JavaZone closeup and end-comments

The last day of JavaZone has been just as exiting as the first one. I tried to add a nice mix of high level process-oriented stuff with hard-core technical sessions to keep me from falling asleep today. Didn't have much sleep tonight, huh.
Mary Poppendieck had a great session on Lean SW-development. I am a great fan of the Poppendiecks and especially their first book on Lean Software Development:An Agile Toolkit.
Conventiently she announced that her new book is shipping as we speak. I am also in the process of entering my credit card number on amazon to get a copy.
Thereafter I dived into a session on DTrace, a feature of Solaris systems that enables full tracing of the entire software stack from a thread in the java-vm and down to system calls in the kernel. This approach to tracing will make searching for bottlenecks in the system much easier. The speach was accompanied with some nice live demos.
Simon Ritter another speaker that made JavaZone 2006 worth visiting. He has been experimenting with SPOT and robots, talking about RTSJ and esoteric VM-options on the Solaris VM. Did you know that there are more than 400 different -XXoptions available in the Solaris VM as from java 6? Well , now you do. A I am currently back to work (in the middle of the night) because we are going in to production with a system for a client. Suddenly I realized that it is actually a year until next time I can spend two great days@JavaZone.

Have something on your mind? post-it!

What is new at JavaZone 2006

I am currently attending a session at JavaZone 2006 called Are you a plumber? How to avoid plumbing for business-enriched remote clients. It is a co-talk by Ole Andre Ranvik which is a co-worker of mine and Bjlørn Nordmoen from Western Gecko. The are basically speaking about a project they have been doing together for the last year and of they solved some of the issues they encountered.

The thing about the program this year as far as I can tell is that we do not have to much stunning news, new technology, new releases and all new specs. Much more of the material this year is based upon how we actually use our technology in day-to day work. Agile tracks and and technology driven tracks share a common property with respect to this, they cover what developers have been working with, not what someone think they should work with. With some exceptions, EJB 3.0 being one of them.

Backwards compatibility, why?

This is quite an interesting topic. I am currently attending a session on EJB 3.0 and JPA given by Patrick Linskey which has been participating in the spec work. An issue related to backwards compatibility related to some things introduced in JPA (global named queries). And I asked if Patrick sees it as much of a problem to break backwards compatibility. And he said, "we did it with EJB 3.0 and we do not want to do it again". Well I have never ever heard of anyone actually complain about this compatibility break. In my opinion in many cases the effort spent not to break backwards compatibility is just a waste. We would be much better of getting new specs and implementations that improves faster as opposed to versions that does not break backwards compatibility.

Meeting the speakers and authors

I am currently staffing the javaBin stand at JavaZone 2006 so I cannot attend any sessions as of now. However staffing the stand gives me a perfect oppurtunuty to talk to attendees, partners and speakers. Seems like if everybody is having a good time. Some of the sessions has been so popular that we had to schedule them twice, like Patrick Linskeys EJB3 Java Persistence API: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.

So far the conference has been running smoothly. I am soon of the the next one when releaved off duty. Think I will head along to a REST vs. Soap smackdown to see what all the fuzz is about :-).

Second Session at JavaZone at 2006

The first session I attended to was the Java Effective Reloaded with Joshua Block. It was packed, so I had to stay in the back. Anyways, I got a picture of what it was all about.

I have allays been fond of GUI development, both web and standalone, although I have never done to much work on GUI's during projects, mostly on my spare time.

I am currently attending the First Aid for Swing by the founder of JGoodies, Karsten Lentzcsh. Karsten is guiding us through the process of doing a project where you have inexperienced developers, no time for usability design and the customer want pay for anything. Cool what a pragmatic attitude, this is how it works in most cases :-)

There are a lot of dos and dont's in developing swing applications. One if to use consistent colors and allays to use native fonts, simply because the render better. Karsten often does a test on applications with excessive use of borders by imagining that the GUI is a physical three dimensional artifact and by drawing the fingernails over this artifact, does it make any sound? "Rattcchhhhhhhhh" not good, to many borders, good tip? :-)

Are your GUI application symmetric? It should be, use gradients and weights to achieve symmetry across the interface, subtle but effective!. Use to three, maybe five fonts at a maximum as a guideline. I guess a lot of this concepts applies to GUI's in general, not only to swing applications.

Depot Lineup at JavaZone

At the javaBin boardroom we are currently in the process of getting the last small details in place for the conference. Yesterday we had the speakers dinner with almost all the speakers for this years venue. I finally got to meet Mary Poppendieck whom I had been emailing for the last six months regarding her speach on the conference, at the Table was also Tom Poppendieck and Gregor Hophe. We all had a nice chat and vere looking forward to a couple of hectic and nice days at javaZone in Oslo.

I will try to get out up to date new published along the way.

Heading to JavaZone 2006

Currently planning the various sessions to attend at JavaZone 2006 in Oslo 13-14 September. The lineup and two-day agenda is impressive I must say.
I have myself been part of the program committee have been working for almost a year now to get the program in place. Hope all of you developers out there look forward to joining up at JavaZone 2006 as much as I do. A mighty combination of Well known names like Rod Johnson and Mary Poppendieck and local heroes like Eirik Torske and Ole Andre Ranvik are some of the speakers this year.

Please also spend some time looking through the agenda and don't join the crowd. Maybe you are in for a surprise when attending the not so well-known speakers?

See you there!