TSSJS 2008 Day One - Synopsis

Key Note: Neal Ford, Thoughtworks

Neal started with an assault on Ruby of Rails developers(and later justified the reason why ruby on rails developers brag). I think the reason why they brag so much is because it is so productive. Thankfully, on the java side, we have Grails to the rescue. Anybody who hasn’t taken a look at Grails absolutely should.

Next, he builds a case for DSLs. One of the strong points of DSLs is that the context is implicit. You don’t have to keep reminding the runtime of the context:

Example: Consider the following java code

Car car = new Car();
car.setColor(Color.BLACK);
car.setTransmission(Transmission.MANUAL);
car.setPrice(30000);

Now take a look at this in a dsl that I just made up

create Car:car
color:black
transmission:manual
price:30000

Now that is much more clearer as we don’t have to keep ourselves repeating the context which in this case is car.

One thing you have to give to Neal Ford is, he knows how to give presentations. In his presentation, he normally uses just one sentence per slide, Sometimes just one word. And lots of pictures. These pictures are typically not from the computer science domain. These are usually analogies from the real world that help the listener in understanding the underlying concepts. Another technique I noticed him use is when he wants the user to concentrate on his talk and not on the screen, he leaves the screen blank.

Also, a template for your presentation is not needed. Leave it dark. It works magic with the audience. Templates and light colored background distracts the listener from what you want to show. This style of presentation is also visible in Steve Job’s presentation. He never uses a template.

Ok that was an un-intended tangent. Now back to the talk: As a programmer, it adds real value to write programs that are close to how the user talks about the problem. It is a huge advantage if the users can read what the programmer can produce..

The final point was that the development stack of the future would be a structured programming language at the bottom. A dynamic programming language on top of it to improve development productivity and then a DSL on top to stay close to the problem space.

Tactical Design by Glenn Vanderburg:

Presentation tip: Try to build on key aspects of prior presentations (the ones you like) so that the audience get a transitionary feel.

His talk concentrated on how to improve the design skills of poor designers and make them good designers. I think it is obvious that DRY and sticking to one level of abstraction thought the method is a good way to improve design. This is analogous to saying “use Design Patterns”. It is also ironic that he took the same topics and repeated them over and over. Overall, the talk was sub mediocre. Luckily, I had my laptop with me and caught up on some grails reference documentation.

p.s: Lenovo sucks. But having a built in upgraded battery back that gives you 6 hours of alive time rocks.

Also, if ure in a talk that you are not sure of, sit at the last so that you can sneak out if the talk sucks. (Also iterated by Hani in one of the previous years of TSSJS)

Self Scaling Java Based Cloud Architecures – Jinesh Varia, Evangalist at Amazon

I can say I hate talks given by evangelists as most of them tend to be biased. The talk sounded like it was a product presentation and less about giving insight. It takes a visionary to be able to give insight. I thought I can stick around as I wanted to know more about Amazon Web Services. Basically it was a vendor talk, and does not delve into the methodology or mindset that leads to cloud computing.

After 30 minutes, I could not bear it anymore and snuck out.

Next stop: Building REST-ful web services with the JAX-RS API – Mark Hansen

This talk turned into a ‘show and tell’ and I snuck out as soon as I typed the title.

Speed: Kirk Pepperdine

This was the third talk I went to in an hour. You can’t go wrong with a talk about JVM J. The talk covered improvements in garbage collection times and algorithms. One of the cool things that Java 7 (sun jvm) will do is look for local references and allocate them on the register. So that they never see RAM.

After the talk, I caught up to Kirk and asked him a few questions about when you would do volatile (for primitives) vs when you would do AtomicBoolean(and other atomic classes). More on this on a separate blog.

Designing for scalability: Patrick Linskey

This talk was about horizontal vs vertical scalability. Running into contention because of shared state. And, about partitioning the application at various levels to achieve scalability.

An application can be partitioned in multiple ways. Some of which include:

Partitioning along application bottlenecks.

Patritioning along data set “fault lines”. Example: geographic collocation so that only relevant information is close to where it is being used. This is an example of a stateful service being partitioned for scalability.

Also using asynchronous execution to increase scalability. Nothing ground breaking. One good point made was that asynchronous architectures inherently support throttling so that the system can catch up on processing in off peak hours.


Boldly Go where the java language has never gone before – Geert Bevin

This is an interesting frame of mind that you do not need to leave the java language. The language can be instrumented or transformed into a different execution platform so that the developer skills can be reused. Geert gives example of Terracota which performs dynamic byte code manipulation of classes to provide clustering without the developer having to use a vendor specific API.

The next example Geert touches is GWT. GWT lets the developer code in java but generates javascript under the covers in production. I would think the intent of GWT is nice. Free the developer from having to worry about javascript incompatibilities between different browsers. The implementation is based on java, which I increasingly think is a wrong tool to create web based/GUI applications. The Java syntax is too buttoned up. Grails on the other hand is a wonderful tool to create web application. I think a grails implementation of GWT would really shine.

The next example is Android. This is my favorite. Android, as you might already know lets the developer write code in java, but gets compiled into an executable that gets interpreted by the Dalvik virtual machine on the cell phone. Although the developer is coding in java, like in GWT, what gets executed has nothing to do with the JVM. I have not done any serious Android development. My take is that UI development is better left to templates. I think it is just a matter of time that a UI templating framework is released on top of Android.

The scalability pitfalls of the realtime web- Jonas Jacobi & John Fallows

The presenters build a case for a event driven server which is basically a reverse ajax. And started listing the pitfalls and solutions(or hacks depending on your perspective) to these pitfalls. Snoozfest. And yes, I got out as I could.

There was only one other presentation that was remotely interesting, which was a use case on SCA.

Next Generation Payment Systems using SCA

My take on SCA is that it is trying to make the same mistake that EJBs did with the “thy shalt give thy java interface to the client”. I am a big proponent of simple and non language specific contracts between multiple parties in a distributed platform. When you expose a webservice (even REST based ones) you are essentially creating a contract with the end developer about the nature of the data interchange or service invocation. The problem with a language specific contract is that apart from being tied to the language, you now get into headaches with versioning. Most programming languages that we currently have do not work well with versioning. So much so, that these days, we have had to build specifications like OSGi to handle multiple versions of an object existing in the same virtual machine.