"Scala, Groovy, JRuby, Clojure - Which JVM language is for you?"

In this discussion, panel members Dierk König, Guillaume Laforge (Groovy), Charles Nutter (JRuby), Stefan Tilkov (Clojure) and Ted Neward (Scala) discuss with the audience the pros and cons of the popular JVM-based lanauges Scala, Groovy, JRuby and Clojure in order to attempt to reach a verdict of rank. The panellists try to logically wade through arguments based on the key concepts of each language along with their primary applications and try to resolve clichéd comparisons such as performance.

We are happy to announce the second RIA forum which will take place in Darmstadt (close to Frankfurt), 23rd of April 2010! This time, with Canoo Engineering AG as premium sponsor, four well known speakers will talk about the advantages and disadvantages of four different ways to create effective user interfaces (especially in business contexts).

Instead of giving details here I recommend to visit the forum page directly: http://www.riaforum.com (in German). Please be aware that we can only provide entrance to a limited audience, so if you want to join, make sure you sign up quickly.

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Dierk with James Gosling during Jazoon 2009

Besides James Gosling, Jazoon’09 features many other interesting speakers from the Java world including Neal Ford, Ivar Jacobson, Adrian Colyer and Danny Coward. As a special guest we are pleased to announce Linda Cureton, CIO of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Goddard Space Flight Center in the USA. She will deliver the Jazoon’09 closing Keynote.

Moreover, as the first developer conference in Europe, Jazoon’09 launched a competition for young speakers aged 26 and under. Out of the several dozen submissions, an expert jury has selected the three most promising. The finalists of the Canoo sponsored “Jazoon Rookie 2009” are:

João Arthur Brunet Monteiro - Brazil
Bettina Polasek - Hungary
Deni Lukmanul Hakim - Indonesia

On 24 June 2009, the conference audience and the jury will vote on the winner. Canoo is very exited to be involved in such an event, as the contest is an opportunity for creative minds under the age of 26 to present their ideas to a broad public of experts. Facing the present shortage of skilled IT specialists, it was an obvious decision for Canoo to actively support the advancement of young professionals and new ideas. 

Scott Davis interviewed Dierk König, Canoo Fellow and Grails/Groovy-Evangelist for Thirsty Head at blip.tv. In the interview, Dierk gives an inside-view about new Grails improvements, about his JavaOne talk, JavaFX and the impact of Canoo Webtest. Enjoy this interesting chat about “beauty and code”!

The main focus of the conference was not about Web applications or Rich Internet Applications; it was about risk management in the financial sector and how open-source software can assist in averting financial collapse of the kind we’re currently facing.

Over one year ago Munich Re (one of the world’s largest re-insurers) initiated the development of an open-source business application suite entitled PillarOne. PillarOne seeks to address every aspect of reserving and risk analyses of insurance companies. Open-source has particular relevance to this business: Identifying and simulating risk cries out for openness and for a strong community that actively validates the applied models and methods. There is absolutely no doubt that conducting Risk Management behind closed doors and concealing models behind inappropriate tools like Excel has contributed to the current financial crisis.

Intuitive Collaboration’s Markus Stricker points out the direction of future risk management tools

Risk management tools like this also have special requirements which are perfectly met by Rich Internet Application technology like UltraLightClient. Firstly, the complex models and simulations need highly interactive and responsive user interfaces designed for power users. Secondly, truly capable risk management tools must be enterprise solutions with all features these solutions normally have (central database, logging, historization, multi-user synchronization etc.). On the other hand, risk managers are used to having their tools on their laptops being fully functional even if they are off-line. Intuitive Collaboration – the company behind PillarOne – has chosen Grails and UltraLightClient because they meet both these requirements. UltraLightClient is a web-based user interface technology that in conjunction with Grails enables the cost-effective implementation of web applications with the most sophisticated user interfaces that are vital for handling the complex domain of risk management and simulation. Moreover, an application can be deployed as on an enterprise server or as standalone tool on a risk-manager’s laptop without changing a single line of code in the application.

Canoo’s Dierk König and SAP’s Christos Lemonidis demonstrating the SAP integration of ULC and Grails based PillaOne

That PillarOne is a milestone for risk management tools is underlined by the fact that SAP has chosen this platform to offer Solvency II compliant risk management to its insurance customers. Just in time for the conference, the UltraLightClient-based PillarOne was successfully integrated into SAP and shown at the conference as an online demo to a captivated audience.

The conference was attended by a large number of risk managers and regulators, one of whom (a speaker) was bold and self-effacing enough to describe the current crisis as “collective failure of a whole profession”. Whatever the full spectrum of reasons behind this collective failure is, the potential of an open-source tool such as PillarOne is to provide the system with a degree of transparency and robustness that would have been unthinkable a few years ago. This has got to be a good thing for all citizens, not just risk managers!

Switzerland and the EU are committed to utilizing the benefits of the Internet and Web technology in order to streamline their administration and to make it easier for the citizen to interact with his or her government. In its role as service provider, governments seek to provide a single point of contact (a portal or a human public servant), who guides the help-seeking citizen through a complex web of public administration. This – at least – was the message of the eGovernment Symposium held in Bern on Tuesday November, 18th 2008.

One of the topics covered in depth was user-centricity – of course an essential point if a government is serious about making engagement with public administration easy for its citizens. As a tax payer I was a little bit worried about the fact that SAP is contributing its complex Netweaver™ technology to the user-centricity discussion (see image to the left – sorry, I have only a German version). But if the ones responsible for eGovernment follow the suggestions of Christian Wanner from LeShop - the Swiss Amazon for food supply – I feel more comfortable again. The value of the experience he gained over several years cannot be understated. To summarize:

1. A user interface – especially on the internet – can never be simple enough.
2. Users do not read instructions – and if they do read them they frequently do not understand them correctly even if your developers are convinced that everybody in the world can understand them.
3. Let real users randomly chosen from the street (not the colleague at the next desk) try out the user interface – you will see the proof for the first two points.

There is one important point I would like to add to this: Governments should take great care when designing and implementing user interfaces for their public servants, who are to subsequently provide services to the citizens. Following this advice can actually lead to dramatic tax savings, and here’s why: Offering a public web interface to citizens requires that internal processes are automated. These proceses will frequently cross the border of departments – especially if a single point of contact shall provide complex services as, e.g., founding a company. Thus, public servants need effective interfaces to sub-service providers. Tools should be designed to support the productivity of the public servants as much as possible in executing such cross-departmental processes.

Wasting the time of our public servants is wasting our taxes.

Public servants as web application users require sophisticated (not complicated!) interfaces. In contrast to a citizen who – hopefully – only rarely has to use the web interface to contact public administration the public servant will use his or her tools very frequently – perhaps every day, many times a day. A citizen, therefore, requires self-explanatory interfaces – interestingly in most cases perfectly covered by pure HTML-based applications (no Ajax required). Our public servants on the other hand, need highly optimized, but not necessarily self-explanatory interfaces. It is worth spending some tax Francs or Euros on the training of staff on the systems. They will return our investment very soon by being more productive (or at least their tools are not to blame if they are not productive). 

Such interfaces cannot be implemented using standard HTML-based technology. They require a different interface paradigm – instead of forms and pages that are filled up and read one by one in a sequence (request-reply-style) – the interfaces for our public servants must be highly interactive, asynchronous, and in a position to display and change more than one thing at a time. This is normally best covered by event- and component-based user interface technology, such as we know from desktop applications like office tools (cf. picture to the right).

Thus, Rich Internet Applications are vital for implementing eGovernment and making our public servants effective which – in the end – means that our governments will save money (our taxes!)

I hope that user-centricity as discussed at the eGovernment symposium is taken seriously and that session chair Peter Fischer’s closing words will not come true: “User-centricity means that the user is always standing in the center and, therefore, in everyone’s way.”

The conference program was quite balanced and beside the main stream topics about SOA (ServiceOrientedArchitektur – represented by the SOACon conference), Spring, Application Security and OSGi there was a huge number of different topics, which were addressed by several talks.

Most interesting from my point of view were following sessions:

• Keynote from Jonas Jacobi: Re-architecting the Web with HTML 5 Communication.
• Talk from Karsten Lentzsch: Efficient design of swing UI’s.
• Talk from Angelika Langer: Java programming in the age of multicore.
• Talk from Dierk Koenig: RESTful JEE with Grails.

Canoo was exhibiting on a booth, which gave the great opportunity to present and talk about our products UltraLightClient (ULC), the just released language application for the IPhone (using canoo.net), our demo for the new JavaFX platform and fancy UltraLightClient / Swing rich client applications. In addition Canoo members used the presence to keep in touch with existing costumers, contact new ones or presented the company to potential new staff members.

Canoo Online Quiz

All the visitors on the booth and all other interested software developers had and still have the possibility to join an online quiz. Its possible to win an iPod touch or one of ten ‘Groovy in Action’ books. The quiz can be found at www.canoo.com/quiz and will end at the 30.11.2008.

Dierk König, Canoo fellow and author of the ‘Groovy in Action’ book, was holding a groovy workshop and was giving a talk about RESTful JEE with Grails.

Stephan Gillmeier presented an excellent talk on Canoo’s German language blog “Fragen Sie Dr. Bopp” (in English “Ask Dr. Bopp”):

www.canoo.net/blog

This is where Canoo’s chief linguist Dr. Stephan Bopp publishes some of the questions we receive at www.canoo.net.

As a special highlight, Stephan Gillmeier revealed one of his plans for Canoo.net:

An iPhone application to look up words on Canoo.net.