Michael Nascimento Santos's Blog

May 2007 Archives

Final JavaOne report

Ok, so after a long trip home, I finally managed to write the final installment about JavaOne.

In the morning, I attended Gavin King and Bob Lee's talk about Web Beans. The coolest thing about Web Beans is actually its dependency-injection support and the rich lifecycle model they are proposing. It is actually a merge between Seam and Guice strategies. It would be applicable to any kind of application, not only web-based, so my question was if they intended to split the spec so these features could be used, well, anywhere. They like the idea, but it is too soon to say. Let's hope they eventually do it. Watch out, Spring!

Then I attended the Effective Java Reloaded session. I haven't attended the 2006 session, but a few folks said it was too similar to last year's talk. I've already applied - and advocated - many best practices suggested during the talk, specially making everything final. By the way, Gavin, Bob and Joshua are great speakers and members of this group were in short supply this year. Sigh.

In the afternoon, I've (accidentally) spent some time with some NetBeans guys. First Roman Strobl:

I've told him a little bit more about my NetBeans pledge (expect a follow-up post about it). Then I came across Geertjan again, that showed me his musical notepad (you can find it at nbjfuguesupport). Guilherme Silveira was passing by and decided to make a video about it. He posted the first part in YouTube and hopefully he will upload the second part soon.

After that, I've attended the last few minutes of the session named "Stress Your Web App Before It Stresses You: Tools and Techniques for Extreme Web Testing". It was quite packed and it seems people liked it a lot. So, no need to be worried, Felipe!

Basically I spent most of the time in the afternoon and early in the evening. Then, I was at the Java Champions BOF. Java Champions are recognized by Sun as leaders inside the community. Some of them are Kathy Sierra, Bruce Eckel, Joshua Bloch, Neal Gafter, Jason Hunter, Calvin Austin and even myself. It was good to meet some of them and also to meet the program coordinator, Aaron Houston, a very nice guy.

Finally, it was show time: our BOF about JSR-310, Date and Time . As noted by Timothy O'Brien, the number of people who attended was impressive. Her is a partial picture:

We showed a few slides and some code Stephen started working on recently; we expect to commit this API to SVN soon. The audience made interesting comments and questions during the talk and after it - we had to stay there for almost an hour after our talk to address all questions. Some spec leads for JSRs that will make it to Java SE 7 were there and showed they intend to use our work and to support it. So, JavaOne selection team, keep it in mind for next year: date and time is a hot topic.

Once I had completed my main mission, I had a meal with some other Java Champions/JUG Leaders in a nearby restaurant. It was quite nice to meet these folks, shall I say.

From Thursday, I would like to highlight the excellent JFugue talk delivered mainly by David Koelle and with special guest star Geertjan Wielenga. David is a terrific speaker, his work is amazingly cool, his demos rocked and he managed to be funny. Geertjan also deserves congratulations for focusing on the main topic, JFugue, instead of just pushing NetBeans. Of course he mentioned his application was NB-based, but he actually focused on demonstrating how JFugue was simple to use, which just makes more people interested in his application and, well, NetBeans. So, another note to J1 selection team: we want more music-related talks, preferably with David!

Fabiane Nardon and Daniel Lopez's BOF, Designing Self-Evolving and Self-Configuring Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) Applications, was also quite interesting and attended by several Java Champions. Nice job! The BoF I've attended after it was one of the coolest sessions in JavaOne: The "java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: PermGen Space" Error Message Demystified, presented by Frank Kieviet and Edward Chou. I couldn't believe they could actually spend 50 minutes talking about this topic with valuable information, but they actually did it. Having done a lot of profiling and OOME chasing before, I must say I could not explain the issue better. You must be on the Rock Star Speakers list for this year.

Fabiane and Edgar's session on Friday was very successful as well and Linda deMichiel and Kenneth, from JPA 2.0 and EJB 3.1, came to them after the session to look for input for their specs. Joshua's Puzzler session was really cool as well.

So, it was nice to meet everyone I didn't know in person before and to talk to all of you I've already known. See you in JavaOne 2008 (if any of my submissions is approved)!

Tuesday BOFs

So, let's proceed with my JavaOne report. I've attended the Meet the Swing, AWT and i18n Teams BOF, mainly because Sun's representative in our JSR would be there. We - Stephen was with me - met him and another Sun guy who works in the util & i18n team. They are nice chaps and I regret not taking a picture with them. Maybe I will fix that later this week :-)

Then I went to Neal's talk on closures. Basically what he said is what he had already made public on the internet, so there was nothing new. One thing I asked him about is if he considered restricting the usage of closures, so people don't use closures for cases it doesn't make sense, perhaps member variables. Neal said he thinks if people are using it for something that way, they probably know what they are doing; I guess he never worked as a consultant in his life :-) Just kidding; in the end, I actually agree with Neal, but I am sure people will shoot themselves on the foot.

Finally, I moved to the final talk in the evening, about Java Programming Language Features in JDK Release 7, with Alex Buckley and Peter von der Ahé. It was really cool to hear from the source what is the process they use for considering language changes and to hear about some of them, including operator overloading. While I am somewhat concerned about it - and so are they, it seems -, I think it would make the Date & Time API much clearer and easier to use.

I've also asked Alex about method/field literals and he said I should probably create a Kitchen Sink Language project implementing them, along with a spec, so they can evaluate it. Maybe I will find the time, maybe not... Let's see :-)

So, wait for my Wednesday report :-)

Tuesday afternoon

So, after hearing from Danny Coward that our JSR is being considered for inclusion in Java SE 7, I came across Neal Gafter:

Neal has contributed many things to the Java community while he worked for Sun and now he is one of the guys behind of the three closure proposals and has provided some input to our JSR - believe me, a few people need support for things you probably haven't ever heard about, like leap seconds, or that you don't fully comprehend, like femtoseconds. So far, our focus is just to get things right and working and Neal agrees with this approach.

After that, I went to the java.net booth and talked to some of the java.net crew, including Marla, Sarah, Daniel Steinberg and Chris Adamson. Here is a pic with Daniel and Sarah:

I've also met Geert Brewin, the guy behind RIFE and continuations:

We talked for some time and hopefully I will be able to help him getting a JSR about continuations started.

Then I attended Bob Brewin's general session. There were a couple of cool things he showed, including the super extra cool NASA World Wind, which has a Java API that can be integrated in your application and works pretty much like Google Earth. He also demonstrated Iris, which is photo editing software for the web, implemented as an applet.

Then I went to the talk about JSR-296, the Swing Application Framework. I am part of the expert group, so I was actually more interested in the tooling provided by NetBeans. I liked it quite a lot; Joshua did a great work, for sure. Hopefully I will be able to adapt some of his work to provide better support for genesis.

The last talk I attended in the afternoon was the EJB 3.1 talk. Here is a list of things (that I can remember) they're considering:

• Eliminating the need for business interfaces
• Allowing EJBs to be packaged along with web components (in a war)
• Creating an asynchronous model, including bean-managed synchronization (using synchronized)
• Adding singletons
• Improving the timer service, so a timer can be created when an EJB is deployed
• Supporting stateful webservices

For the timer service, they are considering some sort of a cron-like service. I've talked to Kenneth after the talk since I think they might find the new Date and Time API useful for these improvements, so let's see what happens.

Well, that's it for now. I know I'm significantly behind, but hey, I have to actually attend the talks and get some sleep ;-) And don't miss our BOF tonight (Wednesday), at 9:55PM!

Everyone is a Brazilian

During keynote this morning, John Gage has said his classic opening sentence again: this week, everyone is a Brazilian. Hey, I am one, so if you come across me during the event, I can probably teach you something ;-)

So, to the real meat (I am a vegetarian, by the way, but you get it): Sun has announced that open-sourcing Java has finally been completed. You can go to OpenJDK and download the full source code for the JDK.

Rich Green also told us they will make Java much faster and that there will be a Java SE distribution for consumers which is modular and starts much faster.

Another cool thing is JavaFX. It is a set of technologies used to build rich client applications. Think of it mainly as the Java alternative for Flash. Part of JavaFX is JavaFX Script, a new script language targeted at making the development of this kind of applications easier.

There is also something called JavaFX Mobile. It will allow every Java SE API to be available on phones, as well as supporting Java ME applications. Basically, Sun wants to provide software for the next generation mobiles.Other things happened during this session, but there is no time to tell everything :-)

After the session, I went to the Java SE: Present and Future talk. Danny Coward talked about the JSRs that are being considered for Java SE 7 and I was pretty happy when our JSR was mentioned as one of them.

There is a lot more going on, so stay tuned...

Monday afternoon at JavaOne

After being disappointed at the Matisse session, I decided to go seeing what folks were doing at Redmonk. Well, the unconference was interesting and there were discusssions about scripting languages, invokedynamic and several, several other matters. I reviewed Stephen Colebourne's airplane hack - that he had improved at that time - and made a suggestion to get fewer classes that abstract the period concept. Have I mentioned we will be presenting a BOF, A New Date and Time API for Java Platform, Standard Edition (Java SE), next Wednesday, 9:55 PM, and that you should add it to your schedule? :-)

At the closing session, James Gosling showed a lot of cool applications built using NetBeans and Bruno Souza called the NetBeans Dream Team to stage, which includes two Brazilians: Vinicius Senger, from GlobalCode and Edgar Silva from JBoss. Here is a picture:

Finally, there was a party and besides meeting a nice Brazilian who works as a VP of software development for JP Morgan, we (Yara, Vinicius and I) have talked to Michael Keith, co-spec lead for EJB 3.0 and what to expect from the future:

So that was it. Hopefully I'll blog about today's morning in a few minutes :-)

A public pledge to NetBeans

I could not be more disappointed after attending the Swing GUI Building With Matisse: Chapter II presented at NetBeans. It's not a problem with the Swing Application Framework or the NetBeans tooling; it's a problem with freedom of choice, vendor lock-in and a close-minded approach, not community-like friendly by the NetBeans guys.

I hate to make such issues public, but I've been trying to solve this in a civilized way for a year. Almost two years ago I've filed an issue about making Matisse extensible. It was ignored for a long time, but over time, I become hopeful again since the NetBeans roadmap indicated that Matisse would support binding for NB 6.

Over six months ago, I've emailed Tomas Pavek, the NetBeans Matisse lead developer (as far as I know) and Scott Violet, who was the spec lead for JSR-295, Beans Binding, to make sure Matisse implemented it as an abstraction, so it was possible to use Matisse with other binding technologies, such as JGoodies Binding or genesis. This email resulted in a thread in which I explained to Tomas what was needed in the API in order to support other frameworks (basically, abstracting how you interact with the binding "metadata"/API and providing extension points to generate the specific binding API code).

One thing that limited my analysis before was the fact there was no publicly accessible code for JSR-295 or the NetBeans support and I was told that a public preview would be available in January. Well, as most of you know, it has only been made available a couple of days ago.

Today, during the session, I mentioned that while I actually found the tooling fantastic, many folks (just for an example, read this) have all kind of issues with Beans Binding and whether NetBeans would allow its users to work with other binding frameworks, by providing a API that is extensible. While Shannon Hickey, the new JSR-295 spec lead, understood it's not like I'm bashing his work, the NetBeans guys simply said they just want to support the standard. What does it mean to you?

• If you don't believe that beans binding as a concept is the correct way to make GUI development easier (genesis does what we call "UI binding", which is different, much simpler and straightforward), you're lost
• If you are working with Java 1.4, sorry; NetBeans will never have a decent solution for you since JSR-295 is targeted at Java 5
• If you want to use a solution that already works with other UI technologies, such as SWT, sorry, no donut for you
• If you want to keep the binding logic apart from the UI logic, there is no way
• If you have an existing project or someone pushed another binding solution in your project, you will actually have to branch Matisse and override it to support it

Obviously, the first answer would be: "hey, but about maintainance?" but no one is asking for a JGoodies or a genesis binding module to become part of NetBeans; I am just asking for the possibility of doing so if needed without branching Matisse. And, heck, I've read Matisse's code: the kind of support I'm asking for would require just a few days to extract the dependencies and create an abstraction based on interfaces and going through the API review process, that would allow people with enough knowledge about other binding solutions to validate it. That is it.

So, to sum up, what I'm complaining about here:

• Sun has always promised us we would have freedom of choice, but NetBeans will get us locked in beansbinding (vendor lock-in)
• NetBeans should listen to the community and work with the community. For years, there weren't a standard approach for binding and there are tons of folks working with other frameworks right now that could benefit from having a plugin that allows them to work with their current binding solution.
• If NetBeans wants to become supported by the community, it shouldn't bite the hand of those that helped to evangelize it. I have been actively promoting NetBeans in Brazil for a few years now, both as a consultant and as a SouJava organization member. I just want to help NetBeans to help its users, but apparently NetBeans developers want to push Sun's solution down our throats.

Here is my request: show me I am wrong. Show you can listen to the community. Show me freedom of choice is not just some marketing rubbish. Please.

NetBeans Day morning

So today is the CommunityOne event, an event where several communities get together in order to exchange ideas, watch sessions and, well, go to some parties. Right now, I am attending the NetBeans general session held by Jonathan Schwartz and Rich Green:

I've chatted a little bit with Geertjan, one of the NetBeans guys:

He actually remembers ThinNB, the Thinlet plugins I wrote in the painful NB 4.1 no-module-development-support days.

I've also met a couple of famous Brazilians folks:

From left to right, Leonardo Galvão from JavaMagazine, Felipe Gaucho, myself and Felipe A. Leme.

Finally, I've been chatting a lot with Guilherme Silveira, from Caelum:

So much to write about, so little time :-P Hopefully I will blog about the conversations I had with these pals later on. See you around :-P

JavaOne 2007 is about to start

JavaOne is about to start and I've already met some old friends again...

'nough said :-). I've met James Gosling during registration on Sunday. Ok, it is not like he actually remembers who I am without some explanation, but anyway... :-)

I have had a great time since I've arrived here on Saturday. In the afternoon, I had a long chat with Stephen Colebourne, who co-leads JSR-310 with me. We'd never met in person before, so it was nice to find out he is quite a cool guy. We've chatted a little about closures, generics quirks and some fresh code Stephen wrote in the plane that we should show up during our BOF, A New Date and Time API for Java Platform, Standard Edition (Java SE), that will take place next Wednesday, 9:55 PM, so make sure you add it to your schedule.

I've also had a great time yesterday with Vinicius & Yara Senger from Globalcode and Felipe Leme, aka felipeal, who is a long-time friend. We've just chatted about many stuff, including some of the most deceiving people we've came across in all these years in consulting. Maybe we should write a public blacklist somewhere :-D

Anyway, it's time to take a shower, put some clean clothes and go to CommunityOne, most of the time, to NetBeans day. I hope I can finally meet the Matisse/beansbinding guys and say a few things about its binding support before I submit a blog entry about it. It's been almost a year I've tried to reach them without success; hopefully, today it will be different.

I have to say a big thank you to my pals at Summa Technologies do Brasil, the company I work for and that is sponsoring my trip, making it all possible. See you @ JavaOne!

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