Archive for September 2008:

JAOO Day Two

Today on JAOO has also been packed with interesting talks. I attended these:

V8: The Javascript engine inside Google Chrome
Keynote by Lars Bak about the all-new javascript engine that was implemented by his team in Århus for Google Chrome. This javascript engine is about 10 times faster than other javascript implementations. Lars explained how this is possible in a very dynamic language like javascript, by creating classes that can be reused; if another object with the same properties is created, which tends to happen often. Optmizations can then be applied to those classes. Furthermore, Chrome compiles the Javascript code to native code so that it can run really fast on any platform. Lars mentioned a few other major improvements, and this was a very inspiring and interesting talk - even though he had some problems with the projector in the beginning.

Failure Comes In Flavours
This talk by Mikael Nygard (who is not danish, by the way, though his name resembles a danish name pretty much) was divided into two sessions. In the first, Mikael talk about anti-patterns that lead to failure - such as depending too hard on third parties, or waiting forever for some external call. This talk featured some "war stories" about failures Mikael had helped to resolve in the past. In the second session, Mikael offered his advice on how to avoid failure and some patterns that can help in this. Though focus was very much on big enterprise SOA systems; the principles can be applied anywhere. I learned a thing or two in this session, that can be applied to my every-day work on web applications in a smaller scale.

Not your Grandfather's Architecture: Taking Architecture into the Agile World
In this talk, James Coplien talked about Agile architecture. He presented his ideas about adding roles as a concept to the object-oriented world of classes and objects. He argued that programs could be made simpler and get rid of polymorphism using his approach; I am not sure that I agree. There was no working code demo, so his ideas is still kind of abstract in my mind.

Successfully applying REST - Integration, Web-style
Stefan Tilkov talked about REST integration; a subject that I find very interesting, since we already use it in projects at work, and are planning to use it even more extensively. Stefan had some very interesting points about REST, and how it can be applied to a SOA world. I really like the clean interface you can make of a REST service, without much of the overhead and scaffolding that is neccessary in SOAP, for instance.

Top Ten Software Architecture Mistakes
This was a talk focusing on what not to do in architecture; so that we can avoid mistakes or bad decisions in our architecture. The talker, Eion Woods, had his list of 10 mistakes and how to avoid them, which was presented with a little bit of humour. At least some of the items is going to be on my list of things to check before beginning development of new projects.


JAOO Day One

Today, I've been attending the first day at the JAOO Conference. It has been an interesting day, and I am amazed by all the very talented people that speaks here at the conference, as well as by the quality of the talks. I have been attending these sessions:

Opening Keynote: Where Are Programming Languages Going, by Anders Hejlsberg
In this talk, Anders presented his take on how the programming languages will be evolving in the future. One point made, was that programming languages has not evolved much over the last 25 years - which was exemplified by a "Hello world" program in Pascal versus one in C#. The C# one was neither the shortest nor the most concise one. Anders believes that we will se more implementation of what he calls "internal domain-specific-languages", such as LINQ. Furthermore, he thinks that in the future the gap between functional and imperative programming languages will diminish, since they are already today starting to borrow the best elements from each other. Finally, he talked about concurrency and in-language concurrency constructs such as isolation, which Anders predicts also will be part of the main-stream languages in the near future.

Continuous Integration
 The Continuous Integration talk was a great introduction to me into Continuous integration, since it is something, that I have little to zero experience with. We do have a build server that does nightly builds at work, but as Chris Read, the speaker, pointed out, that is not CI, though it is a step on the way toward succesful CI.

Google Chrome: The Invisible Browser
This was a talk by Ben Goodger, the Google Chrome UI tech lead, about the minimalist Chrome UI and the architecture and decisions behind it. It was interesting, though there was not much new to learn here. (Or perhaps I should know better than to attend UI talks, when UI does not really interest me. I am trying to learn ;-) )

LING and C# 3.0
This was the second talk by Anders Hejlsberg this day, and featured the new features in C# 3.0. This was info that I knew (mostly) in advance, but Anders explained both the how and the why behind the features - which was really interesting.

PowerShell
The talk about PowerShell was really good; even for me who know and use PowerShell in advance. It got beyond the covers on why the architecture and implementation works as it does, which was interesting and enlightening, and I left with a better understanding of PowerShell.

The Scala Programming Language
Scala is a language for the JVM, that I did not know much about in advance. The talk was interesting, but in "real life", I am probably never going to use it.

Why Functional Programming (still) Matters
This talk by Erik Meijer was propably the most interesting and entertaining one on Day One of JAOO. With enthusiasm, Erik explained about side-effects and why they are bad and what one should do about them (make them explicit if they cannot be avoided). He also demonstrated a few side effects, that can hit you in C# or other main stream languages with closures and lambdas, which was a pleasant reminder for me.


Attending JAOO

I will be attending the JAOO conference the next couple of days. It is my first time, but I have high expectations. I am not sure which sessions I will attend, but of course the opening keynote by Anders Hejlsberg will be a must.

I find it hard to choose - there are so many interesting subjects and speakers; and so little time ;-) If you are going to JAOO, feel free to drop a comment with suggestions on which sessions is a must for you, and why.

Visual update on the blog

Just a quick post to let you know that the blog has been updated with a much nicer theme. I hope I will get around to adding more interesting content to the blog shortly :-)