JFokus post-mortem

Yesterday marked the first one day conference in Sweden focused on Java. All in all, it was a resounding success. I am personally very happy about how well everything ran. The only part that wasn't really up to par was the panel discussion.

So, a quick rehash of the day. First Simon Phipps did his thing in the keynote, speaking much about where Sun's open source initiative comes from. I would have liked some more specific info on the future though, but I guess that's hard for him to say...

After that, Thorbiörn Fritzon from Sun in Sweden started of the Language track with talking about some new features in Mustang, specifically some Swing topics and the JSR 223 support (scripting). After that he showcased a really cool stack-based calculator he'd hacked during the weekend, where you could attach the functioning of the buttons to different scripts, and the scripts could be implemented in any language on the classpath that supported JSR 223. The final showdown of calculator buttons was first a script in Haskell (using Jaskell) that pushed a lambda on the stack. This lambda curried addition, with the first object on the stack. Then another script written in Python popped the lambda from the stack, popped the next value and called the lambda with the value from the stack, in effect doing an addition the longer way...

After that it was time for my presentation. It felt really good and I believe most in the audience was satisfied.

After that I sat in on Dan Bergh Johnsson from Omegapoint talking about domain driven design, and how to refactor to find your domain. I found it quite elementary, and nothing really new.

Last, Jonas Bonér talked about OpenTerracotta, which is an incredibly cool tool for clustering your JVM applications, and by doing that achieving many different cool things. Look it up! I wish there had been more time for Jonas to get in depth about the implementation of Terracotta, though. Most interesting thing he told us was about a situation where they wanted about 50-80 clients pounding in a cluster at the same time, and they used Terracotta for this too, using a CyclicBarrier that was synchronized over all the JVM's. Very nice.

The panel debate wasn't that interesting. Most of the questions asked by the moderator didn't really achieve any discussion. Open sourcing Java doesn't seem like such a controversial topic anymore.

After the debate, the conference was over, but then BEA provided a pub evening with entertainment, so we stayed and networked a little, talked with interesting people and generally had fun. After that, six of us continued to a pub in Stockholm, called Monk's Cafe, where we drank good Belgium beer and talked until our throats were sore. A very interesting day, no doubts.