Posting this from ScribeFire, can’t believe I didn’t know about it before. Looks like a very cool way to post right from Firefox, with a decent editor to boot. Unfortunately doesn’t support MiniPost, which we use for the “Side notes”.
June, 2008
21
Jun 08
TSSJS Prague Afterthoughts
The event is over and I’m heading back home for another five days. This was my second time on TSSJS and it definitely felt different. Last time it was in Barcelona and we weren’t exhibiting (in fact ZeroTurnaround didn’t even exist yet). Also this year had a lot of changes for TheServerSide, with a bunch of new people on the team and a bunch of old people leaving.
The conference content this year was great. Unfortunately I didn’t get to sit in on much talks, but I heard other participants discuss them and I know that the speakers who were there always deliver. There was quite a range of topics and none of the sponsored bullshit (there were sponsored keynotes, but apparently they were decently technical instead of unrefined marketing).
From a speaker perspective it was quite nice as well. I got to hang out with really cool dudes and had loads of fun in the evenings. Also my talks were surprisingly well attended this year, so I couldn’t be happier! The only hiccup was the “Special Appreciation Dinner” to which only half the speakers were invited. That wasn’t very well communicated and the choice of invitees was also very weird. Kudos to Brian for handling the situation and inviting everyone in the end.
However from a vendor perspective I was rather disappointed. The vendor space was hard to access and very dark, and the breaks between sessions were extremely short. The dedicated “vendor networking” time was put in the early morning before sessions and noone bothered coming. Perhaps for vendors who only need to make a few sales it was better, but for us numbers count. Luckily one of the (well attended) talks was (among others) about JavaRebel so in the end it played out OK for us. But I do think that next year TSS guys should either improve the situation considerably or do the conference without a trade show.
Finally I want to thank Geert, who was kind enough to record both my talks on his spanking new HD camcorder. I’m not sure at the moment if and when I could publish them (one recording takes more than 3 Gb at the moment), but at the very least I can make a podcast from the Fireside Chat we did with Geert and Guilaume.
21
Jun 08
Big Google Builds
Just some interesting tidbits that Mike Aizatsky mentioned about Google build process — the executables can be 300 MB big (’cause everything is linked statically) and they have a home-grown build system for making them. Cool stuff!
18
Jun 08
Live: Stephan Janssen TSSJS Keynote on RIA
What is RIA? “Old body with a new face” — just a new client slammed on top of the same old applications server. The obligatory Wikipedia quote is “too vague” :) The spectrum of RIA apparently includes “Internet-enabled client”, “Smart client” and “Web 2.0″.
Turns out the “Smart client” refers to the JavaFX ability to be dragged from the applet in the browser to become a desktop app. AFAIK this wasn’t even demoed for JavaFX specially, but for 1.6u10 applets, so this one misses the target for me. And as for the JavaFX “unified deployment model” we’ll see that when it actually gets there. Until then I’ll remain skeptical.
The keynote will present same case study for AIR, JavaFX, Flex and GWT. A Silverlight demos exists, but isn’t included in the talk.
Going through the data exchange formats: HTML, XML, JSON and binary. Caucho Hessian gets a mention as the binary protocol that works over HTTP. Also Adobe AMF. Apparently Flamingo exposes existing services via binary protocol in the Adobe space. Doesn’t binary have 4/3 overhead on top of HTTP? Is it really worth it?
Now going through communication strategies: RPC, WS-*, REST and JMS. In Servlets 2.0 you can use JAX-RS to expose your POJOs via REST (wow! doesn’t RoR do that since, like, forever?). Spring folks have their own solution, seems like they now ignore the Sun folks altogether. JMS isn’t really a comm protocol, so I don’t get how it fits here. Apparently just to mention that Adobe BlazeDS supports JMS. Everyone else would use Comet.
The case study is (of course!) Parlleys.com.
The first version was done in AJAX. Problems with that included:
- Back-button support. People do get used to its quirks nowadays.
- Cross platform/browser support. JavaScript on Internet Explorer sucks, especially on Macs.
- Securing AJAX. Someone voted 100 stars on one of the talks by calling the server-side directly. This isn’t really a problem with AJAX, man :) That will come with any server-side application.
The next variant is still AJAX, but using GWT. Lots of sliding in and sliding out, prettier interface. The GWT experience:
- It’s Java! Woohoo!
- Back button works. Might have mentioned that you have to define the back actions pretty much manually. Also problems on Internet Explorer.
- Works on different browsers out-of-the-box. As long as you don’t need something arcane :)
- Sucks: GWT sites not indexed by Google. Supposedly fixed in GWT 1.5.
Flex is next. Demo looks identical to GWT. The big difference is that Flash can go full screen (erm, you can go full screen with a browser as well, what’s up with that?). As soon as the AIR application is launched the browser app will change to accommodate the extra desktop settings. You can download the talks for playing offline and so on. Pretty fancy.
- Flex/AIR just works
- Lot’s of different animations available
- Lots of UI components
- Bookmark and history support
- Good Eclipse support
- Bad: Hard to do unit tests
- Bad: Different deployment strategies for desktop and web.
- Bad: Not Google friendly. Hacks possible, but not too easy.
- Bad: No socket listeners so couldn’t implement P2P.
Stephan obviously likes Adobe products a lot and it feels in the talk. E.g. one could likely develop a quite similar offline support for downloading and playing talks on top of GWT with Google Gears, but that’s not mentioned in the talk. However I’m yet to see the JavaFX demo.
The JavaFX demo looks slightly cooler. JavaFX will have native support for Flash video codec, good stuff. Strongly typed and Java-like. Swing, Java2D and Java3D APIs available. Animation and effect library on top of that. Would be much cooler if all this stuff wouldn’t be just one paper… No mentions of the offline functionality as well. Obviously possible, but would be interesting to know how transition from applet to desktop and from online to offline works. Don’t think that anyone outside Sun knows that yet :)
In the end a very cool demo of the actual talk publishing using Parleys. You can add both the video and slides and likely audio and arrange them on a usual timeline. Can’t do that with a web client :)
16
Jun 08
Ultralightweight
EJB 3.x are ultralightweight — OMG! What’s next? Weightless? Antigravity frameworks? And I thought “Plain Old Java Object” was funny :)