Jazoon Monday
Ted Neward spoke about “Why the next five years will be about languages”. He first started with the wide gap between practitioners (software programmers) and academics, which define/invent new programming languages. Up until now the wide gap exists because it was one thing for the academics to define a language for some new concepts but another story to make it usable in the real world. Virtualization narrows this gap. It is possible to build language on top of virtual machines (JVM but also Microsoft CLR). That makes the design of new languages a lot easier, one gets most of hard-to-implement features needed for the real world for free (e.g. support for different hardware, garbage collection etc. etc). He gave an impressive lists of powerful languages which already run on virtual machines. Neward finally ended with the following conclusions that developers should:
- learn these languages
- use these languages to gain productivity
- start to build new languages.
All in all a really enjoyable keynote.
After lunch I attended What’s wrong with Java by Aaron Digulla. What could have been a nice follow-up of the keynote ended in some kind of a rant against Java by comparing Java against Python and Groovy. He made one important point – even if it’s not new though: A lot of Java supporting frameworks use XML and that creates another problem: the information is spread in different places.
JBossSEAM certainly speeds up the implementation of JSF applications. Andy Bosch pointed out that you will probably hate it if you are a friend of strict layering. That’s because SEAM components can be used as a model in the presentation layer as well as model for an EJB entity bean.
I was looking forward to Impossible Possibilites by Michael Wiedekind but was a little bit disappointed. He announced that he was going to talk about something else but forgot to mention the new topic which left me a little bit out in the blue. Also trying to squeeze a 70 minutes presentation into 35 minutes didn’t improve the presentation. Which was a pity because I think it could have been interesting and fun.
After having listened to Walter Bischofsberger presenting his architecture monitoring tool I attended The Power of Tracing held by Tom Sprenger and Christian Siffert. They talked about the importance of tracing especially in distributed environments and about the difficulty of achieving it. They added three additional levels on the top of Log4J:
1. Enforcing a common syntax for the logging
2. Enforcing logging in every method on entering and leave (with source code interweaving). This ensures that the context of a log message is available
3. By adding a transfer id into remote calls they were able to to trace a call over remote locations.
It was quite a long day with a lot of sessions. The conference is held in the cinema complex of Sihlcity which means big screens and comfortable seats. Another advantage of Sihlcity is that if you don’t find a suitable session you can always go shopping 
. (Which I didn’t!)
