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.

The conference was held at Indian Institute of Sciences, Bangalore and therefore had an academic setting.

I met few interesting persons at the talk some of whom knew Canoo and ULC:

• Ralph Mueller of Eclipse Foundation, Europe: He expressed a wish that ULC would be ported to SWT!
• Neelan Choksi of Interface21: He represents a company which has contributed most to Spring and is now offering services for Spring.
• Alexander von Zitzewitz of Hello2morrow: He had a booth displaying his SonarJ tool. He is a ULC customer and has presented SonarJ at Canoo, Basel.
• Craig McClanahan of Sun Microsystems: He gave an interesting talk about Architecture Options for Next Generation Web Applications where he discussed about where to put the view, controller, and model tiers, and the technology options (both Java and non-Java) for each approach. I spoke to him briefly about ULC and how it can fit into his scheme of things.
• Suresh Shamana of LifeRay, Europe: He spoke to me about his JSR 286-based Portal Server.

I gave two talks:

Rich Internet Applications and AJAX – Selecting the Best Product
This talk elaborated on the ideas first presented in Marc Domenig’s article: http://www.javalobby.org/articles/ajax-ria-overview/
The main point is that you carefully need to evaluate the various rich web UI technologies available.

There were about 40-50 people in the audience. Listed below are a couple of interesting questions attendees asked:

Q. Why not Java for multimedia and animation?
A. JavaFX is an effort towards simplification.

Q. How to strike a balance among requirements and strengths?
A. The best architecture appears to be an application independent presentation engine on the client and presentation logic, business logic and data on the server. Within this space Java based solution can provide industrial strength quality.

Java Rich Internet Application (RIA) Pattern
This talk was mostly about the use of the Presentation Model pattern to capture the presentation logic of a rich user interface.
In addition it discussed patterns for validation as well as granularity of data and services. Again there were 40-50 people and lot of questions:

Q. Detailed design of Presentation Model
The presentation model contains the dynamic or mutable state and presentation logic of the GUI independent of the underlying widgets. It mediates between V+C and M of the classic MVC pattern.

There was an interesting discussion about how the presentation model differs from the mediator pattern in the sense that it mediates between the Business / Domain Model and the presentation.

Rich Internet Applications and AJAX – Selecting the Best Product
Thursday, May 31 at 10:20 am

Java Rich Internet Application (RIA) Patterns
Thursday, May 31 at 1:30 pm