Monthly Archives: June 2009

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-06-28

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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-06-21

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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-06-14

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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-06-07

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JavaOne 2009 Day 3 – My Input

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Alternative Languages on the JVM™ Machine

OK, I am the first to admit that this session was not something I enjoyed. The quality of the presentation was probably ok, but I shouldnt have been there in the first place, I was looking forward to see a presentation on jRuby and other cool langugages implemented on top of the JVM, but the presentation was more focused on how you as someone who is implementing an alternative language on top of the JVM can make the most out of the environment, way to techy for my taste, but totally my wrong in selection of session.

JSR 290: Empower Web User Interfaces for Mobile Java™ Technology

This session was not very interesting actually, I think a lot of the presenters on JavaOne would be better of if they worked on their presentation techniques and kept their presentation less techy and cluttered with unecessery information.

Best Practices for Large-Scale Web Sites: Lessons from eBay

This presentation is absolutely one of the best this week. I love to hear about performance tuning and best practices when it comes to sites that are of the caliber of eBay. In short the patterns used on eBay in order to scale was:

  1. Partition Everything
  2. Asynchrony Everywhere
  3. Automate Everything
  4. Remember Everything Fails
  5. Embrace Inconsistency

If you get the chance to listen in on Randy Shoup from eBay you should, it was very interesting and the room was crowded, even having people standing.

Hopefully tomorrow will be a better day, I was only really pleased with the eBay session (and the short mid-day trip to Fisherman’s Wharf).

JavaOne 2009 Day 2 – My Input

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Google Web Toolkit

I started out day 2 of JavaOne attending a session on Google Web Toolkit, GWT is one of those things I do not know if I actually like. On one hand it is a cool framework that makes a lot of UI coding unecessary, but on the other hand black-box-solutions is not my cup of tea. But, if you are a big team of developers it is a big advantage of course to use such a framework/toolkit making sure you are building the web the same everywhere in your corporation. The presentation was ok, I was a bit tired but I think I got a good idea on how I can start using GWT and still have some flexibility when it comes to the “magic” JavaScript parts.

Ajax Performance and Tuning

I was really looking forward to this session, it was a good session, but it was no news actually. They stepped through how to speed up your website using Yslow measures and guidelines, if you have read Steve Souders blog and his book High Performance Web Sites: Essential Knowledge for Front-End Engineers (his upcoming book on Web Site Performance: Even Faster Web Sites: Performance Best Practices for Web Developers)you know all those things already, but I am not from the Java-world, so maybe this is new news to the Java Community. Greg Murray from Netflix showed a framework named Protorabbit which takes care of all these steps for you, they used Protorabbit on stage to show how easy they could adapt the Java Pet Store to actually grade A on Yslow. The presentation was ok, and I found Protorabbit, that is extra plus.

Creating Compelling User Experience

Ben Galbraith from Ajaxian and Mozilla talked to the tech-savvy audience on User Experience, no code, just talk about responsive UI:s, perceived performance, look and feel and usability. I think it was a very important session as there are a somewhat technical focus on software development in general and trying to actually get traditional back-end developers to focus on front-end things is a good thing.

Functional and Object Oriented JavaScript

I have known it for 10 years, but it seems the rest of the world is just about to start loving JavaScript. For me JavaScript is the language closest at hand when thinking of solving a problem, and I am very glad to see how JavaScript have evolved from a crappy web script langugage to a well respected, and fast, language that runs on both clients and servers. This session focused on teaching traditional Java developers the core of JavaScript. Closures, anonymous functions and common problems Java developers could fall into when starting writing JavaScript (scope). The presentation is really good (academic) and goes into the real good and advanced parts of the worlds best language.  BTW, Prototype and Scriptaculous seems to be the bomb in the Java world.

JavaOne 2009 Day 1 – My Input

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After a busy day of flying (and some beers) yesterday I am at the first day of JavaOne in San Francisco today with my fellow colleagues. I am going to tweet my findings continuosly, make sure you follow me on Twitter. Below I have some short input on the sessions I attended the first day:

Ajaxifying Existing Web Applications

The session was at first very basic going through the design pattern behind Ajax and introducing JSON to the XML-friendly Java-audience. As always Ajax is also used for describing all technical solutions involving JavaScript, which I sometimes get annoyed about. In the end the focus came on how to implement portlets that are Ajaxified and can communicate with each other, I found that interesting and got some ideas on how you could architect a event-driven solution in JavaScript where portlets can listen on a message bus, and react to what the other portlets trigger. Any examples out there?

Architecting Robust Applications for Amazon EC2

I am very interested in diving into Amazon EC2 and other services they are offering in the Cloud, and this session was a great introduction for people like me. I really appreciated the pragmatic and very clear presentation on the subject.

State of the Open Web

Canvas, SVG, CSS Animations, JavaScript, Embedded Fonts, HTML5 and other things on the state of the open web by people from Google. Both an introduction by Mark Pilgrim (@diveintomark) on the subject and a more demo-oriented part from @chanezon. I think it is important that the Java people are introduced to this wonderful world. They are demoing Bespin, MozBox (HTML5: canvas, video-tag and some video-manipulating JavaScript, awesome), Yahoo Pipes and Movement Tracker. Things are starting to happen, this is just great! Looking forward to the session on Canvas Tag and SVG.

Presentation at SlideShare

Ajax vs Java FX Technology

Ben and Dion from Ajaxian.com and Mozilla staged a debate on what platform is the best for creating better intefaces on the web, Ben took the Ajax/JavaScript side and argued Dion who took the Java side in the debate. I think Ben did a good job on selling Ajax as the platform for building rich interfaces on the web. There was very little focus on Java FX, more on Java and the capabilities Java have now compared to the “inferior” web. A lot of focus on Canvas, JavaScript, Video and performance. I thought it was a really good presentation and I am certain that the Ajax/JavaScript platform will grow stronger with advocates such as Ben and Dion.

Cross-Browser Vector Graphics with the Canvas Tag and SVG

As a spin-off of the earlier presentation on the Open Web, this presentation focus on vector graphics, mainly on the canvas tag and SVG.  Some numbers on support and how to add fallback content for lesser browsers (IE of course). I am really hoping we see some big player, Google?, start to use this in large scale, I think that is the only way we will see a boom in commercial use to a large customer base. Just like Google Maps and Google Suggest opened up developer and users eyes to Ajax and rich interfaces on the web, I believe that something big has to be released using canvas, svg and other new features. Interesting times indeed.