BarCamp Bangalore 4e

If you are a geek, you already know what i am talking about. Mentioning here for completeness, the 4th edition will be held on 28th and 29th July 07 in IIM, Bangalore campus. Visit the site for more details.

If you still haven’t heard about it, then you might first consider reading this to understand the concept behind a bar camp. And then i urge, you must visit the venue and join the camp. It promises a geeky and techy weekend extravaganza. You will get to know a lot of latest and greatest techno trends and the geeks thoughts about them, not to mention the opportunity to network with the best of the Bangalore techies.

You can visit the site and register yourself in collectives of your interest. It costs you nothing but promises a technical value-add.

 

JAX India 2007 – Bangalore day 3

Below is the coverage of todays sessions and my takeaways. The slides for all presentations are available here.

JSF and AJAX : Best of Friends (by Craig McClanahan, SUN Microsystems)

• The motive was to convey various means of achieving AJAX while using JSF. Though all means are workarounds in my opinion. JSF specification should have built-in support for AJAX. It lost out in this front because of the delay in finalizing the specification and AJAX peaking up during the same time.
• The means are : (a) DIY (Do It Yourself) (b) Use JSF components with native AJAX (c) Wrap client side JS libraries (d) Make non-JSF calls to the web server.
• DIY – Most JSF components have JS event methods. Leverage that along with own JS methods and XMLHttpRequest or other client side JS toolkit like Dojo, Prototype or Scriptaculus. Involves lot of work. Implementing page refresh might be tricky.
• JSF with native AJAX – Components take care of making async calls and updating DOM. Simpler to use. Loads of OSS and commercial ajaxified JSF components available. e.g ADFFaces, MyFaces, etc
• Wrap JS libs – Strongly suggested Jmaki which wraps different client side AJAX libraries like dojo, prototype etc.
• Make non-JSF calls – You can choose to use any of the AJAX libraries and make them talk to a servlet directly instead of going thru the JSF life cycle. Handling the component tree update will be tricky.
• choose any of the above options based on whether you need to keep the component tree in sync with the DOM updates.

Should you adopt/migrate to Struts 2.0? (by Harshad Oak, Rightrix Solutions)

• Provides an overview of new features of Struts in 2.0 release. Its basically like Struts 1 + WebWork = Struts 2.
• Features include annotation support, interceptors through servlet filters, convention over configuration, derive method name from URL, concept of value stack, new tag libraries, a Guice based minimal DI container to integration with Spring, no form beans etc
• Integration points for Spring, AJAX frameworks like dojo, GWT etc.
• Package names now contain com.opensymphony.*.
• Migration from Struts 1 to Struts 2 is difficult because of such drastic changes but migration from Webwork is lot easier.

My opinion – its a mess now, it is dieing. The code code sample he shown looked lot messier, a result of merging two frameworks. The author himself seemed directionless like the framework and mostly tried to highlight that the framework supports all the buzz words in web framework market these days. Guess Webwork is banking on Strut’s image now to sell itself. Pity for both of them. Good for us (developers) since we have two frameworks less to worry about now.

Can tools improve even a power geeks productivity? (by Craig McClanahan, SUN Microsystems)

• Brings out the point that geeks who like playing with their good old editors using the combination of hot keys and the keyboard, can be more productive if the IDE has appropriate features.
• Few features that makes a java IDE good are – documentation lookup, refactoring, real time debugging, unit testing support, version control support, database administration, deployment, generate boiler plate and plumbing code, allow maven / ant structuring, integrate runtime dependencies, heterogeneous programming language support, generate skeleton OR mapping and support for popular frameworks etc.
• Demonstrated Netbeans IDE supporting these features, though he named Eclipse in the context. So i would not say that we was solely pushing the SUN product by throwing a catchy session title.

You can’t just buy an Open Source community (by Neelan Choksi, COO Interface21)

• This talk was to highlight that all the commercial vendors taking the open source route to stay in business will not succeed. They can not buy the community by open sourcing their products e.g OpenJDK, OpenJPA, JBuilder etc etc.
• The only sensible thing he talked about – Community is the most important factor in success of open source projects. You need to build community and their are few approaches to do that.

Otherwise the talk was complete waste of time. More focused on picking up failures from rivals and quoting Interface21 as the rightest thing to ever happen. The less you write about his presentation skills, on stage persona and language command the better it is for Interface21. An instance of catchy title but patchy content.

Why is everyone so excited about Ruby-on-Rails (by Neal Ford, Thoughtworks)

• Title says it all – marketing of RoR. However i still wanted to attend to see whats inside RoR. And to be honest, i was taken aback, throughly surprised with zillions of questions shooting here n there in my mind.
• Few features – RAD development (they mean it, needs to be seen if it works in enterprise apps), agility, instant feedback, OR mapping via ActiveRecord, no compile/deploy etc, scaffolding, testing generation, web 2.o support etc.
• Follows standard folder structure which helps in getting rid of configuration files, making safe assumptions. Generates method code at runtime based on need.
• Recommends Streamlines, a 3rd party scaffolding library.
• Admits it slowness now but expects drastic improvements in next release.

my thoughts – this is a completely different way of developing web apps. Given the productivity features and all the buzz around it, i feel the time has come for a try on it for an agile development project.

SOA: The future of distributed computing? (by Neal Ford, Thoughtworks)

• I am not a SOA fanboy but attended it since none other parallel session were any better. Not sure if i followed him properly but i guess he started with bashing SOA and ended with the note that it has the best chance to work this time for distributed computing.
• One should download the slides from his website and go thru it. Its pretty humorous and informative at the same time.

Overall, one key point to note is that the audience is much more patient and lenient while listening to the established speakers as against the local ones. I had expected more skilled and professional audience since most of them are at architect or designer level. But few basic ethics like allowing the speaker to cover the topic before asking ahead or out of context questions, things like limiting conversations to certain iterations etc were clearly missing and thus few of the sessions were reduced to mere show-off events than for knowledge exchange.

JAX India 2007- Bangalore – day 2

Let me first convey that i deeply regret for not attending the day-1 of the conference. I think the sessions there were more techy and geeky. It doesn’t automatically mean the day-2 sessions were not good. It felt better to hear the subject from their creators themselves. The time alloted to each subject(50 min) is not enough to go deep and thus satisfy the geekier crowd around but you get to hear on so many things in small time in bargain, so no repents. Add to it the fact that you usually don’t get such high profile speakers in conferences around India. Anyways, here are my take aways from the sessions i attended today. The slides for all presentations are available here.

Mylar: The tool and the framework (by Mik Kersten, CTO Tasktop)

• Demonstrated the task ui from within Eclipse covering basic concepts of the tool and the idea behind its existence.
• Connectors for OSS products like Bugzilla, Trac, Ant, Spring, SVN, CVS etc apart from quite a few for commercial tools from vendors like Telelogic, BEA, Atlassian etc.
• Getting ready for 2.0 release with lots of emphasis on performance, search etc.

Best practices for inter-operable Web Services (by Thilo Frotscher)

• Discusses two approaches to WS development – “Code-First” and “Contract-First”.
• Code First : Start with java code and generate Schema, WSDL and other artifacts using tools. It leads to interoperability issues because the tools tend to use platform specific data types like Vector, DataSet etc which may not have a mapping data type in XML Schema.
• Contract First : Create the schema first using the data types defined in xml schema (and creating complex types out of it). Generate WSDL using schema which sets the interface contract. Now use the interface and proceed to the code. Recommends usage of visual tools like Eclipse WTP 1.5 WSDL Editor.
• Strongly discourages first approach and recommends use of contract first.
• Newer tools and frameworks are moving towards POJO based WS development which essentially is a “code first” approach. However one can still bit little cautious and use them as they are lot mature and provide a relatively clean WSDL these days.
• Use literal instead of encoded.
• Dont rely on HTTP for transport. Do not use HTTP specific features like Cookies, SSL, HTTP Header etc.
• Use SOAP header to store meta info.
• Recomended reading on Web Services – Web Services Platform Architecture (by Sanjeeva W)

Tasktop, the task focused desktop (by Mik Kersten, CTO Tasktop)

• Just a couple of weeks back i was thinking about task based contexts for my desktop and here it is, though not OSS or free. Take Google (or Yahoo) desktop search and add task based contexts (and related features) to it. thats your Tasktop.
• Natural extension of Mylar to Windows and Mac desktops for now. No plans for Linux as of now.
• Comes both as Eclipse plugin and Eclipse RCP app.
• Showcases its usage for a project manager who uses Google Cal, Outlook Mail, M$ Office, Bugzilla and Xplanner for his tasks and how Tasktop helps her reduce the clicks required to perform her daily tasks.
• All others were mostly marketing stuff. However, just a thought from my side – Since it can store the action history including the browsing history, can this be potentially used to spy on young children’s adventures on internet?

Polyglot Programming (by Neal Ford, Thoughtworks)

• catchy word – Yes i had not heard of it before as well. Well it simply means writing applications using multiple programming languages, each targeted towards specific problems which are best solved by that language.
• We have been doing it anyways – Java + SQL + XML + JS? So whats new? Ruby
• Pretty smart hand picked instances of java code which look problematic – using static initializer to display Hello World without even writing a main() method in java code, need to write class type multiple times in generics, recursive definition of Enum in javadoc, presence of Zero length arrays etc. Basically bashing static typing and advocating dynamic typing (a la Ruby).
• Message was to view java as a combination of language and platform. The language is retarding / dieing but the platform is as beautiful as ever.
• All in all the talk was very humorous and interesting. One statement that liked very much was – OR mapping is Vietnam of Computer Science.

Shale framework : Taking JSF to next level (by Craig McClanahan, SUN Microsystems)

• I must mention this – i was thoroughly impressed by his simplicity. His geeky looks reflected deep knowledge and responses to queries only floored people further. Sometimes i wonder if simplicity leads to greatness or greatness inspires simplicity.
• An extension to JSF for a cleaner design, convention over configuration principle with annotation support, hollywood principle using callback methods for better encapsulation
• Talked about features – dialog manager for conversation management, clay (similar to Facelets), view controller, ajax support using remoting etc.
• Built-in unit testing framework, JNDI and Spring integration.
• He was impressed with the approach of extending the components to business layer leveraging the EJB3 features by Seam framework.
• Thinks that GWT puts too many restrictions on a developer for her to choose it for enterprise development.

Testing with Selenium (by Neal Ford, Thoughtworks)

• Tool focused on acceptance testing of web application. Works by pushing a JavaScript based BrowserBot.
• Either add it to your web app WEB-INF folder or use in remote mode. It needs test cases in html tables which can be either hand coded or recorded using SeleniumIDE FireFox plugin.
• Explained few cool features like ajax testing, dynamic data in recorded scripts, standard red/green coloring of test runs etc.
• Can not deal with non-JS accessible parts in page like applets, activex, flash content etc.

Over all, it was a tiring day. Sessions were mostly at an overview level than the depth. There was no time for QnA and it was a difficult choice between missing the next session or catching the speaker outside for questions.