Bruno Souza leaves SUN

I know you have expected to read about days 4 and 5 of Devoxx 2009 here, but there are more important things to blog about.

Bruno Souza, founder of SouJava, known as "Brazil's JavaMan" has left SUN. But I suppose this is nothing to keep him from being an (even more) outstanding member of the Java community.

In case you are wondering - Bruno is the guy on the left,

Stephan Janssen on the right and Juggy in the middle!

Bruno, lets meet again at Milliways, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (always near in space)!

Oh, and bring Juggy along, rrrright?

Braziiiiiiiiiiiillll!!!!

Devoxx 2009 - Day 3

Day 3 is the first real conference day. It started with a keynote

from Oracle which really gave no real new insights, since nobody is allowed to say anything at all. But just in case - a subset of the slides is available here. Did you recognize the tie on that "Orange Guy"?

Next was a presentation of Adobe on their new Catalyst tool (Fc) - Chat Haase did a real nice stand up again.

The main breaking news of the day came from Mark Reinhold in his update for JDK 7. Not only will it take longer to get JDK 7 out (due to the obvious reasons) but it even may contain closures. So once again it seems closures is the new pink.

After lunch James Gosling had his un-keynote. He demoed the new version of the JavaStore promising that it will be available worldwide ASAP, but no sooner.

During James talk some novelity happened at Devoxx - the first time in 8 years the audiosystem broke. So James had to wait for them fixing the problem, but the Devoxx-Magicians got it up and running again in no time (=few minutes).

Next up was a JavaFX session with Rich Bair, Jasper Potts and special guest Tor Norbye. They showed the planned features for JavaFX 1.3- regions with css styling support, new enterprise ready ui components and some smaller enhancements for threading. The eyecatcher was the demo from Tor. He showed the JavaFX Visual DesignTool, written completely (100%?) in JavaFX. I have to figure out how to build such a large application without a platform like NetBeans RCP (have to ask Tor). It was a real slick UI with lot of effects and , as it seemed to me, with ease of use.

For the afternoon the sessions were ScalaTest and Project Coin. Bill Venners talk showed how easy it can be to write easy understandable test with Scala - but I agree with James Gosling - you have to hear it 5(?) times to get it all right. the Project Coin session did not reveal many new details but showed how the process worked, made clear that not only because it looks simple to do a change it is that simple (the JLS complexity indicator from Alex Buckley). One new piece of information was that they may be considering further small changes, e.g. multicatch, due to the slip of OpenJDK 7 release.

Only two BOF's for day 3 - the JUG BOF with James Gosling (a must have) and the JDK 7 BOF with Alex Buckley, Brian Goetz, Joseph Darcy and Mark Reinhold.

The main things I took with me? Well Java was invented to trick C/C++ programmers into thinking Smalltalk was cool thing and no Java is not the new COBOL.

For the evening we had a meetup (hosted by the NetBeans DreamTeam) at the Axxes - and guess who was there - Juggy!

Was real good to meet you all again!

Devoxx 2009 - Day 2

So just a short resumé for day 2. First up was the Java EE 6 session, with AlexisMP and Antonio Goncalves. They did an impressive show for all the Java EE 6 technologies by example starting with JPA and ending with nice ajax based frontend.

After lunch there was a good session about JavaFX with Stephen Chin. He walked us through basic things like "How works a sequence?" and more complex things like the new layouts. This session really covered a lot of JavaFX, but my personal highlight was the a short demo from Tor Norbye (Sun Microsystems). He demoed a NetBeans IDE based JavaFX RAD tool that feels it like the famous "Matisse"-GUI-Builder for Swing based applications.

In between those two sessions there was a short private "Thank you, Aaron" ceremony, during which the Duke's Choice Award winning team from ND SatCom handed a T-Shirt with a team photo and the signatures of all the team members to Aaron Houston, who was the one who originally talked us into submitting our tool to the Duke's Choice Award.

In the late afternoon there was an interesting session about how to combine the power of OSGi and NetBeans Lookup with Toni Epple from the NetBeans DreamTeam and Geertjan Wielenga.

The evening (and a better part of the night) was spent discussing the future of Java with Aaron and some guys from french JUG's ending at our hotel getting into the traditional tuesday night party - meeting Kirk Pepperdine, Chet Haase, Romain Guy (too name just a few of those trying to drink a belgium bar out of beer).

Devoxx 2009 - Day 1

The first "University Day" started with a talk about "Generics" from Prof. Steegmans. It was quite interesting, although a bit more detail might have been nice, especially about wildcards. The afternoon session about JSF2 (and beyond) had a lot of information about all the changes that went into JSF 2 in comparison with 1.x and some hints on what is yet to come. The main mantra I think was "Go facelets - die JSP and never look back".

The "Tools in Action" talk about Scimpi was quite nice showing that it is possible to generate a web UI based on Naked Objects, but perhaps it should use more of the new JEE stuff, since all the major things are/can be now POJOs in JEE. The "Next Generation Performance Tools" talk showed the actual state of what is possible in inspecting the JVM, but only some minor(?) improvements for the new version of the JRockit toolchain.

From the BOF'S the talk from Kess Jan Koster was a real highlight. It was interesting discussing about the "Java Tuning Puzzlers" and his real good presentation style made this talk fun even though it was the 21:00-22:00 timeslot. There is one more talk with him this week - so it could be probably a good idea to go there as well, although that may be a bit more about selling and advertising java-monitoring.com. Oh and I nearly forgot - the DreamTeam once again helped out - this time with a power adapter for his Mac.

Devoxx 2009 - It has begun!

First session to attend is Java Generics by Prof. Steegmans. Hopefully adds some more information about the mysteries of type erasure and wildcards to pass on to fellow developers afterwards. Follow some details at Twitter!

SQE Going Real Open Source

Finally we did it. Just take a look at SQE @ Kenai. Get started by cloning the source repository or just download the binary bits and try it out.

JavaOne 2009 - The Fun Part 1.0-7

During JaveOne Bruno Souza talked a few community members into creating a video for the Java User Groups - that was really fun!



Thanks Bruno for the real good idea and the other community members to make it happen!

Winning Duke's Choice and James Gosling's Keynote

By now, you could have read it all over the blogosphere - I have been part of James Gosling's keynote "Toy Show" at JavaOne, as a winner of the Duke's Choice Award.



The full video of the keynote is available at the JavaOne website.

The most important chapter can be found below.





Before the keynote I have been interviewed for the BlogTalkRadio - only it wasn't for the radio - it was full video. So here is the interview.




This was a really amazing week - more blog entries to follow.

JDK 6 update 14 released

Big news - the update 14 has been released and it contains the new garbage first (G1) garbage collector. Try it out with your favourite application to find out if it is really better. It seems that there could be problems (go here for finding out about NetBeans) but you wont notice until you run it with your own application.

There are more improvements - just read the release notes.

Don't Panic- The Definitive Guide to NetBeans™ Platform

Finally it is out. The Definitive Guide to NetBeans™ Platform is the result of a translation effort of the NetBeans Platform community. Led by Geertjan a team of about 10 interested community members translated the original book NetBeans Platform 6. It was a real interesting experience to be a member of such a team and we owe Geertjan big for pushing us so we completed this in about 4 weeks. If you ever get a chance to participate - do it - I can guarantee you will love it.

Give me more details - you think?

Well, here you go. I took the chapters about Lookup and Real-World Application Development and although I am developing NetBeans™ Platform Applications for 8 years I still experienced some aaahh and oohhs. During translating the chapters I had to think about the correct meaning and wording and this triggered some additional thinking about the ways I used this technologies. I discovered that there is a big difference in just reading the original book and struggling with every word. The second takes your understanding to another level.

Besides all this - it was just great to be part of such an effort (it just feels so good).

Hope to see you for the next translation effort.



What are you waiting for? Come back for an in depth review....

SQE - New Year's Eve and 2009

Again - after a long quiet period here some news from SQE - the last one for 2008.

Still, the actual main goal of SQE is to provide a stable release for NetBeans 6.5 .

Here is a list what we have already achieved and what will be part of the next binary drop. It will take a few more days before we can upload it - to allow us to ensure everything is working as expected after the major rewrite we did during Devoxx 2008.

Bug fixes:

• Fixes for numerous NPE, CCE
• use NetBeans 6.5 features where possible (Option Panel...)
  

New features

• codedefect history is now working
  
• further UI enhancements
  • windowgroup for codedefect results
  • move codedefect history to control center
• select checkstyle.xml to use
• even better sorting capability for PMD and Checkstyle results
  

Updates

• Update FindBugs to 1.3.6
• Update PMD to 4.2.4

Upcoming (new things or things already planned)

• Support for configuration of FindBugs and PMD based on Maven pom's
  
• Refresh on save/compile (especially useful for tasklist)
• NetBeans 7.0?
• PMD 5.0
  

Any other ideas, comments, wishes? Just leave your comment here or send an e-mail to the user list at sqe.dev.java.net.

... and don't forget we will be going full OpenSource at http://sqe.kenai.com in 2009 (promised) using Maven as build tool. This possibly allows us to provide different binary drops (e.g. PMD 4.x / PMD 5.x series) and many other exciting things.

Happy New Year 2009 to all of you - and see you in 2009!

Devoxx 2008 - Day 4 / Java 7 and JavaPosse

So again there were two big keynotes today - the first from Josh Bloch about "Effective Java 2nd Edition" an update to his famous book "Effective Java" considering things like Enum and Generics. Well you may say this is not a keynote - and you are correct - it was a "Josh Talk". But nevertheless it was fun.

Next was Mark Reinhold giving an update about Java 7 - with a focus on Project Jigsaw. This is the codename for a modularized Java - not only with respect to the libraries, but also down to the VM level. It seems to be a large, complex and very ambitious thing but I think it is the way to go. BTW none of the existing module frameworks won, there will be one especially tuned for this problem field. Pictures taken from slides shown are here. You are thinking this will take a long time? Well, Mark said the delivery of Java 7 will be in early 2010, that is quite soon (measured in Java dimensions).

The first technical session was Brain Goetz and Alex Buckley talking about the way towards a dynamic VM, so that other languages can make themselves more at home on top of the JVM. It seems the changes to be done are not so big, they invented some real clever concepts for letting the language decide about method resolution - and it will be part of Java 7. So that will give a major boost for your favourite language besides Java - Scala, Jython, JRuby... Next was a seesion about the new NIO API's in Java 7. They should really simplify the way to use NIO and reduce the need to write your own layer on top of NIO.

Now for the fun part - JavaPosse Live Recording. The Posse guys were as much fun as always discussing JavaFX, Java 7 and all the other things around Devoxx. Tor and Joe were live via video - just listen to the podcast to imagine the fun we had.

Devoxx 2008 - Day 3 / All the remaining things

Ok - since there are already to posts available for today I will just try to summarize the remaining events. In the afternoon we went to Bill Venners talk "The Feel of Scala" - one of the few highlights.
He showed Scala vs. Ruby, how ducktyping works and a lot of further features. Seems OSGI is getting into the market.

Here are some pictures I took during the talk:


Aftwards there was the reception for all the developers.

Devoxx 2008 - Day 3 / How NetBeans Saved the Day

... at least for a real unlucky - or perhaps a real lucky guy - read on and fond out for yourself.

Emil Ong from Caucho was up for a talk about PHP on Java showing how to use Java's abilities (and the performance of the underlying JVM) to make PHP integratable/coexisitng with existing Java WebApps on one application Server. This approach is based on Quercus, which is Caucho’s 100% pure Java implementation of PHP.
At the start of the session he already had difficulties getting his laptop to work, but finally got it up and running showing his presentation. Then suddenly somwhere right in the middle of the session his system got stuck switching to the next slide. Rebooting did not really help - so he asked the audience if anybody would lend him/hers laptop. The first try failed (seemed to be some problem with the USB-Drive) so he went for another one.
This is where the story gets interesting. Toni Epple from the NetBeans Dream Team had already met Emil last night on the Devoxx dinner and they had set up Resin/Quercus/NetBeans to work together during a break at the Cauch booth, so that PHP can be deployed with NetBeans to Quercus/Resin (read Toni's blog for more details). So he lend Emil his "trusty new and shiny MacBook" and having figured out the difficulties with the language of the operating system and one display-cable-adapter later the presentation could continue. At the end of this real interesting talk (come on PHP developers - give it a try) he was sorry to announce that the prepared demo could not be shown, since his laptop did not work. So Toni took the opportunity and proposed to show their setup with NetBeans/Quercus and Resin. So Toni just showed the PHP project he had created for Wordpress in NetBeans and just clicked "Run" and that's it - Wordpress was running on Quercus and Resin. What a cool Demo. So that is how NetBeans saved the day - and I think Emil is a lucky guy - he learned about NetBeans and the always helpful Dream Team.

You do not believe this? See for yourself

Devoxx 2008 - Day 3 / JavaFX Keynote

The theatre was packed for the keynote this morning.


Wow - those guys from Sun really showed the community how to sell the technology. Only few slides and many real cool demos and even a world premiere - the "Fox Box", which was so mindboggling cool that I just missed taking a picture. So here is one of another application shown - with a mobile version

The key note was done by Danny Coward

with help of the JavaFX-Team guys (Joshua Marinacchi, Richard Bair, Jasper Potts and Martin Brehovsky)

... and they used NetBeans


The only thing more cool than this was the "Beatboxer".

The second highlight this morning was Brian Goetz giving a talk about "From Concurrent to Parallel".

He discussed in some detail how the JSR 166y works behind the scenes and how easy it is to use (and how better it might be with "Closures") - Josh may disagree ;-) .

Devoxx 2008 - Day 2

Being early as everyday Florian and myself got interviewed for the Parleys magazine. It was a surprise seeing that those guys still remembered us from last year. So it still seems to be a small conference - even with 3200 Java enthusiasts.

The second University Day started with the session Java Performance" by Kirk Pepperdine and Holly Cummins. A quite interesting presentation showing a lot of new and old aspects for performance analysis (remember everything you learned is wrong). One new tool that may be of interest is The IBM^® Monitoring and Diagnostic Tools for Java™ - Health Center™ in Early Access. It provides the possibility to get monitoring directly from the VM without using bytecode injection. To use this you will need the latest IBM JDK as well. So give it a try.

For the afternoon session we picked "Advanced OSGI", but actually there was not so much new in the talk. During his presentation Peter Kriens talked about the classloading issues you could have and visualized it with a photo

So the highlight of the afternoon was meeting with Aaron Houston from Sun. We took a photo of the dreamteam members and did a small podcast recording.

For the BOS's we selected Meet JSR Spec. Leads, Effective code reviews in agile teams and The magic of JXLayer component .

All in all a lot of interesting stuff to try out and evalute.

Quotes of the Day:

• "You do not have performance requirements? So you have no further goal in life!", Kirk Pepperdine
• "A mouse move has been detected. Do you want to keep it? Please reboot!"
  

Small Language Changes for Java 7

Did you still believe language changes for Java 7 would be coming? Well here is the announcement from Joseph D. Darcy and some in length discussion what may be in there from Stephen Colebourne.

So any ideas? Just help Joseph and Stephen and put them on the whiteboard.

Devoxx 2008 - Day 1

First thing after breakfast today was an extensive presentation on JavaFX done by Richard Bair, Jasper Potts and Martin Brehovsky - "JavaFX in Practice". It was an amazing thing to see and to try it out in parallel. There are lots of interesting features in JavaFX already and more to come. The downside is that deployment is not finally solved (how to get it to a customer, who uses a closed network) so no easy way to get around the actual deployment limitation.



The afternoon session was "Groovy and Grails in Action" with Guillaume Laforge - presenting all this small niceties Groovy has to offer in comparison with Java. But I have to admit - I did not find the flexibility very appealing; e.g. that it is possible to overwrite the operator "+" so that it always returns 1 (reminded me of my good old C/C++ days).

For the "Tool in Action" series we went to "VisualVM - new extensible monitoring platform" done by Kirk Pepperdine and "Building Java Projects With Gradle" by Hans Dockter. VisualVM is a must have troubleshooting tool ranging from Heap-Analysis to CPU-Monitoring. If you need anything else, just create your own plugin and extend the existing functionality, e.g. like TDA. The best is you now get it with your favorite JDK (and it brought the NetBeans Platform into the JDK). Gradle seems to be a quite flexible tool for creating a build environment, but somehow I missed a bit the declarative nature, as it can be found in Maven. So check it out and give it a try.

Afterwards we attended another session for JavaFX (from Martin Brehovsky) showing a bit more about the integrated workflow between developer and designer. Next up was "Tune It!" a performance related session with Kirk Pepperdine. For the finishing session at Day One we had a session about SwingLabs. The expectations were quite high I think after all those long e-mail discussions about Sun stopping funding for SwingX.

So what's the Story about JavaFX and Swing? Well I'd say that nothing special will happen - so there is still Swing and for more advanced fancy UI code there is now JavaFX coming up. Will there be a possibility for a mesh-up? Yes. The NetBeans plugin is already quite usable, but it still seems to lack some of the features a typical Java developer will try to use (e.g. in place rename, comment out, code completion) - hope there will be updates quite soon (next year)

So what may be on the roadmap for Java7 from a Java Desktop User's view?

• Integration of Scenegraph API and other tools and laguages should be scheduled
• JWebPane is still in the works
  
• Full Java/JavaFX Meshups still to be done
• JavaApplicationFramewrk
• Beans Binding
  
• JAM (???)
• ....

My personal subjective impression - there is a cool technology coming up - so please stop whining - if you need something be part of the community and contribute.

Devoxx - Registration

To avoid long queues for registration, we decided to already pick up our bags on Sunday evening. Everything went smooth - so now we are prepared for Devoxx 2008.

We have already met some cool people - had a small chat with Stephan Janssen (make sure to visit his talk/BOF about Parley TNG), met Aaron Houston from Sun, Kirk Pepperdine (Master of Java Performance Tuning), Bill Venners (Artima Software) and just got a short glimpse at Josh Bloch.

Seems this years conference is again packed with a lot of real interesting people. So if you are already registered - cu at Devoxx from tomorrow on (or better today already past midnight here in Europe).

SQE and Devoxx 2008

Interested in exchanging ideas how to make SQE better?
Want to share your preferred workflow with the SQE developers?

Meet the SQE Team at Devoxx - just leave a comment and your e-mail - so we can get together over a Belgium beer or just have a chat over breakfast / lunch or a coffee break.

BTW expect some news on SQE for Devoxx - following our tradition we are actually working full steam for a new stable version of SQE compatible and best to use with NetBeans 6.5 Release. More news to follow ...