NFJS Conference Atlanta 2010 - Day 3

The last day is over. It's been a great conference. Without a doubt, JVM language alternatives dominated the conference sessions. Since I won a book on Scala yesterday, I will checkout that language out next :-)

Today, I attended two sessions by Ken Sipe: "Architecture and Scaling" and "So you want to be an Architect". I particularly enjoyed the latter one, as Ken gave a very pragmatic overview of his view on what the qualifications of an architect ought to be. I had to smile when somebody from the audience asked Ken how as an architect you can possibly keep up with the constant technical innovations and the sheer breath of required knowledge and Ken responded that he doesn't watch any TV. Well, I catch myself weekly listening to the Java Posse, SE Engineering Radio, Parleys.com etc. while doing the dishes, cleaning up etc. And with planning for AJUG meetings, the next Devnexus conference etc. there is not much time left for TV either (Although I still leave some space for my weekly dose of Southpark ;-)

I guess you really have to like what you're doing in order to fulfill the requirements of an Architect.    

During the Birds of Feather (BOF) session I asked the panelists on their opinion about Python, which was never even mentioned at the conference but which at the same time is heavily used in computer science teaching at colleges in Georgia. Their opinion was, that it's white-space issue is just too much of a limiting factor for using it in HTML scripting, using it as a DSL etc. and also that there are some issues with the user community itself. And thus, they said, there were just better alternatives at this point.

During the afternoon I attended 2 sessions by Ted Neward

• The Busy Java Developer's Guide to Advanced Collections
• The Busy Java Developer's Guide to Hacking with the JDK 

Both sessions were interesting but I wish Ted had given some more real world examples for use cases of Apache Commons Collections and the Google Collections Library. In his latter talk he showed an example of how to add functionality to core JVM classes. Interesting, but talking about "experimental and highly hacky stuff".

Overall, this was an absolutely wonderful conference. Looking forward to the next one! As always: Jay keep up the good work!

Don't use Java for New Projects - NFJS Day 2

Day 2 of the No Fluff Just Stuff (NFJS) conference here in Atlanta is over - It's been a good day. It has been another day of excellent speakers and topics. One thread you can see clearly throughout the presentations is:

Java's days are numbered as a language for new development - Viva la JVM!!

I got the sense that you should at least start thinking about an exit strategy. Stuart Halloway was even more outspoken: "Don't use Java for new greenfield development." (Saying that any of the talked about alternatives are better - Scala, Clojure, Ruby and Groovy).

After going to a few sessions that dealt with concurrency, I am certainly not inclined (border-lined scared) to do that kind of stuff in Java. The two languages most talked about at the conference were Scala and Clojure.

The nice thing is, that both language run on the JVM, so you can use the new language features, but are also able to use the vast power of Java libraries, if needed. Once drawback I saw is the fact that both Scala and Clojure can be fairly cryptic, which was an issue that was raised repeatatly by the audience and as well during conversations with fellow developers in between session breaks. Scala at least gives you the ability to write Java like code and then later on as you gain proficiency, you can make your code more concise . From a "power perspective", Scala looks awesome, though.

The sessions I atended to today were:

1. Tackling Concurrency on the JVM (Venkat Venkat Subramaniam)
2. Advanced Topics in JMS (Mark Richards)
3. Java.next: Clojure, Groovy, JRuby, and Scala (Stuart Halloway)
4. What's New in Spring 3 (Ken Sipe)

Onto the last day now...

NFJS Conference Atlanta 2010 - Day 1

Today was the first day of the NFJS conference here in Atlanta. It's my third time and it is always a great experience in terms of sessions but it is also a good opportunity to network.

First I went to two sessions of Venkat Subramaniam: "Effective Java" and "Programming Scala", both excellent sessions. I get the feeling, it is really time to look beyond Java, particularly if you do anything around concurrency. Not sure if Scala will be it, there seemed to be some contention in the crowd regarding Scala's more cryptic syntax. Although, it looked manageable in my opinion. Nevertheless, I need to check out the Clojure talk tomorrow.

The third session I attended was "Transaction Pitfalls and Strategies" by Mark Richards. At first I was a bit hesitant attending the session but I was glad I did. A related article can be found at IBM DeveloperWorks. The presentation contained some really good stuff.

The first day ended with a very good keynote by Ted Neward on Iconoclasm. Oh well, it is 1am already...better get some sleep for day two of the conference.