Berichten met label malmo

Sharing knowledge, that’s the theme for the yearly Øredev conference, held in Malmö, Sweden, and that really sums up the spirit and wealth in sessions nicely. After visiting the conference with Karl for the first time last year, I decided to go there again this year. What makes Oredev such a nice conference is that it contains a lot of different and interesting tracks, so it’s not just about Java, or .NET, but also about Scrum, mobile development, languages in general and project management.

The opening keynote was by Ted Neward who talked about The Next Big Thing(tm), which he thinks is a renaissance of languages. The main reason for that is one that we have acknowledged within luminis, and that is that current languages (Java, C#, …) fail miserably when it comes to handling concurrency and really exploiting distribution of tasks amongst all available cores and nodes. Functional languages like Erlang, which we studied in a research project early this year, cope a lot better with that. With all these languages, the gap between researchers, who create these languages, and practitioners, who just want to use them to get real work done, also becomes more obvious. This gap is mainly caused by different interests of both groups and their inability to effectively give feedback to each other. An example he used was the time it took for object oriented languages to become popular: about 25 years, from the initial Smalltalk language to C++, which first used the concept of objects in a commercial setting. Ted argued that objects are not all that great, and that we probably need other ideas to go along with them to improve upon the way we work.

During the first day, I attended quite a few sessions on different subjects. A session on the Java ME SDK showed the integration of all ME components (CLDC, CDC) in an environment with better emulation and on device debugging support. The presentation itself had some basic demos, and one showing a SunSpot which showed off the sensors API. In overtime they mentioned the BluRay project, which is also supported, and the fact that they will add support for JavaFX. Later that same day, Josh Marinacci actually did a good presentation on JavaFX script, showing only three slides and developing sample applications on the spot. He showed some of the nice features of the new language and also demoed the Photoshop CS3 integration. A third presentation by Sun, done by Terence Barr, contained some demos that exposed the new features of the Java Mobile Services Architecture. A Marble Madness demo, showing off hardware accelerated Java3D and the motion sensor API was nice. He also showed how a single JavaFX application could be deployed on the desktop, as an applet and on a phone, but I’m still wondering who would like to use a UI designed for a phone on a 30″ cinema display. Then again, that does mean you can show about 200 applications side by side.

Rickard Oberg did a very good session on Qi4j, a domain-driven development language that builds on standard Java. Basically it tries to make the gap between code and the domain model as small as possible. He explained how an application, originally created using Spring, would have looked had it been done using Qi4j. It definitely sounds like Qi4j is ready to be used in a research experiment, possibly by also rebuilding some existing piece of code. I discussed this idea with Rickard, who was very enthousiastic about the idea and would love to hear the feedback that came from that.

Ken Gilmer from BugLabs showed “the bug” again. For those new to the bug, it’s basically Lego Mindstorms on steroids, really cool stuff for geeks! Having seen his talk already at EclipseCon 2008 earlier this year, some of it was familiar. The new thing was the fact that he showed they completely published the specs for the “bug” components so anybody is free to create their own hardware modules. After the talk I briefly talked to Ken. They’re still having some issues to solve before they can ship the thing abroad. An interesting thing to note is that he was interested in our device manager donation to Apache Felix, so perhaps we can get some feedback from them on how that runs on Concierge.

In the evening, a session about the principles of open space, coupled with an experiment with that, were conducted, but after dinner I spent most of the time in a 2 hour session with Alef Arendsen who demo’ed Spring DM and did a nice job of explaining how they use OSGi. After a long day, at around 10 in the evening, I stepped out of the conference building for a refreshing walk back to the hotel. To be continued!