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.

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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.