Plain English: When something is true , then do this. That’s it. The rule engine does most of the hard work.
• Integrating Workflow and Rules is easy. Use JBoss Seam (link) or do it by hand (link). And it works on non-JBoss web / app servers such as Websphere, Oracle Application Server, Tomcat and Weblogic.
• Repeat x6 : Use workflow and rules. Use workflow and rules …

More information on:

• JBoss Workflow
• JBoss Rules

In a maybe related development, Tom Baeyens is now using strangely Rules-y like examples over on his workflow blog ….

Vincent Pardington has a good post up on DZone beginning an SOA pitfalls series. His first post, on NIH in the SOA world is a good one, but I think misses one important point:

First of all, the idea of a SOA is to reuse existing services. If department A builds a get_personal_details service, there’s not much point in department B building a get_address service. Assuming the get_personal_details service returns the full address.

Of course, there may be multiple reasons why department B would do this:

1. They don’t know about the get_personal_details service. In this case there is no proper service registry, a point we will discuss later.
2. The way they design their application does not cause them to think about reuse. This is one of the things that can happen when applying Big Design Up Front. Something we will also discuss in a future blog (way to build up the suspense, not? ).
3. They’ve known about the get_personal_details service but they decide not to use it. Maybe they don’t know what it does exactly, maybe they don’t trust department A to get it right or keep it right, or maybe they’d rather have full control over the implementation. In this case, you have some classical NIH hitting you. This is the time to discuss the ownership of the services and allow both department A and department B to feel in control.

I think there is one more here that is organizational. In my experience, services in the enterprise tend to be developed as part of an application. The problem is, they aren’t staffed as standalone products after the application for which they were originally designed goes into maintenance mode. Let me set up a #3 to Vincent’s storyboard:

Team B knows about the get_personal_details service, but the address returned doesn’t include the shipping code for the address. They would love to use it, but Team A is now working on the next project. Team A’s boss doesn’t want to spare resources to amend expand the service, and Team B’s boss doesn’t want to take ownership of the service.

The problem is one of perspective. In reality, Team A built TWO applications: One for the end user and one for developers and they should be slotted to do ongoing enhancements to either one of those. I know at Manheim there was an earnest effort to establish a product ownership system fro the “Services” products. The problem there was, nobody in management wants to own them.

I know there was a great article in ACM Queue a little over a year ago about the services infrastructure at Amazon. Their solution was to treat the services products as a profit center: every call back to underlying services was “billed” to the application group making the call. This has the effect of encouraging the service owners to add value to the services infrastructure, as well as encourage upstream applications to be frugal in their stress to the back end. I found this to be a really compelling structure, but I can also see how it might lead to some… poor… software decisions in a less disciplined organization.

So this has made the rounds on /.

I will say this about UML: some of us are visual people. As the token Left-Handed guy in the software world, I admit, I see the world in somewhat visual terms. I think some UML is valuable. Class diagrams, obviously. Sequence diagrams, sometimes. Use case diagram, rarely. But this goes to a larger issue with UML:

UML is not a process.

Is RUP dying a miserable death? Yes. I admit, I still think Coad is a demi-god in the OOAD world. Actually, even if you “know” the UML “answers” on the IBM cert exams, you are likely overly ceremonial. However, if UML is suffering it is because of this one fact:

People don’t pay for tools anymore.

TogetherJ 4.x was amazing. That was the last release before it became redonkulously expensive, but I loved it. Today I use NB. There are a couple of commercial UML tools, but Sun has a free UML tool for NetBeans that round trips. Frankly, the problem with Sun’s is the printed output blows, and they certainly don’t have the fantastic integrated UML/JavaDoc output that I remember so fondly from Together.

Is UML dead? No. However, I think UML documents have a place in the Agile world that they have lost. The problem is UML-as-Process was never really a great idea. UML-as-documentation in an Agile-Refactoring-CI world: sure. Someone just give us the tooling at a reasonable cost, and UML will come back with a vengeance.

The Phoenix Mars landing is tonight (Sunday), you can Watch NASA TV starting at 6:00 PM EST. You can expect live commentary to start around 6:30 PM EST.

If you want to follow along and watch the landing, there is an interesting program called Mars24 Sunclock, which is available from NASA. This Mars24 Java application is bundled as an application for Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux. I was able to download and start it without knowing I was dealing with a Java application, and it is a pretty impressive piece of GIS software for the Martian environment.

Here’s a picture of the Phoenix landing site from Mars24:

I downloaded it, and unpacked it to see what it uses. Read more…

Stumble upon this blog post via Google Reader today, and I don’t think it has received much attention. Michael Podrazik wrote about his prediction that Java will be the next Google App Engine Language. Quoting from Michael’s prediction:

Steve Yegge blogged recently about how you are only allowed to write C++, Java, Python and JavaScript code at Google. He went into even more detail here. So if Google is going to go with something other than these it would have to be the result of an explicit change in policy.

He continues:

So how reasonable would it be to offer a hosted Java environment? While almost any hosting provider currently gives you the option of running PHP, lots of ‘em give you Perl, etc. virtually nobody except boutique hosting providers let you run Java. There’s a good reason for this. First of all, Java is an enterprisey language and the apps that use Java on the server side are not especially well suited to run in a shared environment. Secondly, even if the market existed, there are technical limitations that make running Java in a shared resource pool problematic. … The fact that you can’t just run a Java program using an Apache module or through CGI, and the fact that there tends to be a mismatch in the skill sets that *nix ops people usually have and the skill set required to effectively manage a Java app just further muddies the waters.

This echoes the sentiments expressed Deployment is Colonization but also brings up an interesting possibility. Could Google be getting ready to solve the long-standing issue with Java application hosting by doing something revolutionary?

Podrazik goes on to predict that Google will release a reduced capability JSE and do something along the lines of Android (Dalvik) and GWT’s reduced Java API.

I pinged some people who should know about if it were something that was in the works, and the response leads me to believe that this might just be conjecture. But, it is interesting conjecture nonetheless. The comment threads are equally as pessimistic, but the idea that Java is the next Google App Engine makes sense in the context of Yegge’s statement that Google only codes in C++, Java, Python, and Javascript.

All eyes toward Google I/O.

(C’mon the last post was my JavaOne session notes? Where’s everybody at?)

Sitting in the FindBugs session, it’s pretty interesting. The last time I interacted with static analysis it was a product from Parasoft (?) and it wasn’t that compelling. FindBugs looks interesting, simple, and is integrated with Hudson. Everyone seems to be moving to Hudson, Kohsuke has created a very compelling CI server.

Participated in a Q+A session after yesterday’s keynote. Sat down with Neil Young, Larry Johnson, some Sun executives, and a small group of reporters including Tim O’Reilly. Young and Johnson struck me as animated and excited about both the archive project and the electric car (more below). Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb also covered the Q+A session on ReadWriteWeb. Here are my informal impressions / quotes from the meeting. Read on for quotes and details…

My entries are a day behind. I’m not a reporter, I’m a blogger, and I think it is more important to spend time talking to people than it is to work to some deadline in the press room. There’s a lot of interesting stuff going on this year, a general sense that Java has it’s mojo back. Here are some quick observations (a larger piece on Neil Young is in review at the moment):

• Bob Lee has a lot of energy, you can just tell when you meet him. People are flocking to the Google booth to hear him speak of Guice. Go to his BoF tonight, whether you use Guice or not, he’s an interesting dude.
• The video codec is welcome to many. This neutralizes hundreds of negative blog posts from me about video on the Java platform.
• Rod Johnson is impressed with Glassfish. He’s as surprised that he said this as you are. Rod talked to me about the new application platform Springsource released, the Covalent acquisition, and business in general. In short, the app platform is all about OSGi, the acquisition with Covalent gives them really deep coverage of both Tomcat and HTTPd, and there’s more to come.
• Schwartz is definitely “on message” this year. He does seem a little weary, no? Maybe that’s just me seeing the conference through the lens of the 4 cent per share loss. When asked in a press conference if he would comment on the upcoming layoffs he answered with, “I’m here to talk about JavaOne”. Everybody seems to think he’ll be gone in a year, I disagree. I think the MySQL acquisition and the down market provide a good cover for him to restructure without looking like a bad guy. I think he’s a developer’s CEO, and I shudder to think of a Sun run by some soulless suit. Keep the blogging long-hair, everybody likes him.
• The Maven dudes wants to hear your feedback positive or negative. Seek them out - twitter BrianEFox. Seek out Jason van Zyl, he wants to talk to you about Maven, Nexus, all that stuff.
• Met Raible for the first time in person, everyone was enjoying themselves at Zebulon last night. It is scary to be in the same room as all these open source people. From what I see, everybody gets along well. Everyone was making fun of my Mr. Maven sweatshirt (I wouldn’t be surprised if it shows up on someone’s blog.)
• Bruce Snyder and I talked about writing, he’s writing his current book (Manning) in DocBook, says I helped him make the decision. I’ll have to pre-emptively apologize, DocBook is a PITA, but, at the same time, I love it. Bruce is really committed to writing, we need more people like Bruce. We need more people to write.
• I found myself in a small group briefing with Neil Young yesterday, he’s an impressive (legendary) dude. A real geek, I kid you not. And, he’s focused on stuff like the environment and peace. Good choice for the keynote. I spoke to him and he spoke back to me, that’s when I realize I was speaking directly to Neil Young in a small group. Crazy, that dude’s famous.
• Geertjan is everywhere. Turn a corner, Geertjan! Open up a door, Geertjan! Netbeans is impressing some skeptics. Schwartz singled out Tor and Geertjan as great bloggers in response to a question (from me).
• Sun employees, business is pretty good out there. Every business owner I talk to at JavaOne thinks they’ll have a job for you. That’s the sense I get.
• I skipped the scripting stuff, not because I didn’t want to go, but because I have to go talk to some OpenLazslo dude. Ooops, I’m late. I’m always late, I’m a jerk.

So, the big kickoff for JavaOne. I guess there was news. Solaris on EC2, which is fine. More JavaFX demos. Expected that. Other than that, what?

So one thing that really struck me: Project Hydrazine. Can someone tell me what the hell that is? Listening to people talk it sounds like yet-another JINI style initiative, but nobody seems able to give me a straight answer. “Service discovery and auditing on the cloud” is no nebulous it might as well be a cloud.

Of course, getting a decent codec in the JRE is something that you would have though was obvious sometime around when, oh, YouTube fetched billions of Google dollars. At the end of the day, getting the On2 codec stack is the same as using Ogg anyway, no?

If there was one thing that really made me pay attention today, it was the tools demo at the end of the TechNote. Thank God someone at Sun found a clue on this one. Basically, the story is this: Sun has plugins for Photoshop and Illustrator that let you (read: your graphic designer) export to a JavaFX file with assets and appropriate names. This is a huge one. Whether it is GWT or Flex, the process story between design and code has been a rough one. Microsoft has Expression, which I think is a really amazing tool, but they are never going to be able to sell it to designers. The artsy side of this business is definitely filled with creatures of habit. They don’t change tools nearly as easily as the nerdier side. Adobe Thermo is promising, and they at least have a brand in that arty space. This is the first clearly smart thing I have seen do in a long time.

As for sessions, if you missed the Fortress session with Christine Flood, you missed something great. Fortress really excites me as a technology and she was a really great presenter. Will Pugh can certainly pack a room. The big session hall was standing room only for his Defective Java session. The multi-touch interface session was cool, but disappointing. Given that we are talking about Java on the iPhone, and multi-touch seems to be becoming more popular, I was hoping we would see something more like a new JSR for working with it. It was really DIY session on stuff I have seen a number of times now.

I also just have to mention I went to a Q&A with Schwartz and Green. Honestly, I hear stuff about Sun poking at people they want to work with — Apple, Google, etc — but Rich Green couldn’t seem to utter three sentences without making some seriously passive aggressive aside. Speaking on Android he noted, “They call it an open platform, I don’t know how many people have seen the code.” Well hell Rich. Sun calls JavaFX a product, I don’t know how many people have actually gotten their hands on it. Say what you want about Google source release strategy, they have an emulator, IDE support and first class docs available. And JavaFX has…

Seriously, though. What the hell kind of leader even makes that kind of comment. In the grand scheme of things, working with Google and Apple is in Sun’s interest. Why they would poke a badger with a pencil is beyond me.

Last year JavaOne got the UN guy and was trying to eradicate poverty; this year they got Neil Young and were showing off the cool stuff. CNET blogger Dan Farber has a good write-up and the video that tells you all about Neil Young’s appearance at JavaOne. Read it from the source. I will avoid repeating it.

The good part of this year’s showoff is that Blu Ray and BD-J are cool in reality and they do what they promise. It’s not poverty eradication, its higher resolution and better interactivity and better digital archiving so I guess its more achieveable ! If you know nothing about Blu Ray or are confused on the value it adds then maybe you will benefit from seeing Sun’s Webcast on Blu Ray and browsing hdcookbook.

With the web continuously morphing into the read-write digital media network, applications becoming increasing interactive and the dividing line between business applications and entertainment getting twisted if not necessairly blurred, its not far when quite a few Java developers may use technologies like BD-J to write their applications. To some of the so called — “enterprise developers” — this may seem alien and surely we are not talking about universal applicability of this technology, but don’t be surprised if such stuff starts creeping into your realm too.

The moral of the story (for Java developers) — “Start becoming cool, if you aren’t already !”
The question (for Sun) — “Is coolness directly proportional to increase in revenue?”
A request (to Google and Steve Jobs) — “Please stop driving everybody up the wall.”
A word (to the users) — “You are loving it :)”
A word (to speakers and event organizers) — “Start making friends with rock stars”

JavaFX.com is up and running! The problem is that it doesn’t work well on most browsers. The small fonts are unreadable when viewed in FireFox or Safari. The site takes a long time to load up. The only thing notable is the transition from one window/panel to the other. Considering almost everybody else can do this as well, I am a little confused what to look at and be impressed about :)

Maybe, I should be happy there is finally something there and not just vapourware, like we saw at last JavaOne.

For a second, lets take a look at what competition’s got :

Flex Showcase
Silverlight Showcase

Now you tell me, if Sun should have waited to get this all trim and proper or am I missing something out here?

CommunityOne was huge. Having been to various what-use-to-be NetBeans Day at what-used-to-be the Argent, seeing the Moscone filled with people for C1 was actually quite strange. In real terms, the experience didn’t seem that different, however.

CommunityOne works the big room

Again this year, another “panel” discussion about things that I really found mostly uninteresting. The chat centered around community and businesses relationships with the open source world. Given the people on the stage, I would have expected a much more interesting discussion. At least Tim wasn’t there being marginally on topic this year. (Sorry Tim :P)

Charlie preaches to the converted

The list of sessions for C1 was really overwhelming. It was impossible to get to everything you would have wanted to see. I opted to open the day with Charlie Nutter’s presentation on JVM languages. While obviously discussing JRuby, the presentation was a much more general discussion of how the non-Java Java languages can coordinate efforts: MOPs and invoker infrastructure, code generation, etc. I found it interesting, but the room was filled with serious language geeks (I was sitting with Jim and Tobias from the Jython team) and I suspect there wasn’t a whole lot there that these guys needed to be in a room to hear.

Big hats are in this year.

The Java Posse were the lunch entertainment again this year. They were, again, great. It is really a tough balance doing a gig like that. Last year they had prepared slides and a pretty firm script, but it felt a little artificial, where the best stuff from the Posse is usually relaxed. This year they were less formal and it was much more like a regular episode of the podcast, but it seemed they were having a discussion with each other and not engaging the audience fully. Like I said, that’s a tough problem.

The Atlassian guys ran a session of lightening talks, in which I represented my GWT spew. It felt very much like a re-run of the JPR evening session, given that all but one or two of the talks were given at the Roundup this year.

In the afternoon I went to the Redmonk Unconf in the hall. Wow, that was a spectacularly bad place to have the side events. It was incredibly noisy and traffic heavy — people basically had to walk through the Redmonk stuff and the Startup Camp peeps to get their free turkey sandwich. Even worse at the end of the day the crew started tearing up the whole facility to prep for the evening party. The content seems OK, but it isn’t on the list of great unconfs I have participated in.

At dinner a number of Java bloggers had a passing discussion of what we expected from the keynote. Mostly, nobody had any ideas aside from “Get Sun’s business house in order.” Well, let’s just say the actual discussion was much more colorful, but that was the gist.

At any rate, to summarize: C1 huge. So big I feel like I barely got to see any of it

Although JavaOne 2008 officially starts tomorrow, it commenced today with CommunityOne. Carrying on the trend that started a couple of years back JavaOne is continuing to emerge as an event for things more than just Java. For statistics sake at least 10% of the 391 sessions that make up the content catalog are about Groovy, Ruby, PHP, JavaScript or Python. Also like Java the conference itself it becoming a “platform” , with many mini events within it. There is the Groovy Meetup and the Agile Event and the Adobe presentations to name a few. Not to forget the numerous gatherings sponsored by Eclipse, JBoss, Adobe, Oracle and QCon are becoming events in their own right. Then there is the excitement around social networking at the event. So hope all of you at the event have fun mingling, learning, discussing and catching-up.

So I am going to break rules here, I am pretty sure, six ways from Sun-day (haHA!).

I am pretty sure I have never commented on this before, because, I agree with the 16,000 of you who will tell me it is in bad taste, but the first thing that always stands out in my mind about San Francisco? There are no black people here. Not that there are none. That is silly. I, however, come from Atlanta, a city with a 65% African American population. Moreover, I live in Midtown Atlanta. given the population averages, in my “hood” you are likely black and/or gay. In spite of its reputation, a city of straight white/asian/latino people is definitely a big change for me.