Felipe Leme's Blog: JavaOne Archives

Posted by felipeal on May 10, 2007 at 12:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

We presented our technical session earlier today, so now we can finally enjoy the conference - too bad I have to work tomorrow :-(

Anyway, I'd like to talk a little bit about our presentation...

The room was quite packed (541 seats of 800 available), and the session was kind of fun, besides our problems with the demo. In fact, we took a look on the evaluations after we left, and most of them were good. We received some bad feedback though, some valid, some not, so I'd like to comment about some complaints we received...

They should have tested the laptop setup - well, we did, but it didn't work :-(. There is a 10 minute technical rehearsal in the day before the session, exactly for this purpose. We went there yesterday at 7:00 PM, and could not make it work (thanks to the wonderful video card work Dell does on its laptops), besides the effort of the JavaOne crew and even the help with another speaker (a guy who is a WTP committer). We tried hard for almost 1 hour, but had to leave before the 8:00 PM BOF. Then we tried again this morning, and apparently it worked - apparently, because we did not try to login (once I logged in during the technical session, the problem happened again :-(. What made me really angry is that I didn't install Linux on that laptop (I just got it Friday) because I didn't want to mess it around before our session...

The speaker should have practiced more, so the demo should not fail - I don't think that critic was fair, I did practice a lot. I agree I should not have had the errors with the proxy server, but when I practiced, I got other errors (like swing elements not being displayed correctly), so I opted for removing the minimum number of elements. Also, some errors I had were on purpose, as the idea was to show the right way demonstrating the wrong way first. So, in summary, the errors were:

not saving test plan before running a test: on purpose, so I could talk about the extension (.jmx)
failure due to lack of cookie manager - on purpose
failure because of ViewStage - on purpose
big mess as proxy was not stopped - my bad :-(
forget to add ${viewState} - my mistake again, although not a big deal

Session was supposed to be about tools, but they just talked about JMeter - that's fair. When we planned the presentation, we intended to show other tools, specially the integration of JMeter with profilers and build. Unfortunately, as we developed the presentation, we realized we would not have time to show everything we had in mind, so we opted to just explain - in a practical way - how JMeter works. So, our biggest flaw in that point was not being clear about it in the abstract - sorry about that...

Speakers had an accent hard to understand - we are sorry about that as well - we are not native English speakers, but tried our best (I, in particular, tried to speak slower than I normally do). In fact, we had a couching session before our presentation, and we told the coach the accent was one of our main concerns, so he gave us some tips. Looks like they were not enough though :-(

It was a total waste of time - I don't think it was that bad, at least it was funny - I've been to sessions that just were not a total waste of time because I could take a nap and get some rest while on it...

But we also received some very good feedback, most of them regarding the fact that we had trouble with the demo but could work around it.

So to finalize, I'd like to apologize for those who didn't like the session, and to thank those who enjoyed. In particular, I'd like to thank:

the JavaOne crew (the stage guys, the speaking coach, etc...)
the guy who suggested I should stop the proxy
everyone that helped me find a red request in the screen
Ed Burns
and a special thanks to Dell - had the laptop worked smoothly, the presentation wouldn't be half that funny!

SOIA - Specfiy Once, Implement Anywhere

Posted by felipeal on June 23, 2005 at 06:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Have you ever wondered how hard would it be to switch the implementation for a JCP-based technology? Theoretically, it should be easy as changing the skin of your MP3 player. Unfortunately, that has not being the case for most of the J2EE technologies, specially EJBs.

Last Monday I finished the JSF port of the application we are usign for our BOF at JavaOne. Our originally plan was to port an existing webapp to different MVC frameworks, including JSF RI and MyFaces. As the clock was ticking (our presentation is a week away and we are departuring today) and I hadn't even finished the JSF RI version, we pratically gave up the MyFaces port.

Anyway, last night I decided to give it a try while watching a soccer game (that's one of the best uses of a laptop system :-). And how wasn't my surprise to finish the job just before the half time (and that becuase most of time was spent downloading the software!): all that it took to switch RI for MyFaces was to add a few lines on web.xml and replace half a dozen jars!

That's right: no changes on JSPs, backing-beans or even faces-config.xml; just add a listener on the deployment descriptor (and replace the jars, of course) and you're done!br>
Still don't believe me? Well, take a look on the diff between the 2 projects then:


[felipeal@localhost webapps]$ diff -r jsf-project myfaces-project
Only in myfaces-project/WEB-INF/lib: commons-el.jar
Only in myfaces-project/WEB-INF/lib: commons-validator.jar
Only in myfaces-project/WEB-INF/lib: myfaces.jar
Only in jsf-project/WEB-INF/lib: jsf-api.jar
Only in jsf-project/WEB-INF/lib: jsf-impl.jar
Only in jsf-project/WEB-INF/lib: jstl.jar
Only in jsf-project/WEB-INF/lib: standard.jar
diff -r jsf-project/WEB-INF/web.xml myfaces-project/WEB-INF/web.xml
27a28,33
>
>
>  
>    org.apache.myfaces.webapp.StartupServletContextListener
>  
>

Of course, we have to take in account that our application was very simple: just 3 JSP pages and 2 backing beans. Still, the transition from one implementation to another was very smooth, much more than we predicted.

A friendly warning about JavaOne submissions

Posted by felipeal on January 08, 2005 at 07:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

As I (and many others) have mentioned earlier, the JavaOne call for papers is open.

But beware of the dog, I mean the submit button - this year the system has changed and once you click "Submit - Finalize" your submission is final.

Although this seems obvious for a "newbie" submitter, it is not for people that have submitted proposals in the previous years, as the old system allowed you to edit the submissions. In fact, you never actually finalized a submission, you could edit it until the last day. So I think they changed the system to speed up the selection process - once the submission is finalized, the Program Comittee could start evaluating it, without waiting for the final day.

I personally preferred the old system, specially when you have co-speakers and/or peers helping to review your submission. So, if you like this approach too, be careful and do these steps externally to the system, *before* submitting your proposal - once they're submitted, they're done.

Calling for JavaOne papers

Posted by felipeal on December 22, 2004 at 06:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As Daniel already pointed out, the J1CFP was really late this year - by this time in previous years the submissions should have been already sent.

Looks like Sun has an excuse this time though: the submission system has changed and it has now a better looking layout (although it still have some flaws, like automatically creating your username as the pre-@ part of your email). I'm not sure if the old system is still up (I don't have its URL neither my previous logins right now) but I guess it is.

The final date for submission is January 31th and they will start send the notifications on March 7th (plus delays :-). The topics seems to have shrinked a little and the sessions were split in 3 types: News from the Leading Edge, Tutorials and Advanced How-tos. At first glance looks like they just gave new fancy names for the old Beginner, Intermediate and Advanced levels, but I think their expecting a different format for each one.

Anyway, it's time to suspend (or, hopefully, finish :-) my SCEA assignment and move on into this new challenge...

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