Archive for December, 2007

JRuby

December 12th, 2007

Ola Bini and Charles Olivier Nutter did a talk on JRuby today. Ola Bini is much like you would expect from the photo in his blog: unusual-looking, with nearly invisible eyebrows, lots of bracelets and a huge moon-shaped earring (but the usual geeky garb for the rest).
JRuby (as you know) is a Ruby implementation that runs on the JVM. The added bonus is that you can use Java and Ruby code together.

The obvious bonus of this is that you could leverage legacy Java code in a Ruby application, making the transition more attractive.
Predictably, James Gosling’s view is slightly different: he thought that once your little Rails app was running, this would allow you to seamlessly ‘upgrade’ to Java. It’s another point of view.

Anyway, the presentation was pretty good: he showed JRuby on Rails. The good news is that it is pretty similar to using Rails out of the box. He got a simple app up and running in the usual Rails way.

The bad news is that his first demo tanked. JRuby might be in the end stages of development, but might still need some ironing out.

The really good news is that it is possible to deploy a rails application in any one Java application server, like Tomcat, JBoss or other (in other words, generate a war). This means it would be fairly easy to sneak in a rails application in an enterprise environment, without disturbing any of the existing stuff.

At the end of the day, i spotted the pair while i was waiting for my coat. Like a big fan girl, i wanted to go up to them and say how good the presentation was, but by the time i got my coat, they had disappeared.

4 comments »

Posted in RoR

Javapolis day 3

December 12th, 2007

Or rather, for me, day 1.

I spent an interesting and pleasurable day at Javapolis: you’ve got to be impressed at the quality of the organisation, the European scope of the event, and the comfortable settings (Metropolis in Antwerp: cushy seats and large cinema screens for all presentations).

My schedule of today:

Late for the keynote. James Gosling talking about pretty much under the Sun (pun intended), J2SE, J2ME, EE, JavaFX and all those other acronyms that make the java world mysterious and befuddling to the outsider.
You get why Sun likes Gosling for a spokesman. He’s relaxed, and he has this benevolent Santa Claus quality about him, while being quite witty and (obviously) clued up. Most memorable quote:

Netbeans 6 is almost as good as sex

. Which could be interpreted as an allusion ~~to the quality of his sex life, or~~ to the level of his enjoyment of this IDE, depending.
OpenJDK: this was not really a technical presentation, but still quite interesting: Mark Reinhold talked about the process of open sourcing the JDK.
This meant combing the code for external sources, working out legal aspects, migrating to another versioning system, and setting up a governance board. From the cathedral to the bazaar.
Filthy Makeover: of very little practical interest to me, since i don’t code rich clients very often. The few AWT and Swing apps i’ve made didn’t leave me with a great impression of the stuff.
However, this presentation showed that they’ve moved some way, and that you can now make nice-looking applications, with animations, transparency effects, and similar candy. And the presenter (Chet Haas) had esthetically pleasing features, which always helps.
JBoss SOA: this turned out to be more a presentation about SOA then about the JBOSS framework. Pretty impartial, and well presented (Mark Little)
JRuby by Ola Bini and Charles Nutter: i’ll make a post about that one alone, otherwise this post will exceed my personal limit (not to mention your attention span). This was the presentation i was looking forward to most.
The day was ended by a panel discussion between James Gosling, Neal Gafter (Google), Joshua Bloch (= design guru, also Google), Martin Odersky. A bit aimless, but quite fun nonetheless. Not much debating going on, except for the time when Joshua Bloch dared suggesting that Java might have a limited future, while James Gosling was keen to demonstrate that it was alive and kicking.
At that last presentation, i was sitting next to Jim Weaver. We got talking, and he offered me and my colleague a free Java FX (e)book ! It would be impolite not read it and drop a review on Amazon, as he asked. Nice man.

Update: i forgot: bumped into Bruno Lowagie who was there for a book-signing. He got congratulated by Gosling himself for iText – impressive, if i say so myself.

4 comments »

Posted in developer, Open source

Golden years

December 8th, 2007

Doesn’t it strike you sometimes, how we might be living in golden years ? A once-in-a-planet’s-lifetime lifestyle. I’m talking about Europe of course – 9/10 of the world population might disagree on this statement.

But here we are, burning away fossil fuels like there’s no tomorrow. The shops are full of items from all over – oranges all year: my mother once told me that when they were small, an orange was an absolute luxury, something you got for christmas and ate religiously, part by part.

And the endless transport possibilities also go for humans: attending a meeting in New York is no problem, and what about a holliday in New Zealand ?

Distances have shrunk, information goes at lightspeed. We buy the latest electronic doodah manufactured in GuangDong. We throw away food without a second thought. Our main issues are emotional or spiritual. Survival is not a problem.

Don’t you wonder sometimes how our children and grand children will look back on us ? How for them, barring a major breakthrough, things might be different ? How we will tell about it ?

This time will seem crazy, wasteful and fantastic at the same time. An era of splendor and decadence.

(and the unavoidable background theme by David Bowie:)

5 comments »

Posted in life

Next week

December 7th, 2007

We’re on the threshold of week-end: usually this means i’m happy and content in the moment, pretty much until sunday night.

Not this time: i’m actually looking forward to next week, more precisely to wednesday to friday. I’ll then be at Javapolis. Schedule looks good.

It’s a first time for me. The funny thing is, Javapolis is far from being purely about Java. Sure, there’ll be stuff about EJB3, Struts and other Java items. But also web design, AJAX, Flex, Agile, Web2.0, JRuby and Ruby.

And that’s more than fine by me. I like to shop around. The more the merrier.

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Posted in software

Links in the middle of a thunderstorm

December 3rd, 2007

The 100 first .com sites ever: see who was a visionary, and who survived. Some predictable ones: Apple, Philips, AMD. Boeing, Lockheed, close to the military so that makes sense. Stargate.com ?

I thought that the BBC making Perl on Rails was pretty cool, if somewhat quirky idea (rather like making Mini Europe with matchsticks). Apparently someone who used to work there doesn’t agree with me. What he says has the ring of truth.

And, since we’re in the right season: an Open Source Hardware gift list, for if you’ve got another geek in the family.

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Posted in geek, so sue me, RoR, software

Ontology virus

December 3rd, 2007

Today i had a very interesting Knowledge Sharing Session at work (after hours, of course), about ontologies and the semantic web. I’d read quite a lot about it, without quite grasping the whole. This was like connecting the dots.

To be honest, i was a bit disappointed. Quite simple. No magic, actually. Next thing they’ll tell me Santa Claus doesn’t exist.

I’ll tell you about it, but not today. Today i’m a bit tired, and i’m carrying around all kinds of germs, straight from the office petri dish.

2 comments »

Posted in Uncategorized

Barcamp Brussels #4

December 1st, 2007

Well, had a nice barcamp again. The site, mVillage in Schaerbeek, was slightly less glamorous than the Halles des Tanneurs of Barcamp#3, but still good. Organization (by Peter) was impeccable.

It started at a crazy hour for a saturday: 9 o’clock ! On a saturday ! No mercy, i tell you.

Like last time, the hardest thing was to choose your presentation. I really hope it will be possible to retrieve the ones i have not seen: in fact, if i was to suggest one thing to Peter, it would be to encourage everyone to put their presentation on Slideshare.

The ones i saw:

A presentation of bootcamp by Yves Hanoulle of Paircoaching. A series of protocols to make your meetings productive.
FOSS for non-profit organizations by Wim Mostrey. His speech was interesting in itself, and i would say his situation was recognizable: he wanted to do something meaningful other than just web development. He was contacted by CivicActions to participate in the development of the Amnesty.org site.
Commentag is a (startup ?) project by Xavier Dammans, and is about tagging blog comments. This would allow you to organize and analyze discussions at a glance.
Shoes: a fun presentation by Koen Van Der Auwera, about a (looked like) equally fun toolkit for making Ruby GUI
Thought-provoking presentation by the MakeOrFund.com team. Their idea is to allow you, me, everyone to select, and then micro-fund entrepreneurs. While there are still some gaps in the plan (what’s in it for the investor ? will the general public really select the best ideas ?) it sounded like a real innovation.
Tim Romberg is participating to a research project to take the wiki a step further. This would involve integration with other enterprise components, semantic search, a rich client to allow a more usable and productive way to contribute to wiki’s (for the non-IT user), and content ‘gardening’ by the software itself. Looking forward to their release in january.
Peter Vandenabeele is (amongst other things) or national expert on ODF. A presentation about the roll-out of this format within the belgian government.
emich messed around with Google Android and made a presentation to tell us the tail. His verdict: an alpha at best, not ready for serious development.
errr … my presentation.

I missed a good few other ones, which sounded equally interesting. However, the best thing about BarCamp is the fact that you meet people, exchange ideas, discuss ideas and plans. You leave the place with a headfull of new ideas, tools, advice. Cross-pollinating in the belgian IT world.

Somehow i feel really tired, now. Full day.

3 comments »

Posted in Belgium, developer

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