Raghavan "Rags" Srinivas's Blog

The Script Bowl

I just moderated a panel with the scripting gurus. Guillaume LaForge of Groovy, Charles Nutter of JRuby, Frank Wierzbicki of Jython and Jorge Ortiz representing Scala.

The distinguished panel of judges were Roberto Chinnici, Ola Bini and Carol McDonald and was moderated by me.

It was a fun and interactive session and I got some good feedback from the attendees.

The attendees voted real-time for the best performance ala Idol style via SMS and the results are here.

View Results of the Script Bowl

Speakers A, B, C and D are Groovy, JRuby, Jython and Scala respectively.

Lots of real cool demos and insights into the language. I am impressed by the conciseness and power of the languages. Lots of fun!

Thanks to Jerry Tao for the voting hardware and software.

Rags

Sun Tech Days 2006-2007

Sun Tech Days starts this year on Sep. 6th at Seattle. Check out

http://www.sun.com/developers/techdays

to get a peek at the agenda, check out the speaker roster and to register. In addition to the speaker roster listed we also have many subject experts -- Eduardo Pelegri-Llopart, Craig McClanahan, Linda DeMichiel, Mike Grogan, Brent Christian, to name a few.

Would love to get some comments on the agenda and any general comments on Sun Tech Days (good, bad or ugly) especially if you are an Alumni.

Hope to see you in some part of the world!

Rags

Interop event in the Bay Area

This event aimed primarily at architects and CIOs is something that I have been helping pull together. It is scheduled for Tues., Jan 31st at the Network Meeting Center in Santa Clara, CA.

http://www.sdforum.org/interop06

The event has a nominal fee and although you should not expect to see code and API level details, it should be an interesting forum to hear from the vendors and more importantly from the users when the rubber meets the road.

The main challenges of enterprise integration such as management and identity is expected to be covered in greater length.

You should also expect to get a sneak peek for more interoperabilty support in Glassfish at this event. Some of the support, such as early bits for ws-addressing is available today.

More Interoperability with .NET

In my very first customer engagement with a financial services company in Boston, I was told unequivocally that they needed to see much better interoperability between the platforms they had of which Java was predominant.

Developers have been rigging up their own solutions to make their systems interoperate until web services ushered in a promise of unprecendented interoperability. While adoption has been somewhat slow for a variety of reasons, some recent strides have been made in the support for some of the web services standards that are fairly mature. Check out

http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/051104/sff032.html?.v=22

Also, check out Eduardo's blog.

In addition to the community efforts that Java is undertaking with Project Glassfish and Mustang, it's nice to see the community participation in the robust and sustained growth of Java to keep the language and platform competitive.

Also, checkout the recent JavaOne 2005 conference .PDF archives at

http://www.sun.com/products/interoperability/javaone.html

or the multimedia of the sessions at

http://developers.sun.com/learning/javaoneonline/

Rags

Sun Tech Days

As faithfully as the fall colors of New England come around this time of the year, it's time for the next installment of Sun Tech Days. The Sun Tech Days is a world-wide Face-to-face event in which we highlight Java and other technologies from Sun.

http://www.sun.com/developers/techdays/

Would be great to hear from the thousands of Tech Days alumni and the developers out there about the proposed agenda and how we can generally enhance the Tech Days experience. This year, we are also premiering Netbeans day and Solaris days in conjunction with the main event.

I am a firm believer that virtual learning has it's place and that learning is significantly enhanced in talking to peers, visionaries, etc. and just experiencing the energy level of being in a big room. At these events I have met many great developers around the world including fellow bloggers. To be able to see technologies, solutions and the everyday challenges and rewards through their eyes, is an unique experience for me. I have heard from many Tech Days attendees about how directly pertinent the Tech Days experience has been to their respective careers.

However, I also hope to turn over into a new leaf and start blogging more since I realize the limitations of events even if they're so widespread.

Java and .NET interoperability track at JavaOne

Details of the track is at

http://java.sun.com/javaone/sf/interoperability.jsp

with a kickoff session featuring high profile speakers from both Sun and Microsoft as featured in Graham's blog.

http://weblogs.java.net/blog/kgh/archive/2005/06/ibm_microsoft_a_1.html

The track is aimed to discuss mostly current solutions with some insights into future.

Will be great to hear from developers about what other topics specifically concerning interop they would like to hear about.

Hope to see you there!

Rags

Have you sowed the Bean, yet?

I attended the session on Netbeans . It talked about 3.6 and future versions. It's really amazing to see the kinda things that one can do with an IDE these days -- I've to confess that I use vi whenever I can and when it comes to a tad bit more complex development and deployment, such as web services, I resort to netbeans or the Studio.

The session talked about bringing up different tools within the IDE and how the different data/stats., like memory, profiling information, etc. could be correlated without leaving the IDE. From syntax coloring to being able to step through JSPs, the IDEs seem to be so feature rich. I remembered my first assignment right after school when I had to find out memory leaks in a C/C++ program and what a royal pain it was.

Do you think this seemingly quantum shift in features of IDEs have made you dramatically more productive?

IDEs are like religion and developers generally stick to an IDE and work around its idiosynchrasies. However, If you have not checked out the latest netbeans, perhaps this might be the time to give it a spin.

Rags

Java - If it's not your cuppa tea, it ought to be

Day 2 and counting down. I have been invited by the Computer Society in India and we're trying to finalize a topic for the talk. My initial list was

Network Security: From Warfare to Web Services
The economic implications of Open Source
If Java is not your cuppa tea, it ought to be

After Scott McNealy's general session this morning, I am convinced that the third topic will probably be the most appropriate.

The game demos. were simply astounding. The frame speeds & the graphics resolutions were really jaw dropping. The Looking Glass desktop was also a great example. But, what sealed the argument on whether Java is not ready for certain applications was the Dukie awards. A variety of applications across the gamut have been written and deployed successfully in Java, not to mention the T-shirt throwing gadgets that incorporated some Java.

Although no technology is a silver bullet, it's worth thinking about Java for every application that you are called to design. Shameless plug here, attend BOF-1404 from 7:30 to 8:20PM tommorow to see an example of Java Everywhere.

So, Java might indeed be your perfect cuppa tea.

Rags

Java - the C/C++ inheritance

Interestingly, in many of my JavaOnes, this was the first time I attended the chat. I was disappointed that there was no fire anywhere. However, the energy level was very high and I enjoyed the discussions. The JavaOne Alumni is a very robust and influential community.

Of all the questions, the one that struck me most, was the intertwining of Java and the C/C++ language. Obviously, many of us in the Java community did take the C/C++ route and sometimes wish for some of the esoteric feautures of C/C++ that we miss.

When I joined Sun, I had a discussion with James Gosling about the fact that I loved STL and when would templates be incorporated in Java. I am glad that a much improved version of templates i.e. generics is in Java.

However, it also reminded me of some of the pitfalls. I quickly typed in a piece of C/C++ code.


#include 
main()
{
    if ( (unsigned) 0 < -2)
        printf("C is falling apart\n");
}

If you're able to guess the answer for this and realize why, you may probably agree with me that the unsigned is abused more than used appropriately.

I hope that Java continues to be relatively small, elegant and harder to commit mistakes. Thoughts?

Rags

JavaOne Hands-on Labs

After switching over to a computer job after an undergrad degree in Mechanical engineering, it sorta felt strange not to see any moving parts in whatever I was building or help build. The closest that comes to looking under the hood of a software system is to look at the code, study the code, modify the code and watch the modified movement.

This year, there is a plethora of Hands-on Labs in 2 different formats -- the traditional instructor-led and the self-paced to suit attendees who have different learning styles.

The labs are pre-installed and ready to run. Follow along with the instructor and/or the lab manual or simply hack around with the code as you please and get to experience the tangible in software.

Big Brother is watching

The Chinese Government is insisting that wi-fi chipmakers must bundle a properiatary encryption software not only to make the chips in China but also to be able to sell units made of these chips to the Chinese market. This piece of software has not undergone public scrutiny and select companies within China have special access to it. See http://wifinetnews.com/archives/003051.html. This reeks of Government control and invasion of privacy with accusations that the software may contain a backdoor. Starting with wi-fi chips, who knows where this will end?

As Java developers, the historical distinction between JCA and JCE has largely been as a result of the US export control Laws. Prior to year 2000, many companies provided clean room implementations of JCE until Sun was able to export the framework while still be seen as compliant with the US export control laws. See http://java.sun.com/products/jce/jce-rsa2000-html-files/rsaSlides.ppt.htm

Steven Levy details the clipper chip controversy and other interesting crypto trivia in his book Crypto. The book talks about how the cryptographers eventually prevailed over relentless Governmental pressure.

However, will the Chinese Government win this round that the US Government never could largely because of it's might and willingness to wage a war of attrition on the Multinational companies who have larger battles to fight at the moment? It's a really scary thought and outcome with possibly much wider ramifications.

Rags