Skip to main content

Mid West Java Tech Days 2007 - Minneapolis Trip Report

Posted by arungupta on October 17, 2007 at 2:18 AM EDT

Mid West Java Tech Days concluded in Minneapolis earlier today.

First, here are some facts I learned about Minneapolis:

  • Minneapolis is a Twin City with St Paul
  • Has 20 lakes and wetlands
  • Mall of America - Biggest retail and entertainment complex in the USA
  • Target headquarters is in the downtown
  • Has the First Basilica in USA
  • 7 miles of skyways linking 8 blocks downtown. Really useful for those rainy and snowy times.
  • Has one of the biggest Tibetan populations in the World (read more here)
  • Abundance of public parks - Accessible within 0.5 mile of every home

Second, the Internet connection at the hotel is ridiculously slow (at least for me) as shown here:

I talked to other colleagues staying at the same hotel and it seemed to work fine for them. Anyway, it took 6 calls to the Tech Support to resolve the issue partly. Or may be it's 1:15am in the morning here, the usage is down and that's why I'm seeing a better response time ;-) But when I explained the issue to the hotel, they happily removed the ISP charges for my first day stay @ the hotel.

Now back to the event.

The event kick started with Tim Bray's keynote.

Tim Bray gave the keynote to an audience of approx 125 people and talked about "Business and Cultural aspect of Web 2.0" and "Programming Language and Infrastructure". Everybody in the room raised a hand when asked if they were a developer which was kind of cool because typically we see a mix of IT managers, Engineering Managers, Sys Admins and of course Developers.

One of the key messages in the talk was to start thinking about outside-in (how the community is going to interact/provide feedback about the product) and inside-out (how open the discussions can be) for a product and see how the community can be involved.

Tim presented Tree View of the Programming Languages. It shows how different programming languages are getting adopted year-by-year. The data is created by collecting book purchasing data from different publishers and then taggin each book with language. They point to notice is that only JavaScript and Ruby are growing. Here are some of the points that he mentioned about PHP & Rails:

PHP

Rails

Java is a 3-legged stool comprising of APIs, JVM and Java language. All the scripting languages (Ruby, PHP, JavaScript, etc) are supported in the JVM using JSR 223 APIs.

Tim also compared PHP, Rails and Java in terms of scaling, dev speed, dev tools & maintainability. The talk concluded by stating that Single Architecture IT shop is never going away. PHP, Java, Ruby, .NET - all will continue to exist and live together. REST allows a cleaner integration of these technologies. In my talk on Metro, I discussed an alternate strategy for a heterogeneous systems where Java and .NET can co-exist with each using WS-*-based interoperability achieved in GlassFish.

I delivered two talks - "Metro: Web services interoperability with Microsoft .NET" and  "jMaki: Framework for Ajax-enabled Web 2.0 apps".

The first talk (Metro) was scheduled to start at 11:15 am and there were only 3 people in the room at that time. I started the talk few minutes late giving time for people to show up but even by 11:25 (after I've done the initial introductions) there were only approx 12 people in the room. And then somebody from the audience mentioned that the previous session just finished and I did see a splurge of audience right around that time. On audience's request, I did a recap and then continued with rest of the presentation. I was glad that the room was full in few more minutes :)

The slides are available here. Here is the list of questions asked with their answers:

  • Can Metro apps be deployed on Web Sphere ?
    This is not a tested/supported configuration but Metro apps can be deployed on Web Sphere provided all the libraries are bundled in the WEB-INF/lib directory of the web application itself.
  • Can Metro apps be deployed on JBoss ?
    JBoss WS 2.1.0 will support Metro. Read more details here.
  • How can contract-first endpoint be developed and still utilize interoperability with .NET feature ?
    Use the "New Web Service From WSDL" feature in NetBeans IDE and the enable Security/Reliability/Transactions feature as shown here.
  • Link to demos shown in the talk

The jMaki talk was SRO and we had to borrow multiple chairs from another room to accommodate the audience. The slides are available here. Here is the list of questions asked with their answers:

  • Can jMaki apps be deployed on other containers, such as Tomcat ?
    jMaki web applications are deployed as WAR files and can be easily deployed on any other container.
  • What does it take to create your own widget and make it available in the palette ?
    This page provides low-level details on how to create your own jMaki widgets.
  • What is the total size of jMaki wrapper ?
    18KB
  • Can jMaki apps be developed using JDeveloper ?
    Currently jMaki apps can be developed using NetBeans IDE, Eclipse and Ant-based tasks only. However please send us an email if you are interested in contributing the jMaki plug-in for JDeveloper.
  • Link to demos shown in the talk

And, of course, there were some Hudson enthusiasts.

The evening concluded with a great dinner at Solera along with Charlie, Thomas, Tim and Greg and some interesting discussions about scripting languages.

Here is the picture album so far:

Next step Chicago on Oct 18, there is still time to register!

Technorati: conf webservices glassfish projectmetro jmaki netbeans hudson

Related Topics >>
Blog Links >>