Nicks JavaOne Day 4

Day 4@J1

Java Community Keynote

Community Panels, LJC, Robots, James Gosling

I arrived a few minutes late, as a panel of representatives from Cloudera, Eclipse, Eucalyptus, Perrone Robotics, and Twitter talked about their usage of Java, how it has enabled them and their hopes and wishes moving forwards.

In between demos of Java robots (the theme being that Java enables ease of interoperation between various embedded platforms), the London Java Community presented on the work that has earned them an award for community involvement. We tip our hats to the guys in the big smoke - excellent work.

I found this notably less formal than the Sunday keynotes, but still with some important messages. It was good to see Martijn Verburg involved given the good work of the LJC. His personality and rapport with similar community personalities goes a long way towards improving this type of presentation. Personally I think that it's easy for community members to be daunted by, or simply feel indifferent to large scale domains like Java with it's suite of old standards andestablished community faces. I want the whole ecosystem to be better, but to do this we don't need passive community members - we need people to feel that they can contribute. I think that the lowest barriers possible for people to express interest in projects is going to be important in achieving these goals. It was good to see Chris Aniszczyk (Twitter) echo these sentiments in the keynote by talking about using projects such as Github to encourage social style coding thus driving participation through familiarity.

James Gosling finally came on to talk about the use of Java in a new generation of ocean mapping robots that are used for a range of activities from replacing buoys to environmental monitoring.

Up, Up, and Out: Scaling Software with Akka

Viktor Klang

I dropped into a talk on scaling software using Akka by Viktor Klang, the project lead. I've heard impressive sounding numbers being mentioned around the parallelisation abilities of Akka and Scala. In this talk Viktor gave an introduction to the Actor model and how it can be used as an abstraction over parallelisation. Akka exposes some nice features such as inherint processing distribution and dynamic behaviour modelling (think that threads can be told to behave differently if extra processing is required by an application.

Personally I'd like to understand the messaging model more before I built a distributed application on this platform. I understand from a slide briefly at the end of the talk that SonicMQ can be leveraged for this purpose, I wonder if it supports generic JMS? 

Taming the Spaghetti: Rich Web Applications with Errai

Jonathan Fuerth

Christian Sadilek

Finally before heading back I attended a talk on JBoss Errai. If you're not familiar with the benefits of GWT, to summarise it allows you to write Java code that is compiled at build time to optimised, browser specific Javascript. I personally found GWT to be a little clunky when I used it a few years ago. It's good to see a number of improvements have been made (UIBinder to prevent programmatic UI creation, cool), coupled with Errai specific enhancements such as CDI integration, REST-ful integration and JBoss Aerogear for mobile UIs this looks like an impressive way to build a push out client that can be mapped to mobile and desktop devices. 

To achieve this, it has uses an internal event bus to manage the push of messages to clients with a registered expressed interest in certain types of callback.

I asked the guys at the end what the serialisation performance was like combined with the throughput of the message bus. Mike said that it had been tested with thousands of concurrent events. I was left wanting to know more about how this toolset could cope with scaling up to many concurrent clients and dealing with large amounts of events.

Thanks to all who made Java One a success this year!

I had a great time, if I had one thing I could improve for next year it would be more wifi please!

Nick Wright