techno.blog("Dion")

JavaPolis is a fantastic conference. Denver is a city that feels like a town, and JavaPolis is a large conference (3200 this year) that manages to feel like a community. It all comes from Stephan and his great team, all volunteers, at the top.

One advantage of speaking at the conference is that you get to talk in a movie theatre. This year, they perfected the experience by having a picture in picture situation that showed speakers and slides together. Like this:

When you go to the same conference year after year, you get to pick up on memes. This year I was a little surprised by some of them.

GWT

I have seen that GWT is successful (way over 2M downloads now for example), but at last years show most of the people talking to me about it were doing so in a “I think I will check that out soon” manner, with a few users.

This year though, people from all over were talking to me about fine details, and about their many projects in production and development. At this point they had gone through a couple of the GWT releases too, and I was often told something like this:

I love the fact that every few months a new GWT comes out with a compiler that makes my applications significantly faster.

The compiler updates from 1.3 to 1.4 and to the bugging 1.5 are quite impressive. Quite a few folks were running on head and I was told “I am so glad that someone just checked in support for Enums at last!”.

I also found it interesting that the majority of people were using GWT-Ext, and that Mattias Bogaert was funding the update to Ext 2.0, which I am excited about (I worked on an Ext 2.0 toy on the plane trip home that I will blog about shortly).

Now, some of the usual suspects were talking about GWT such as Didier Girard, who I got to finally meet. He is such a nice bloke, and told me about a few GWT related libraries that I need to check out. He also interviewed me on video, where I gave an honest account about my Ajaxian feelings. I also met Cyprien Noel, of JSTM4GWT, which is an interesting object replication framework for GWT. I am interested to see how it would work with Gears.

But apart from these season vets, I also talked to companies that have poo-pooed GWT in the past, and are now picking it up, or thinking about doing so.

This all being said, this is a Java conference, so you would expect to see a higher number of “give me Java not JavaScript” folk, but I was still astounded by the numbers. I really think that GWT has reached a tipping point.

Flex my Java guy

One of the morning keynotes was a split session, with the best piece actually being Stephan and Ben showing off their new Flex/AIR-based parlays.com. I got to interview them about it, and will get it up on Ajaxian at some point soon.

It is really well done, and although Stephan bleeds Java, he realised that for what he wanted, Flex was a good choice. He even tried JavaFX but of course, it is too early.

This wrapup of this keynote tells the story on how truly poor the Sun session was. Wow.

Adobe had a booth, a keynote slot, and lots of talks, but there was no better advertising than seeing this application.

Of course, it was a pleasure seeing the usual suspects in Europe, and having a fun time with all.

Au revoir et voyez-vous l’année prochaine.
Het goed tot ziens en ziet volgend jaar u.

I land in SFO after the fun flight from London which I luckily didn’t miss (Mark Reinhold, also). What do I do after I land? Why turn on my iPhone of course. There is an obvious desire to check email and voice mail as SOON as you land a plane. Just look around.

The problem was that I couldn’t hear any voice mail. Hmm. I try to call, and no cigar. When I got to the car I could use the bluetooth integration, and it worked fine.

So, I did what I normally do, and I setup an appointment at the Stanford shopping mall store. I just got here, and after a lot of testing they realised that some lint fell into the mic line, and the sensor there told the phone “oh, the headset is on, so pump all AV out through that”.

So, if you don’t hear anything out of your phone, and it wasn’t the speaker setting, or audio sources, give this a try: blow into your mic input.

Marcus Ahnve posted about Merb, and how it is “leaner and meaner than Rails”.

His core point:

I have used Rails on a daily basis for almost a year now, and before that I was a night time hangaround. While I am definitely a happier programmer using Rails than anything built on Java, I still feel that it can get better.

First of all I want more things to be plugins. And really, they should not be plugins at all but gems instead.

Why plugins? We use RSpec instead of Test/Unit, HAML instead of erb and are seriously looking into JQuery instead of Prototype. And of course, we are using Mercurial instead of Subversion. All of this is of course possible to use in Rails, but a lot of things are sort of made for the default choice, such as generators generating tests, and plugins having the -x switch for Subversion. And I am pretty sure that this is the way DHH wants it.

The part that interests me is “we use X instead of Y”. I get it. People have been doing Rails for quite awhile now, and as with everything, they see things they would like to do different. That PHP/ASP/JSP-like, ugly <% %> syntax is a drag. It makes me think that I will be putting code throughout the view god damn it! So, I will give HAML a try, or some other builder-based system, or write my own. Why not? With Ruby, surely I can put together a great templating system in about 10 lines of code.

The problem of course is one of the reasons that you probably jumped to Rails in the first place was due to the paradox of choice that you had in Java land. You sat down with Rails for the first time and had a sign of relief as you ran % rails mynewproject. Just like that, you had bypassed the weeks of work evaluating which combination of Java frameworks and tools that should be used on this project. You didn’t have to argue with The Architect about the merits of abstracting logging to a bizarre degree with commons-logging.

When you talk to Railsy folk you will already hear about various plugins that you should be using. If you aren’t careful, you will be in the same path as before, until you move on to Django, …

I saw the updated LinkedIn home page. What is really new here?

Discover articles your colleagues are reading.

That could become interesting. I like the idea of seeing my own personal Digg, so LinkedIn could do something there.

The “modules” allow you to plug and play…. but for now with only a few options (Answers, Jobs, People search). You can see how it will make sense to open this up to developers in the future.

The network connections portion shows me what is wrong with LinkedIn. On Facebook I can see interesting things that my friends have done. On LinkedIn, I see that a connection has added another 6 connections. Who cares?

Today, I was able to launch a new section of Google Code that is focused on open source code related to the Mac. Since I am passionate about both open source AND the Mac, it was a really fun little side project to work on.

The core Google Mac team, and other developers at Google, actually have a fair amount of Mac related open source code. From small pieces of helpful code such as the Quartz Composer patches for Leopard, to large projects like MacFUSE to fun tools like iPhoneDisk to a new meta status updater called Statz. This is just the beginning of course, and now there is a home for this code.

One of the pleasures of working at Google is the slew of great people that you get to meet. On this project it was a real pleasure to work with Amit Singh (MacFUSE and much more), Nicholas Jitkoff (Quicksilver), and Dave MacLachlan (Adobe and much more).

I have been playing Scrabulous with many people, including my family.

My Mum and Dad would sometimes complain that they couldn’t easily get to the games that we were playing, and I chalked it up to “Computing Whilst Boomer”. Surely they just can’t see the darn Scrabulous link for some bizarre reason.

Well, when I delved into it more today on the phone, I found out that somehow, they had managed to be playing the games even though they hadn’t actually added the application to the FB profile!

The loop hole happened when they were invited to play a game. They said yes, and were able to get going without adding. They were able to get to the game itself by contorting in a bizarre way too. They could go to my profile, see my stats, and then get to the game.

Finally I got them to add the application:

“Wow this is like Fort Knox”. Not a good sign. It is good to see a new world through old eyes from time to time.

I won’t get started on how Scrabulous hangs when I try to delete one game that I never actually played, but have it marked as a loss!

For gods sake work out how to ship the damn things.

Jim Halberg is my new Hero for grabbing the last copy in Madison. I now hope he holds it for me and doesn’t sell it on eBay for millions!