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This is a presentation I’ve given at TSSJS’08. Hope you enjoy it :)

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.

Lately there has not been much time to post as we are working on a lot of stuff before the summer vacation. We are exhibiting again at TSSJS: Europe and this time I am going with Juhan Aasaru, who is also the guy working with me on typesafe DSLs, specially the SQL one, which we’ll announce soon.

This time besides the booth I’ll also be giving two talks that you are welcome to attend if you’re in Prague. One of them is Zero Turnaround in Java Development, which will be more of a panel with Geert Bevin (the guy behind RIFE and continuations in Java) and Guillaume LaForge (Groovy main guy); should be loads of fun. The other talk is Typesafe Embedded Java DSLs and is based on the research article we wrote recently; this one may be less fun, but I’ll cover lot of interesting stuff we came up with.

Hopefully some of you reading this blog are also coming to Prague. If that’s the case let us know in the comments and we can taste the famous Czech beer together :)

This is a guest post by Rein Raudjärv, who at the moment is with Toomas Römer at the Great Indian Developer Summit. Edited by Jevgeni Kabanov for brevity and to fit with other blog content.

Our trip started after a big birthday party. I slept in (my phone battery ran out of power) and got no time for breakfast or anything. There were almost 25 extra kilos of luggage and with a re-check-in to a local Indian airline in Delhi we decided to leave our back wall and some T-shirts in the Tallinn office. We got to Finland quickly and easily.

The flight to Delhi took about 7 hours. The landing at about midnight was delayed because of the thunderstorm above the airport. The first impression of India was high temperature (above 30 degrees Celsius). There already were guys waiting at the airport waiting to carry your luggage to the nearest (his cousin’s) taxi. We had to use the taxi to get to the next airport. People were sleeping outside the building — we didn’t understand why they were not allowed to enter. Inside most of people including the personal was sleeping as well.

We got to the flight to Bangalore (officially named Bangaluru) in the second morning. The taxi trip to the hotel illustrates the Indian traffic in the daylight. The number of lanes is very dynamic. They have lot of scooters and 3-wheel drives. I also saw a cow sleeping on the sidewalk. Nobody was interrupting the holy animal. In general India is not so clean. At the same time people are quite friendly and happy to help us.

The first day at the conference started with several hours setting up the booth. We had only a table, a chair and a title “ZEROTUMAROUND” waiting for us and no WiFi in sight. We asked for extra tables and a plasma TV. Trying out different things we finally came up with the final booth layout. The title and WiFi got fixed during the day. Except for the slow network connection, hotness (felt like 30 degrees inside) and lacking of toilette paper everything went really well. During the day there were several folks enjoying our cartoon and giving some fliers in front of our booth.

There are quite a few reports about the happenings on Scala LiftOff, so I’ll just summarize my personal experiences, which might have been quite different from others:

• This was the first time I posed as the sponsor. The sponsor part sucked, since it made me feel I bought my way in there :) At the same time we got some attention, which was good. And the community itself was great!
• Scala selling points are static types, DSLs and actors. Lift selling points are AJAX and Comet. Everything else is just eye candy.
• Scala really needs proper clustering, persistence and transactions on top of Actor library (or rather beneath it?). I wasn’t sold that actor-d is that, although it could be on the way there. A lot of architects having to deal with JMS will be sold on that.
• Martin doesn’t care about legal issues. Someone else has to start caring or there will be trouble later
• Unconference is a great social event and facilitates discussion wonderfully. It is not that good for talks though. Some mixture would fit engineering gettogethers better, I think.

All in all it was a great experience and I hope participate next year as well. And for your viewing pleasure, here’s a shot of Martin Odersky from a different perspective: