Subject: “Extreem RAD : Live Web Applicatie Ontwikkeling met Oracle Application Express”
Pro: Roel Hartman
Office: Arnhem, the Netherlands
Date: 28 oktober 2008

Subject: “Standardizing SOA with Oracle’s Application Integration Architecture”
Pro: Adri Greeve
Office: Rotterdam
Date: 13 november 2008

Subject: “Practical Approach to SOA Adoption”
Pro: Edwin van Dis
Office: Amstelveen
Date: 27 november 2008

Register for a Pro4Pro session

On Monday the 20th of October Logica has invited Thomas Erl to speak on the Principles of Service Design and Patterns to transform the most important challenges into a successful realization of a Service Oriented Architecture. Business analyst, functional designers and architects will gain new valuable insights on the modeling of services and supporting architecture.

About Thomas Erl:
Thomas Erl is the world’s top-selling SOA author, Series Editor of the “Prentice Hall Service-Oriented Computing Series from Thomas Erl” (www.soabooks.com), and Editor of The SOA Magazine (www.soamag.com). With over 95,000 copies in print world-wide, his books have become international bestsellers. His most recent titles “SOA Design Patterns” (www.soapatterns.com) and “Web Service Contract Design and Versioning for SOA” were co-authored with a series of industry experts and are being released in the latter half of 2008.

Thomas is also the founder of SOA Systems Inc. (www.soasystems.com), a company specializing in SOA training, certification, and strategic consulting services with a vendor-agnostic focus. For more information, visit www.thomaserl.com.

Program
18.00 uur Welcome & diner
19.00 uur Welcome speach
19.15 uur Thomas Erl – ‘How to overcome the key challenges within SOA’
20.30 uur Drinks

The presentation will be in English of course.

Location
Logica, Prof. W.H. Keesomlaan 14 in Amstelveen

There is more info on the Logica site (in Dutch). You can also register (”aanmeldingsformulier”) there.

The seminar was well received and we got good evaluations. All in all a great day. You can find the presentations here www.logica.dk/owsm

Click here to see the full UKOUG agenda online.

Both presentations aren’t fully booked yet, so if you have the time and happen to be around…you can add these to your OOW-schedule!

Lucas and Dimitri both built an application using their favorite tool and demo’ed it to the audience. Both failed on one part - as live demo’s tend to do - so it was 1-1 at mid time. After the break the match continued with some nice features shown on both sides. Both presenters where dared to say something positive on the other tools. For Dimitri this was the most difficult part: “I can’t come up with anything nice to say about JDeveloper”.

After a complete comparison, there was one clear winner: The audience!

Thanks to both of you guys for this joint effort!

So to wrap up: ODTUG is a great event. Not great in the sense that you’re overwhelmed with 1,000’s of people (there were about 700 attendees), but exactly the opposite. Due to the fact that it is rather small, you’ll find yourself having a beer (or two) with all kind of guru’s, experts, co-bloggers etc. Especially that relaxed, cool atmosphere is what makes ODTUG such an excellent event.

One more note about ‘atmosphere’: New Orleans in June is so hot and humid, that you barely can stand the outside temperature for more than 10 minutes - on the opposite : inside (in particular inside the Sheraton) the air conditioning is turned to the max. So every time you get from the outside to the inside, or the other way round, you have to deal with a temperature difference that feels like a 20 C.

Also the Sheraton is a good place to stay and from the 43th floor I had a great view on the river. Could have been better if somebody had cleaned the window - but who cleans windows at that height?

I hope to see everybody again next year - in Monterey (?).

After that one Dimitri Gielis presented on Creating Advanced Charts with APEX. He showed the audience what you can do using the charting options of APEX. Impressive!

Next was the Oracle APEX Developer of the Year 2007, Patrick Wolf. His main message is that you can speed up your development process (even further!) when you use the right third party tools. The tools you can’t do without as an APEX developer are - apart from Firefox itself:

• Firebug - a great extension on Firefox
• Web Developer - another Firefox extension
• YSlow - a performance monitor, again an Firefox extension
• Live HTTP Header - to track traffic between the browser and from server, again Firefox
• APEX Developer Plugin - An extension on APEX that Patrick built, to make your live (even) more easy
• APEX Essentials - An APEX application to check the quality of your APEX application, free, adaptable and extendible, created by Patrick
• jquery - A great Javascript pack, this may be included in the next version of APEX
• APEXLib Framework - A framework, by Patrick, that reduces the writing of code even more

I will report on the presentations of Anton Nielsen and Carl Backstrom later (because I’m at the airport right now and have to get into the plane soon).

For example (note, the “import BigDecimal._” is the same as “import static java.math.BigDecimal.*” in Java):

object HelloWorld {
def main(args : Array[String]) = {
// Import BigDecimal into the scope of this block of code
import java.math.BigDecimal, BigDecimal._

val a = ONE.add(ONE);
println(”One plus one is: ” + a)
}
}

Martin Odersky, the inventor of Scala, is currently busy writing a book of which a pre-print version is available at Artima. At the moment, Scala is not yet ready for prime time (there are still some funky bugs in the compiler and some rough edges in the language itself, and IDE support is not yet complete), but there’s a good chance that this is going to be an important new programming language in the next two or three years.

The second session I went to today was “Distributed Computing and MapReduce: Technology Selection, Implementation and Deployment Made Easy” by Eugene Ciurana. He explained what MapReduce is - an algorithm for processing large amounts of data efficiently in two steps (”map” and “reduce”). The idea came from Google. Eugene explains how it’s used in the company where he works to analyze log files from webservers, to find out from which countries people are accessing their website. There are a number of implementations of MapReduce available, for example the open source Hadoop from Apache and commercial products from for example GigaSpaces, GridGain and Terracotta. He also used Mule (see also this case study from Eugene).

My third session of today was “Performance Tuning a Web Shop with Open Source Tools” by Jeroen Borgers of Xebia. Often, when developers have to solve a performance problem, they make a guess about what’s wrong with the application and try to fix that, but in reality the only way to know what’s really wrong is by measuring instead of guessing. Jeroen talked about a project in which he used tools such as JMeter and JAMon to measure performance, and JARep, a reporting tool for application performance data that he wrote himself.

After lunch I went to “How to Choose your Java Web Framework” by Shashank Tiwari. It’s a question that ofcourse interests a lot of developers, because there are hundreds of frameworks and it’s not easy to determine which one you should use. Besides discussing the characteristics of the most popular frameworks he also talked about whether you should use a framework at all, because there are also some disadvantages: you’ll have to deal with a learning curve, for simple applications a framework can unnecessarily complicate things, it can cause infrastructure bloat, and it presents challenges for testing and maintenance. Ofcourse he didn’t come up with a perfect recipe for choosing a framework. He finished with two conclusions: For simple applications, it doesn’t matter a lot which framework you choose (or if you use a framework at all), so you shouldn’t waste much time on it; for larger applications, that are part of a bigger system, it’s probably best to go for a “full stack” solution such as Spring or JBoss Seam, because you’ll have less integration problems in your project.

The last session I went to was “Real Google Web Toolkit Applications” by Jeff Dwyer. Google Web Toolkit is a web application framework by Google which allows you to program in Java, as if you’re writing a Swing desktop application. It compiles your Java code into a web application with JavaScript. He showed how GWT works by looking at a real-world example application which integrates GWT with Spring MVC. GWT is one of those things that’s on my list of things to look at sometime.

So, it was an interesting conference, I’ve learned a number of new things and got some new ideas. Thanks to JavaRanch for giving me a free ticket for this conference!

At 9:10 I went to “Spring 2.5 On the Way to 3.0″ by Jürgen Höller (one of the main committers on the Spring framework). He explained some new features in Spring 2.5, and went quite deep into the technical details of the @Autowired and other annotations - which was quite boring. He spent so much time on talking about those details that he had almost no time left to talk about 3.0. Spring 3.0 will be for Java 5 and newer only, and some new features that it will have are an expression language, support for REST and some preparation to support servlets 3.0. I wonder why they’re going to give it version number 3.0 instead of 2.6, since it didn’t sound like it would be a lot different from the current Spring 2.5.

The next session I attended was “Groovy in the Enterprise: Case Studies” by Guillaume Laforge. As the title suggested, he showed some examples of where and how Groovy has been used by companies. He discussed a number of use cases, such as: using Groovy as a developer tool (for example for testing or extending Ant or Maven), using Groovy to extend your applications (for example by using the Java scripting API to run Groovy scripts from within your application), using Groovy to create a DSL and using Groovy and Grails for web development. There was some overlap with his presentation about Grails that I attended yesterday.

At 11:40 there was an expert panel session titled “Languages: The Next Generation” with Ola Bini, Ted Neward and Guillaume Laforge. They discussed about the programming languages that are currently popular or that get a lot of attention. I found the session a bit disappointing, I had expected more. The panel didn’t come up with a clear answer or vision about what the next generation of programming languages is going to be. The only conclusion they came to was that Java is here to stay and that other languages such as Groovy, JRuby and Scala will be important additional languages, but they’re not going to completely replace Java.

After lunch I went to “Lifecycle APM: Monitor, Diagnose and Prevent Performance Issues” by Alois Reitbauer (from dynaTrace). This session was a “vendor tech brief”, so there was some marketing talk, about dynaTrace’s tool that allows you to follow transactions through a whole chain of systems (so that you can monitor and debug performance of the system).

At 13:50 I went to “JRuby on Rails: Web Development Evolved” by Ola Bini. He spent a lot of time on explaining the Ruby programming language, and had unfortunately not a lot of time left to explain how Rails works on JRuby, which was what I was interested in (I’ve already used Ruby for some time, so the intro to Ruby was not so interesting for me). Anyway, Ruby is an interesting, easy to learn and easy to use programming language, and I’d recommend any Java developer who wants to learn some other language to have a look at it.

The next session I went to was “Concurrency & High Performance” by Kirk Pepperdine. He’s a well-known guy in the field of high-performance and concurrent programming in Java. Writing software that efficiently uses multi-core processors is not easy, but it’s becoming more and more important with the current trend of multi-core processors. One of the things Kirk mentioned was the fork/join framework that will be added in Java SE 7. One book that I want to read someday soon is Java Concurrency in Practice, I’ve heard that it’s a very good book.

At the end of the afternoon there were “fireside chats”, which were sessions in which a few people did some short demos and then discussed among each other and with the audience about the things they demonstrated. I went to the fireside chat titled “Zero Turnaround in Java development”, which was about developing in Java in such a way that you don’t have to go through stop / recompile / redeploy / start cycles all the time. Guillaume Laforge showed how you can edit your Groovy web application on the fly. Geert Bevin showed how the RIFE framework supports the same thing, and Jevgeni Kabanov (from ZeroTurnaround) showed his (commercial) tool JavaRebel, which is a JVM plugin that allows you to reload classes in a running JVM. They discussed about the use and limitations of their tools and answered questions from the audience.

I arrived here late in the evening last Tuesday and I’ve hardly been outside the hotel (the conference is held at the hotel), so I haven’t seen Prague yet. Tonight there’s a “meet a stranger” dinner - you could put your name on one of five lists, and you’re going out to dinner with the other people on the list. So I’m going to a restaurant in the center of the city tonight with a few other people to have traditional Czech food.