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Last day.

I do not have time to attend any later sessions because I have to catch a flight, however I did attend the general session. It looks like John Gage is going to retire. James presented cool technologies. Very good, but the one that really caught me was the Java pens. They are real pens that you can write with that run Java. They can record what you write and you can send it to your PC. They can record voice as you write so that you can playback what you wrote interlaced with your voice recordings while you wrote it. Very cool.

In summary, there were many good sessions. JavaFX, Scripting Languages, Ajax, and Restful APIs all caught my interest. Possibly even more important were the contacts I made. Talked to several vendors on the floor. At least one resulted in a bypass of the normal support channels and probably ended up saving us days of time in fixing an issue we are having. Met James Gosling! Met the Sun Engineers and learned a bit about how they do development for something much more sophisticated that most of what we do, and how they do MUCH LESS PROCESS that we do to get a better result. Talked to several Social Networking experts including Peter Reiser. Talked to people about using virtual worlds for business.

This trip was well worth it!

The last real day.  I have noticed that my notes are a bit more terse today.  Still I attended a full day of sessions.

GWT jMaki session .  A session describing the Google Widget Toolkit and jMaki.  jMaki is a framework for providing JavaScript support to help Ajax enable web applications.  There is both NetBeans and Eclipse support from jMaki.  jMaki provides client server support and provides events based on the publish subscribe mode.

Mylan is a very interesting project that focuses on productivity from a new perspective.  IDEs do not focus on a specific sort of human memory called episode memory.  This is the memory associated with an episode or event and the supporting things.  You might call this the context around an episode.  Mylan attempts to track tasks you want to perform and to keep all of the context around that task in one place.  So, when you want to work on a task you have put aside you click on it and all the things you were looking at and doing are put back exactly as they were.  This saves your recreating the context.  The talk was very informative and this product looks like it could be very beneficial.  Best of all it is part of the Eclipse project.

Semantic Web Panel Discussion moderated by Tim Berners-Lee.  This was a fairly interesting discussion that I attended mostly because Tim was hosting it.  I found the discussion a little too abstract for me to get much out of it.  Sometimes I simply have to think about this type of discussion for a while before something clicks.  Hopefully that is what will happen here.

Choosing a Java Based Web Framework.  I am involved in deciding upon web frameworks for my company, so I thought it was important for me to attend this presentation.  I think the presenter put together a pretty thorough set of criteria to measure frameworks against each other, and as he said, sometimes they are just too different to compare.  Some of the things he selected were maturity, community support, ajax support and many others.  He did not like Struts 2 at all, but his primary arguments against it seemed to be that it was new, that the community was too small and that it required too much XML.  I think the new and community arguments are a little weak because it brings forth the struts community as well as being derived from the fairly mature webworks project.  Other frameworks he compared where Groovy/Grails, GWT, Tapestry and Wicket.  For the most part he liked them except for Struts of course.

Talked to Sun engineer about social networking. Focused on social equity, mashups, and a product that they are working on for creating such including facebook apps.  Good discussion with a very smart person.

I attended breakfast with Borland.  Good meeting, but I really don’t think it will amount to much.  This is one of those normal vendor meetings where they try to convince you they have the best product in the world and try to figure out how to get you to buy it.  I don’t think they were very successful.

General Session was a bust.  Oracle presented, and I arrived a little late because of my breakfast meeting.  People left early in droves.

Asynch Ajax Revolution.  Nothing too new here.  They discussed the need for suspend and resume on servlets to help provide real Ajax support.  This seems to be coming in Servlet 3.0 spec.  Discussed several models including long delays and waiting vs. Asynch.  Interesting, but not earth shattering.  Things to look into included ICE Faces, Project Grizzly and since JavaOne is a Sun meeting, Glassfish.

Lunch with Sun guys.  Unfortunately, I missed the opportunity to talk to Bob Lee.  Mark ran into him, but I didn’t see them.  Bummer.  Decent meetings, and probably most importantly I learned some things about other parts of my own company from them.

Struts 2 Session.  Struts 2 is based on WebWorks although I don’t think they mentioned this in the session.  It is going back to a POJO model like so many things are today.  This means that there is a lot more freedom and developers do not have to implement interfaces.  The execute() method is the default, but you can specify other method names if you would like.    There is a concept of an iterceptor stack and the framework seems to allow you to use servlet filters which are supposed to give you a big performance gain.  You have several choices on result types and can use FreeMarker, Velocity and XSLT among others.  Maven can be used to create a complete working shell project and there is plenty of integration with Spring.  Many people are using Tiles with Spring but the presenter preferred SiteMesh.  There is an Ajax theme which is built upon the Dojo framework, but it will under go many changes from the 2.0.x to 2.1.x upgrade.  The Dojo framework version embedded is 0.4 and this could present problems if you are using later versions elsewhere.  Since Struts 2 is built upon Struts and WebWorks it should have a big community and it is definitely one to look at.

Java and Restful APIs.  Good general talk on Restful APIs and how Java tools are used.  Real world examples include doggdot.us.  (Formerly called diggdot.us, but changed because digg did not like the name.)  This site is a mashup of Digg, SlashDot and Del.icio.us.  Another is dailymashup.com which is a mashup of Flickr, Del.icio.us and Yahoo News.  Basically REST is a technology where services/resources are exposed via URLs and you use HTTP commands to get to them.  This makes them very accessible.  Response data from these RESTful services can be in many formats includeing XML, JSON or Atom.  Jersey is the open source reference implementation of JSR-311 JAX-RS.

OSS Session - great presenter.  I got here late because I was talking to some vendors, but this presentation was great.  It was very non-technical, but as an Open Source proponent I really liked it.  I would like to find out more information about this speaker and see if he as anything on the web I can read.  Fun facts include the fact that Gartner estimates that by 2012 90% of all commercial software will be based in Open Source.  Gartner is a very conservative organization in their estimates and others say this number is probably already closer to 100%.  The talked about the usual topics including the fact that a “software license” is really a copyright issue.  Mentioned that software patents are fundamentally broken, but large companies have to use them.  They are unhealthy but there are plenty of “patent vultures” out there.  His site is webmink and I will be spending some time there seeing what he has to say.  He was by far the best “session” speaker that I saw.

Met with Sun folks creating a three-D virtual world based on DarkStar. It was very interesting. Discussed how this could apply to the real world problems of a big company. An obvious use would be providing training in a virtual classroom.  This was one of those interactions that I held little hope for but turned out to be very useful.  I would like to follow up on this one, and I can chalk it up to another very useful contact made at the conference.

Dinner with the JRE engineers. Very interesting. They use an SCCS variant for source control. They laughed at the concept of using UML to do their software development. When they have simple changes they just make them. When they have hard changes they prototype it several ways and determine the best way to go forward. They use code reviews to keep quality high. Very, very good contacts and very useful.  So, they practice iterative development and lots of code reviews.  I think quite a few companies could really learn from this and would be wise to thin out their development processes.  I ended up sitting between the manager of the project and one of the developers who does work on the garbage collector.  Very intelligent folks and very nice.  I wish we would have had more time because I am sure there was still a lot to learn from them.

The first day of the full conference started like it usually does. A fairly large production in the general session which is very well attended. A dark room with flashing lights and loud music before the speakers begin is status-quo.

The general session was good. As usual, the Sun folks really did a really good job of impressing us with all the cool things going on in the world of Java. Some, as you would expect, were mostly Sun marketing, but they do a pretty good job at the opening of avoiding to much of this. The Android and JavaFX discussions were very interesting and seemed as if they would be of use to me in my job in the future. I was particularly impressed with a JavaFX demo of hundreds of high-def video streams being presented in a swirling ball and allowing the user to select one of them for viewing. Some of the other demos did not fare quite as well.

The first session I attended was one on JRuby because I was interested in learning a bit more about various scripting languages at the is conference. Part of my job is to evaluate technologies, and it seems to me that I am going to need to look at scripting languages soon. It seems to me that JRuby and Groovy are leading contenders in the Java realm. The presentation was pretty good and I learned quite a bit. Basically JRuby is the Ruby language compiled to bytecode. I know that M$ often says that a benefit of their .Net platform and particularly the CLR is that you can use any language you would like and the same is not true of the JRE. Well, languages such as JRuby prove that statement wrong. While I did not learn enough to program in JRuby, I did learn that it is a language that is complete enough and fast enough to warrant inclusion in any future scripting language evaluation I do. Cool, the conference has already helped me out.

The next session I attended was one on JavaFX. I had not originally planned to attend this session, but as usual I changed my mind at the last minute many times. The opening session had interested me in JavaFX, so I decided to learn more. The language is really not a programming language in the usual sense. It is more of a declarative language. It looked pretty powerful, but I would have to change my way of thinking to really learn it. It is designed for people that are not programmers to do very powerful user-interface things. I got the feeling that it is very cool, it is going to be cooler, but for right now it is not quite there. One of it’s great promises is it’s ability to provide user interfaces that are appropriate for all screens from the computer to the cell phone.

My co-workers and I were very fortunate to get the opportunity to meet with James Gosling. Unfortunately, we did not have a fixed topic of discussion, so we were not prepared to ask him very specific questions. However, he is a very good speaker and he was very interesting. He talked about cell phones and how backward we are in the US. He seems very fascinated with the way Japan and their cell phone companies work. When asked questions about the difficulties of large companies in keeping Java products (JREs, Application Servers, etc.) up to date. His one recommendation was to update the JRE to a 1.6 version at almost any cost. His reasoning was that the improvements particularly in performance were well worth it.

I attended a session on JavaScript that turned out to be a waste of my time. As I mentioned, I am interested in scripting languages, and we do quite a bit of JavaScript in my job, so I thought this would be a good topic to hear about. However, the focus seemed to be on geeky tricks and details in JavaScript. While I know some JavaScript, but I am no expert and I simply was not ready for this level of detail.

The last formal session I attended this day was on Open Ajax (TS-5030) and the talk was given by an IBMer. This was a pretty good talk and a very interesting framework. I will have to look into it some more.

Outside of the sessions I spent some time on the Pavilion Floor. This is where vendors set up their booths. This is where vendors give people trinkets or t-shirts to look at their products. I don’t really care about trinkets, and I don’t like to wear shirts with logos on them so that is not a big draw for me and I can talk to vendors because I want to. However, it is pretty interesting seeing the long lines at the vendors giving out t-shirts. The vendors I spent the most time with were Instantiations who is a vendor we have some history with. They have some new products versions coming out that may be good to look at. I also talked to Atlassian, who makes the Confluence wiki. This was a great contact to make

Dinner included Sun Rep’s, co-workers and Peter Reiser who is an expert on Social Networking. Good talking to all of them. Much useful info was exchanged.

Since my company is a Java Licensee, I was able to attend a special VIP session for licensees.  It started with a short presentation outlining the major topics of JavaOne 2008.  I thought it would be a good summary, however it was so high level and short that I really did not learn anything.  But, after the presentation there was a nice reception where I got a chance to talk to our Sun rep’s and to meet some of the folks from my company I did not know.

Since networking is a large part of the reason for attending the conference, I will call the evening a success.

I attended JavaOne this week and I had intended to blog day by day what I learned and thought during the days sessions. However, these conferences become very long days, and I had very little time to do actual blogging. We generally met for breakfast shortly after 7am each morning and typically went until 11pm or midnight. So, I am going to take my notes and try to reconstruct my thoughts the best I can from them. It should be pretty accurate, but maybe not quite as detailed as it could have been.

It is almost spring.  Well, officially spring arrived weeks ago, but the weather is starting to warm up.  When this happens the gyms seem to get a bit more crowded for several weeks.  My theory is that people suddenly realize two things.  First that they have not kept up with their New Years resolutions so they are really not in better shape then they were at the beginning of the year.  Secondly, I think they realize that swimsuit season is close at hand, and this scares them into temporary action.  This gets them back to the gym, but as a regular gym-goer for many years, I know that most will not stay for long.

I am going to give you some common sense suggestions to help you avoid being like the other spring gym lemmings.  I want you to keep working out.

• First, realize that working out is not a short term solution.  It takes lots of effort over a long time.  It is a lifestyle change and if you don’t approach it as a lifetime commitment you may as well not start.
• Set goals.  Know what you are trying to accomplish.  If you want to lose weight your goals are different than if you want to add some muscle.  Write them down!
• Use your goals to create a plan.  Write it down too!
• Start slowly, but not too slowly.  You will be sore and tired after you start.  Push yourself so that you feel it, because if you don’t feel it you are not going to get much out of it.  But, don’t push so hard that you cannot move for days.  When you hurt that badly you are more likely to quit.
• Eat right.  If you work out but you eat poorly you are really limiting your progress.  Why run three miles in the morning burning about 300 calories just to eat a candy bar and put 250 of the calories right back in?  Now the net effect of the day is 50 calories to the good.  At that rate you will lose a pound in two or three months.  Unless the candy bar was king-size in which case you will gain a pound in a month or two!
• Find a workout buddy.  Someone who is in similar shape and has similar goals makes an ideal partner.  The important part is to commit to each other that you will workout according to your schedule and goals.  When they miss call them up and harass them!

Probably the most important thing is to commit to yourself that this is what you are going to do.  Don’t let yourself down.  If you cannot keep a promise to yourself who can you keep a promise to?

Large companies have lots of bureaucracy.  That much is given.  How often have you seen the process that must be followed get in the way of getting real work done?  My guess is that it happens pretty often.  Have you ever wondered why the powers-that-be allow and even encourage so much process?  Have you ever seen a pet project of an important person in the organization completely hampered by the company process?  My guess is that you have not, or that as soon as the process started to slow things down it was abandoned with the complete blessing of this VIP.

Why is this?  The VIP will insist that the process must be followed to ensure quality and proper accounting, etc.  However, when it is their project is quality suddenly not important?  Now it is OK to ignore the time and cost accounting that must go with every other project?  Why is the process that was so important suddenly ignored so that the VIP can get something quickly?  Shouldn’t they care more that the process is followed so their project is done right?  After all the process is about doing things right, isn’t it?  

I suppose a cynic might say the VIP does not really believe the process is as important as they say it is or else they would never ignore it for the projects that are most important to them.  Maybe the VIP uses the process to slow down and track the movements of everyone and every project happening in his organization so that they have total control of them.  Maybe they don’t need that level of control on projects which already have their full backing.  After all, are they going to use the data gathered by the process to kill the project?  These thoughts seem pretty cynical, but big companies are pretty cynical places.

It seems to me that large companies today say they value their employees, but when it comes right down to it this statement seems pretty empty.  An example would be the so called knowledge workers.  These folks are paid primarily for the value they add to the enterprise in terms of what they know or for the things that they create using their brains.  If large companies valued these folks for their knowledge they would certainly want to hear what they have to say, right?  I would think so!  But it seems to me that large companies in general tend to disenfranchise this sort of employee.  They are told they cannot place their knowledge in any non-standard form such as a blog, forum or wiki page.  They are told they cannot email anyone except a direct supervisor.  Very often they are asked to be brain-dead yes men and women.  In other words, you can only think about the things we want you to think about, store them in the places we find acceptable, and only tell the people who manage you.  By no means should you put ideas in the medium you feel is best, think for yourself or talk to someone outside of your reporting chain even if they are the best equipped to help you get the job done.  I guess I don’t understand the value of a knowledge worker after all.

As I have been working on social media projects for my company one of the biggest surprises was the amount of concern our Legal department has about all websites that allow employees to contribute content. I am most amazed, because I thought much of what my job as a so called knowledge worker was to contribute content and to make it available to others so that they could benefit from it. I have tried very hard and very nicely to let our legal staff know that when they went down this path they were really talking about all electronically published materials. This included not only the blogs they so feared, but other things like all SharePoint sites, all email, all websites and if we want to go this far all publicly shared drives. Blogs are just a different content management system.

Fortunately (I guess) cooler heads prevailed and our discussions were largely limited to the “new” technologies, namely wikis, forums and most scary of all blogs. This was really not so much because they disagreed with me, but because the battles had already been lost for share drives and email. And, they argued they are more contained. I suppose that is true, but what about anyone running an Apache Web Server? The only barrier to publishing content there is knowing a little HTML. But I call this decision fortunate because it means they are not taking away my email.

The fear is someone on their soapbox will post something that is damaging to the company. I argued that the blogs we were allowing would be internal so the risk was minimal, but that did not seem to matter. Nor did my argument that we would never allow anonymous posting, so if someone violated our policies we could simply fire them. At first I thought this was pure and simple paranoia, but in the end I did see that they had a few real fears. For example, if someone published insider-type information to all of our employees it would amount to a public disclosure and would cause many real legal issues. I hated to admit it but they did have a point. I argued that the fact that people’s names are always associated with a post, and the fact that they are required to sign the company policies regarding this type of information would almost guarantee we would not have the problem they feared. As I said, they could just be fired at this point and that should be a big incentive to do the right thing.

All in all this is an interesting situation. On one side, you have technical folks, like me, that think the benefit of this type of software outweighs the risks which I feel that we can largely mitigate. On the other side we have our legal staff who have told me that their job is to try to make sure we know about and avoid all risks. I could be wrong, but I think a big part of business success is knowing how to take calculated risks in order to reap the rewards associated with them. I am not completely sure how this will play out, but right now I know it is possible we will shut down our internal blogs permanently. That is a pretty scary message to send your employees. “I don’t want to hear your opinions and I really don’t even trust you.”