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by Simon Brown.
Original Post: QCon London : day 3
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Well, as you can see from my lack of updates, this has been one busy conference! I'm writing this on the train as I travel back into London for the final day's events and hopefully my battery will hold out so that I can actually connect to the wifi and post it to my blog. If you're reading this then I've been successful!
So, Wednesday. This was the day that I hosted the "Java in Action" track and despite a slight dip when Martin Fowler was speaking elsewhere, the track was pretty well attended. My duties for the day included introducing the speakers over the day and introducing the track with a short session of my own. My session was entitled "Trends in Enterprise Java", which presented a brief look at how we're using Java within London, and specifically capital markets/investment banking. The trends I spoke about were collected from my own observations from working on projects within the city, talking to friends and colleagues who also work in the city and additionally from recruitment. I tend to get involved with interviewing people and find this a great way to get a view of what's happening in the "real world". Anyway, I really enjoyed delivering the session and I think it went down well with those that came along. For me, the really interesting thing about the track was listening to the speakers echo some of the same sentiments in the work they are doing. By this, I mean trends such as being more pragmatic about the use of technology and simplification were prominent throughout the rest of day.
Being the host of the Java track meant that I had to stick with those sessions all day, and actually this wasn't a bad thing at all because they were all very good. First in the running order was Rod Johnson with a look at Spring 2 and Beyond. This was a very nice introduction to what Spring is and what it is all about, specifically with reference to the 2.0 release that happened late last year. The use of custom namespaces in the Spring config files is a neat way of providing a mechanism for other vendors/frameworks to integrate pretty seamlessly, as well as being an enabler for reducing the complexity associated with those files through the use of much more abstract definitions. For example, you can use a single transactional XML tag to instruct Spring to weave it's transactional magic on any classes annotated @Transactional. Compare this to the boilerplate XML that you have to write in Spring 1.x and you'll see the benefit.
Cedric Beust and Alexandru Popescu were up next with a look at Next Generation Testing with TestNG. Like a lot of people, I use JUnit for my automated testing and haven't really taken a look at TestNG. Cedric's blog has an overview of the session. From my perspective, TestNG seems to have some very nice enhancements over what you can get with JUnit and, because of its use of annotations, doesn't constrain you in the same way JUnit does. I asked about how easy it was to "upgrade" to TestNG from JUnit and tooling is available to help automate this process. Sounds something that I'll certainly be taking a look at when I get a chance.
Third in the schedule was Rod Johnson again, this time looking at AOP in the Enterprise. During my introductory session, I said that although we might be using aspects in our day to day work, typically this is done indirectly, via a framework such as Spring. In essence, we may be using aspects but not thinking in aspects. Rod's session looked at the AOP support in Spring and AspectJ, while also looking at some of the uses for our own bespoke aspects. There's no doubt in my mind that this is pretty interesting, particularly when you consider that aspects really can be used to simplify development of cross-cutting concerns such as security, business logic validation and even architectural conformance. So while I'm sold and understand the concepts, I must admit that I found the implementation a little confusing. Rod illustrated the concepts with a number of demos and there were a couple of times where I didn't quite understand the relationship between the real code, the aspects and annotations/Spring XML files. I'm sure it's easy once you get into it, but there's definitely going to be a barrier of entry there for most developers. I'd be interested to hear what anybody else has to think about this, particularly if you attended the same session and saw the concepts Rod was trying to illustrate. All in all, very cool and it echoed the simplicity theme.
Next in the track was Scott Delap's session called An Overview of Desktop Java Technologies in Today's RIA World, which was basically a look at the options you have for building Java based applications that have a rich client front-end. Scott walked us through several technologies including Swing, SWT/RCP, AJAX and Adobe Flex, comparing how rich the user experience is and how much reach they have in terms of deployment. This wasn't necessarily a very in-depth look at each of the technologies, but instead covered the sort of things that you would have to think about if you were responsible (e.g. as an architect) for the selection and implementation of one of the technologies. One of the major points Scott made was that the deployment of Swing apps is just a non-starter if you want to ship that app to the general public over the Internet, perhaps using WebStart. The reason for this? Simply put, you can't guarantee that the end user will have Java installed. To get the largest reach of your application, you need to use something like Adobe Flex because the Flash player that it uses is just so ubiquitous. When was the last time you saw a major website (e.g. YouTube) use a Java applet to deliver their functionality publicly? It's a good point and one that gets you thinking about whether Flex will be the start of something more mainstream.
The final session of the day was Linda DeMichiel's presentation on Java Persistence and EJB 3. Having attended Mike Keith's JPA tutorial on Tuesday, I didn't really learn much here but it was still a good introduction to the EJB 3 persistence API. I really like JPA and think it's possibly going to be the thing that grabs people's attention and energy into using EJB on their projects once again. Don't get me wrong, what the team have done with EBJ 3 is very cool, particularly because you can make any POJO an EJB through a couple of annotations. It's just that people have been burnt by EJB in the past and might not be very enthusiastic about coming back. Once people see JPA, they just might take a look at the rest of the spec too. I mentioned this to Linda and she thought I was saying "JPA is great and the rest of the EJB spec is crap", which isn't the case at all. ;-) To help drive this adoption, we need to stop talking about EJB 3 and start seeing some running code. Sun, if you're reading this and considering more "EJB 3 in theory" talks at JavaOne this year, please, don't do it! Demo this stuff running in Glassfish instead and show the masses how cool EJB can be.
My overwhelming thoughts from the day were (a) tiredness and (b) that QCon feels like a "proper" conference. This might be the inaugural event but it certainly feels like a mini JavaOne style conference. Speaking of Java, Sun held their tech days literally next door to the QEII conference centre (where QCon is) and I met a handful of people that weren't impressed. In fact, a couple of people I know actually came across and bought a conference pass on the door. I don't think they were that impressed with presentations about the new features in Java 6 or NetBeans.
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