I'm off to a horrible start this morning. I couldn't get coffee (or orange juice) from the servers at breakfast. I'm a coffee junkie, so needless to say it wasn't a good start.
The talk I'm sitting in is entitled Batch Processing Performance and is being done by a couple of consultants from Accenture. The first speaker is having all kinds of difficulties: microphones, projector and believe it or not, even PowerPoint. I'll try to take the optimistic approach and know that the day can only get better.
After struggling to get going for about 15 minutes, the speaker started off by reciting word-for-word a 1,000 word article published in Computer Weekly. What a complete waste. I should have walked out 5 minutes ago when he mentioned his title, which included the word "manager". After listening for another 10 minutes without any improvement, I'm walking out now...
Friday, December 14, 2007
Thursday, December 13, 2007
The Spring Experience - Day 2 Afternoon
In the first session of the afternoon, Rob Harrop talked about batch processing including I/O and data access strategies. Rob is a very energetic speaker and he definitely keeps it interesting with his lively stories. The talk was very well organized, but fairly basic if you've ever worked on moderately large batch processing. Some of his recommendations include:
- collections are evil
- so is DOM
- streaming is your friend
- use I/O buffering
- parallelization
- partitioning
I believe Rob along with a guy from Accenture are the leads on Spring Batch. They're working on milestone release 4. I'm sure it's something we'll be looking at closely for our batch needs in the future.
In the second afternoon session I attended, Rod Johnson talked about The State of the Art in Dependency Injection. Not surprisingly, he admitted he doesn't have as much time to write code as he used to. However, it was obvious that he still has a deep technical understanding of the state of the enterprise Java landscape. In his talk he walked through the history of DI going all the way back to his first book. It was a fairly in-depth review of various DI containers and their current state including various versions of Spring, PicoContainer, SEAM, Guice and EJB 3. He talked about the pros and cons of various features and how they've introduced the best-of-breed into Spring (with attribution to the innovator). Overall it was a very good talk. One tidbit of information that I didn't know about is their new Spring Java configuration. It's exactly what it sounds like, you use Java code to configure Spring. So now there are three options for configuring Spring: 1) XML, 2) Annotations and 3) Spring Java Configuration. Sadly, this is the second and last talk that Rod is giving at this conference. Obviously I'd like to hear more from him.
- collections are evil
- so is DOM
- streaming is your friend
- use I/O buffering
- parallelization
- partitioning
I believe Rob along with a guy from Accenture are the leads on Spring Batch. They're working on milestone release 4. I'm sure it's something we'll be looking at closely for our batch needs in the future.
In the second afternoon session I attended, Rod Johnson talked about The State of the Art in Dependency Injection. Not surprisingly, he admitted he doesn't have as much time to write code as he used to. However, it was obvious that he still has a deep technical understanding of the state of the enterprise Java landscape. In his talk he walked through the history of DI going all the way back to his first book. It was a fairly in-depth review of various DI containers and their current state including various versions of Spring, PicoContainer, SEAM, Guice and EJB 3. He talked about the pros and cons of various features and how they've introduced the best-of-breed into Spring (with attribution to the innovator). Overall it was a very good talk. One tidbit of information that I didn't know about is their new Spring Java configuration. It's exactly what it sounds like, you use Java code to configure Spring. So now there are three options for configuring Spring: 1) XML, 2) Annotations and 3) Spring Java Configuration. Sadly, this is the second and last talk that Rod is giving at this conference. Obviously I'd like to hear more from him.
The Spring Experience - Day 2 Morning
This morning I attended a talk on Enterprise Integration with Spring by Mark Fisher. It was part one of a two part talk. Part 1 was basically an introduction to Spring combined with an introduction to EAI. About the only thing I got out of it was to see some of the new features in Spring 2.5. It was a good introduction for anyone who hasn't been introduced to EAI principals.
In the second session of the morning, Hal Hildebrand from Oracle talked about what could be their next generation application server. It was an intriguing talk and made me think quite a bit about the architecture for the platform we're building out. It allowed me to compare and contrast the two and think about which ideas we could leverage. Basically, Hal laid out that it would be based on OSGi and Spring. It will essentially be a distributed grid with a single agent on each node talking to daemon processes locally through JMX. The agents are purely for coordination and the daemons do the actual work. The agent plus daemon concept reminded me a little of DB2's architecture of coordinators and agents. For what sounded like autonomous management he also discussed the use of rules engines on each of these agents that would basically act as a distributed expert system. The question I would've liked to ask him but didn't is will they support multiple component models (Java EE, JBI, SCA, etc.). He alluded that it would, but he also talked about the fact that Java EE is dead, so it was difficult to tell for sure.
In the second session of the morning, Hal Hildebrand from Oracle talked about what could be their next generation application server. It was an intriguing talk and made me think quite a bit about the architecture for the platform we're building out. It allowed me to compare and contrast the two and think about which ideas we could leverage. Basically, Hal laid out that it would be based on OSGi and Spring. It will essentially be a distributed grid with a single agent on each node talking to daemon processes locally through JMX. The agents are purely for coordination and the daemons do the actual work. The agent plus daemon concept reminded me a little of DB2's architecture of coordinators and agents. For what sounded like autonomous management he also discussed the use of rules engines on each of these agents that would basically act as a distributed expert system. The question I would've liked to ask him but didn't is will they support multiple component models (Java EE, JBI, SCA, etc.). He alluded that it would, but he also talked about the fact that Java EE is dead, so it was difficult to tell for sure.
The Spring Experience 2007
Last night The Spring Experience kicked off in Hollywood, FL. It's the first time I've attended. It's run by SpringSource (used to be Interface 21) in conjunction with No Fluff Just Stuff. I've attended several NFJS conferences and have always been impressed with the content and how they are run.
Rod Johnson was the keynote speaker last night, and his theme was The Changing of the Guard. Basically, people are switching from Java EE to Spring. Not surprisingly, he's essentially saying that Java EE is a dinosaur. He's been saying this for quite some time, and he's largely been right all along. I can't remember when his first of three books was published, but it was around 2002. In his presentation, Rod had some interesting quotes from a Gartner report that came out several months ago that basically reinforced what Rod was stating. I'd like to read the full report, but I'm sure it's fairly costly to obtain. Rod always has interesting things to say, but of the times I've seen him speak, this was the least interesting. Maybe it's because he's become more concerned about running a company or the fact that keynotes are rarely very technical.
Before Rod started, Keith Donald spent about 30 minutes going through each of the tracks and sessions including photos of speakers. In my opinion it was a complete waste of time. On top of that, they started the show about 30 minutes late, so I felt like it was an hour wasted. Everyone waited patiently though, because they new Rod was speaking next.
Rod Johnson was the keynote speaker last night, and his theme was The Changing of the Guard. Basically, people are switching from Java EE to Spring. Not surprisingly, he's essentially saying that Java EE is a dinosaur. He's been saying this for quite some time, and he's largely been right all along. I can't remember when his first of three books was published, but it was around 2002. In his presentation, Rod had some interesting quotes from a Gartner report that came out several months ago that basically reinforced what Rod was stating. I'd like to read the full report, but I'm sure it's fairly costly to obtain. Rod always has interesting things to say, but of the times I've seen him speak, this was the least interesting. Maybe it's because he's become more concerned about running a company or the fact that keynotes are rarely very technical.
Before Rod started, Keith Donald spent about 30 minutes going through each of the tracks and sessions including photos of speakers. In my opinion it was a complete waste of time. On top of that, they started the show about 30 minutes late, so I felt like it was an hour wasted. Everyone waited patiently though, because they new Rod was speaking next.
Friday, September 7, 2007
The Four-Dimensional Space-Time Continuum
I think I am finally gaining an understanding of what is meant by us living in a four-dimensional space-time continuum. I'm currently reading Albert Einstein's book entitled Relativity, The Special and General Theory. In section XVII (page 55) he discusses Minkowski's Four-Dimensional Space. He started out very simply in section I with a discussion of Euclidean Geometry and built all the way up to the space-time continuum. I don't pretend to have understood everything he discussed, but I made a point of ensuring I (at least partially) understood every section leading up to this point. On page 56, he discusses the fourth equation of the Lorentz transformation and it actually makes sense to me! It was definitely an aha moment.
I would recommend reading this book to anyone who wants to learn about Einstein or his Theory of Relativity. The writing style is a little difficult to comprehend at first, but eventually you get used to it. I would guess it is due to the fact that 1) Einstein lived in a different era, 2) it may have originally been written in German (and translated to English by someone else), or 3) Einstein's advanced intellect. Regardless, Einstein does a great job of following one of his famous quotes:
"If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough."
I'll now have a different perspective on every day life...
I would recommend reading this book to anyone who wants to learn about Einstein or his Theory of Relativity. The writing style is a little difficult to comprehend at first, but eventually you get used to it. I would guess it is due to the fact that 1) Einstein lived in a different era, 2) it may have originally been written in German (and translated to English by someone else), or 3) Einstein's advanced intellect. Regardless, Einstein does a great job of following one of his famous quotes:
"If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough."
I'll now have a different perspective on every day life...
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