My tracks for the second day

It is only two sessions left for day one at JavaZone and I have to make planning arrangements for day III lready. Hopefully, I will also be able to update my first blog entry with comments on my previous encounters at JavaZone 2007 as well.

Ok, we have a lot of nice sessions tomorrow as well, actually we are doing BOFS' until 21PM on Thursday, not bad!!
This is my schedule for September 13.

Time	Talk	Comment
9.00-10:00	Java Persistence 2.0 - What's New, Linda DeMichiel
10:15-11.15	Open source Enterprise Integration with Mule, Tijs Rademakers og Jos Dirksen
11:45-12:45	Deploying Maven in the Enterprise, Kristoffer Moum
13:00-14:00	None
14:15-15:15	How Do I Invoke a Method, and Yes I Am A Senior Developer, Ole Andre Ranvik, Bjørn Bjerkeli	This is my own talk actually, I really recommend it, puts some things in perspective (I might be biased here :-)
15:45-16:45	Teaching computers How to Drive, Mary Poppendieck	Mind blowing
17:00-18:00	WS Duck Typing, Arjen Poutsma

Jim Coplien talking about "Agile Stuff"

The Agile track is covered pretty well at JavaZone 2007, we have a lot of good speakers doing agile-talks. This is very much thanks to Jessica Hildrum that seems to be very well connected. Jim has been looking into agile issues for the past 12 years and works for a Danish company called Nordija.
Most of the projects that I have been working on lately has been organized in an Agile matter, Jim goes into the some details on explaining some common myths on agile processes and what works and whatnot. The five Myths discussed are:

• On-Site customer
• User Stories
• TDD
• YAGNI
• DLS's

Before Jim starts to talk out, I will poin out the ones that I wold tend to focus on, from a developers perspective will be YAGNI and TDD. Jim tells us that it doesn't work, he's go me curious.
Jim clains that TDD will destroy your system, which is a pretty bald claim, nonetheless interesting. He claims that you will end-up building an unmaintainable and procedural architecture, which does not lend itself to refactoring. Well, he is getting my attention. I simply do not agree. I think what Jim thinks about here is that Unit testing at the JUnit level is not really testing of customer requirements, and he is perfectly right. It is tests testing parts of the system implemented using classes to build an object oriented system. This means requirements translated into something computionally feasible. Maybe I am not using TDD properly, but I do not expect that my JUnit tests maps one-to-one to functional-requirements.

What Jim misses out on here, especially with respect to saying that YAGNI will kill you is what Mary Poppendieck states about eliminating waste. I am a strong believer in up-front design, but I am not a strong beleiver in building anticipated structures, especially without tests. I think you should really eliminate waste.

My track for the first day at JavaZone 2007

I have just came home from speakers dinner after talking to a lot of different people that are giving talks at javazone.no. I really didn't have time to figure out what tracks I will visit tomorrow, there are a lot of options, but I am trying to prepare i bit now. I finally was able to meet Tor Nordbye, Carl Quinn and Dick Wall from the JavaPosse, I am really looking forward to be present at the live podcast tomorrow evening.

Here are the shortlist of talks (selected from 7 parallell tracks) that I will probably attend the first day:

Time	Talk
9.00-10.0	Web 2.5 development with Java, Stephan Janssen
10.15-11.15	The State of Ajax, Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith
13.00-14-00	Five practical solutions to Agile myths, James Coplien
14.15-15.15	Latest in Java Technology From Sun Microsystems , Simon Ritter og Angela M. Caicedo
15.45-16.45	Have to think about this one not sure actually
17.00-18.00	Scripting in Java 6 , Per Mengshoel og Thomas Heiberg
18.15-19.15	JavaPosse RoundUp, Live podcasting from Oslo (You would not want to miss this one)

Kicking of JavaZone 2007

Finaly it has launched, JavaZone 2007 is running with more than 120 speakers from all over the world, and more than 2200 attendants, make this a pretty large conference, at least according to Scandinavian standards. I have been participating the program-commitee myself and it is very fun to see everything come to a start. The program this year is pretty well balanced, Enterprise, Web , Agile and Hard-Core Java speakers from all over the world is here in large numbers.

There are definitely a lot of focus on Agile this year. On other conferences I have been attending during the last couple of years, there is always one or two subjects that stands out, but I don't find it to be as clear this year. There are definitely bias do use less heavyweight infrastructure in web-like deployment-scenarios that it used to be. There is also a lot of focus on Maven. We actually had to reject as much as five talks on Maven, because it was already so well-covered.

I spoke with the Javaposse crew-members yesterday, and my impression is that Maven has a strong position in Scandinavia, and Less in the US.

Regardless if you are interested in Maven or Ajax there should definitely be something for every taste in this years program, hope you will enjoy it, we enjoyed putting it together!