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Mid West Java Tech Days 2007 - Minneapolis Trip Report

Posted by arungupta on October 16, 2007 at 11:18 PM PDT

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

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