Full article on: http://www.infoq.com/news/2009/09/google-sitebricks

JavaScript DSLs for the Client Side
With Dionysios G. Synodinos
Date: June 3, 2009, 3 PM EDT
Duration: 1 hour

Read the full story: Location-Aware Browsing to become Mainstream?

In addition to specifying markup, HTML 5 exposes several new scripting APIs for:

• 2D drawing
• Media
• Browser history
• Cross-document messaging
• Drag & drop
• Client-side persistent storage
• Server-sent events
• and more…

InfoQ recently conducted a virtual panel via email regarding how the JavaScript frameworks will evolve in order to take advantage of these new APIs. The panel featured representatives from some of the most widely deployed projects that deal with client-side JavaScript:

• Dylan Schiemann, CEO of SitePen and co-creator of Dojo
• Matt Sweeney & Eric Miraglia, YUI engineering team
• Andrew Dupont, core developer of Prototype
• Thomas Fuchs, creator of script.aculo.us, and core developer of Prototype and Ruby on Rails
• David Walsh, core developer for MooTools
• Scott Blum and Joel Webber, co-creators of GWT

“

Read the article: Evolution of JavaScript Frameworks for HTML 5

Read the full article here: http://www.infoq.com/news/2009/03/test-swarm

See the full interview here: http://www.infoq.com/interviews/tim-bray-future-of-web

“With the Web becoming the default development platform, we are witnessing major innovations in browser technology. In the spirit of time, Opera has announced plans for “the fastest JavaScript engine on the market” code named Carakan and Apple has released Safari 4 in public beta with several new features and improvements.”

Read the ful article here: http://www.infoq.com/news/2009/02/caracan_safari4

Summary

What	2 days of practical, applied DSL sessions from industry experts and practitioners
When	April 16th, 2pm-6pm (registration at 1pm), April 17th, 9am-6pm
Where	Microsoft Research Building 99, Room 1919 14820 NE 36th Street Redmond, WA 98052 USA

The topics are very interesting and the list of speakers is impressive:

When	What	Who
Thursday, April 16th
12:00pm	Registration
12:45pm	Welcome	Chris Sells
1:00pm	Keynote	Martin Fowler
2:00pm	M DSLs: Deep Dive	Paul Vick
3:00pm	Domain Specific Languages for automated testing of equity order management systems and trading machines	Tom Rodgers
4:00pm	DSLs in the Horn Package Manager	Paul Cowan
5:00pm	How to implement DSLs with Groovy	Guillaume Laforge
6:00pm	Reception (food and beverages)
6:45pm	DSL Panel	All speakers
Friday, April 17th
7:30am	Breakfast
9:00am	Textual DSLs and Code Generation with Eclipse Tools	Markus Voelter
10:00am	JavaScript DSLs for the Client Side	Dionysios G. Synodinos
11:00am	Functional vs. Dynamic DSLs: The Smackdown	Ted Neward, Bradford Cross
11:45am	Lunch
1:00pm	Embedding DSLs in Newspeak: EBNF, Hopscotch and NewShell	Gilad Bracha
2:00pm	RUMBA: RUby Managed Business data for Applications	Umit Yalcinalp, Tilman Giese
3:00pm	A DSL for Cool Effects in Adobe Pixel Bender	Bob Archer, Chuck Rose
4:00pm	Language Oriented Programming in F#	Chance Coble
5:00pm	TBD	TBD

“Last week Mozilla released Bespin, a web-based framework for code editing and only a few days later Boris Bokowski and Simon Kaegi implemented an Eclipse-based Bespin server using headless Eclipse plug-ins. With the presentation of a web-based workbench at EclipseCon and the release of products like the Heroku web-based IDE for RoR apps, it seems that web-based IDEs might soon become mainstream.”

Read the full article here: http://www.infoq.com/news/2009/02/web-based-ide

In Wikipedia you read:

In software engineering, a web application or webapp is an application that is accessed via web browser over a network such as the Internet or an intranet. It is also a computer software application that is coded in a browser-supported language (such as HTML, JavaScript, Java, etc.) and reliant on a common web browser to render the application executable.

So this is what I could come up with: just paste the following piece of code (140 characters) in a file with a .html extension, open it with a browser and you have a crude number guessing game:

<script>function
x(){if(confirm("odd?")&&((Math.floor(Math.random()*10))%2))alert(":)");else
alert(":(");if(confirm("rpt?"))x()}x()</script>

The browser calculates a random integer and asks you if it is an odd numbers. If your answer is correct it returns a smiley (or a frown if you’ve guessed wrong). Finally it asks you if you want to repeat the game and if you choose “ok” the whole thing starts over again.

You can save many characters by omitting the loop. Also you can save 10 whole characters by having the browser randomly choose “1” or “0” and asks you to guess between them.

<script>function x(){if(confirm(“1?”)&&(Math.round(Math.random())))alert(“:)”);else alert(“:(“);if(confirm(“rpt?”))x()}x()</script>

• Sir Tony Hoare – Inventor of Quicksort, Turing Award Winner
• Joe Armstrong – Father of Erlang
• Martin Fowler – Loud Mouth on Object Design
• Steve Freeman – Agile Software Development Pioneer
• Michael T. Nygard – Author of “Release IT”
• Rod Johnson – Creator of Spring
• Dion Hinchcliffe – Web 2.0 and Social Media Industry Expert
• Eric Evans – Mr. Domain Driven Design

The track themes for QCon London & track hosts are as follows:

Architectures in Financial Applications – Hosted by Cleve Gibbon and Alexis Richardson

The latest innovations as well as time-proven best practices that architects of banking & finance systems need to know.

Emerging languages in the enterprise – Hosted by Ola Bini

. In this track we will look at some of the languages and how they are used in the enterprise, what benefits they give and what to look out for.

Real World SOA – Hosted by Stefan Tilkov

Whether based on SOAP/WSDL-style Web services or alternative approaches such as RESTful HTTP, we will talk about the good, the bad & and the ugly.

Turning on a sixpence – technical skills for Agile development – Hosted by Steve Freeman

This track is about the technical essentials you need to know to make Agile software development reliable and sustainable.

Web as a platform – Hosted by Geir Magnusson

Benefits and liabilities of web programming and recent case studies.

Agile Organisational patterns – Hosted by Linda Rising

What’s the optimal way of working together – Social aspects of software dev teams, organizational alignment, compensation,self-organization, decision making, vision.

Architectures you Always Wondered About- Hosted by InfoQ’s Chief Editor, Floyd Marinescu

The BBC, Guardian.co.uk, and others.

Domain-Driven Design & Development – Hosted by Eric Evans

This track will take you through the foundations of DDD, and how they are applicable and actually applied in projects.

Functional and Concurrent Programming – Hosted by Erik Meijer

The track presents a series of examples of actual use of functional programming languages and actor/concurrent languages and discuss how it affects our way to comprehend distributed, asynchronous software systems.

Java.Next – Key Technologies Shaping the Future of Java – Hosted by Scott Delap

Technologies pushing the limits of Java on the server, desktop, and places in between.

Architecture for the Architect – Hosted by Dan North

Industry leaders share their experiences in designing architectures and being good architects.

Domain Specific Languages – Hosted by Neal Ford

This track covers a wide range of business areas and technical implementations.

Historically bad ideas – Hosted by Floyd Marinescu & Aino Corry

Null References? Corba? This track will feature technology directions that were once discussed almost like silver bullets but which later proved to be bad ideas or short-lived fads.

Next Generation Web on .NET – Hosted by Beat Schwegler

Learn how to develop state of the art Web Applications using technologies such as ASP.NET, Silverlight 2.0, Deep Zoom and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF).

Systems that never stop – Hosted by Michael Nygard

How do you develop, test, update, maintain, and reason about systems without borders?

The previous QCon was well received, below are some comments from bloggers who attended our last QCon:

• Erik Johnson – QCon London was a top-notch event and among the great presentations, two things I learned stand out …
• Nik Silver – every hour of the three days of the conference there were insights and guidance that could be tucked away, and reused later to save hours, days or weeks of time elsewhere.
• Matthew Ford – … I’ve just spent the last week at QCon and I’ve just about fully recovered (it was pretty intense)…
• Ola Bini – I had a great time and I look forward to being back the next time. I can definitely recommend QCon as one of the best conferences around in this industry.
• Steve Vinoski – I just returned home from QCon London, and its excellence exceeded my expectations. As usual, the quality of speakers QCon attracts is outstanding, and they cover a very wide variety of topics.
• Antonio Goncalves – I only had two days at the conference and I have to say, QCon is different from what I’m used to. The audience looked more experienced (or older if you want) and the quality of the presentations was really high
• Mark Edgington – In short fantastic. I left the conference armed with lots of ideas and inspiration and a handful of excellent contacts.
• Danilo Sato – I was really impressed with the quality of the conference, from tracks, to sessions, and speakers. QCon is one of the best technical conferences I’ve participated and I recommend it for anyone interested in enterprise software development. I’m looking forward to attending again next year.

See also past QCon/JAOO talks available online on InfoQ:

• How to Work With Business Leaders to Manage Architectural Change by Luke Hohmann
• Building your next service with the Atom Publishing Protocol with Dan Diephouse
• Establishing Your Organization’s Enterprise Security API by Jeff Williams
• Real-Time Java for Latency Critical Banking Applications by Bertrand Delsart
• Architecting for Latency by eBay’s Dan Pritchett
• Martin Fowler and Dan North Point Out a Yawning Crevasse of Doom
• Designing RESTful Rails Applications with Obie Fernandez
• Lessons Learned from Architecture Reviews by Rebecca Wirfs-Brock

Registration for the 3 day conference is £1,170 if you register before February 22nd, a savings of £130!

“The public draft of the Java EE 6 Platform specification has been published and will remain open for public review and feedback until the 23rd of Feb, 2009. Maybe the most notable part of this delayed draft is the Web Profile, which is first profile in the history of the Java EE platform.”

Read post here: http://www.infoq.com/news/2009/01/java-ee6-draft

PeekYou. FAIL!

Spock. FAIL!

Whoisi. FAIL!

YoName. FAIL!

ex.plod.us. FAIL!

snitch.name delivers!!!

I’ll try to incorporate more user requested features, so drop me a line if you’d like to have a new search provider added or have some new functionality in mind.

Plugin

You can search with snitch.name directly from your browser’s search box using the OpenSearch specification! This is the box that sits right from your address bar. Both IE7 and Firefox support it

FAQ

Do I need an account on these social sites?

In most cases these sites reveal little or no information to users that don’t have an account so it would be wise to get an account. It is free anyway

Why can’t I just use Google?

There are several advantages over a plain Google search! Some of them are:

1. There are several social sites that are not indexed by Google at all or in a very limited way. As has Tim O’Reilly agreed on: “Social sites like Facebook/Flickr grow  exponentially without being indexed by Google”.
2. Depending on your privileges to the various social sites, you’ll always get the maximum information that you are allowed to get. For example if you are in someone’s network in Facebook you’ll get more information in snitch.name than you would get directly from a Google search.
3. Google will not necessarily give higher ranking to results that are “people profiles”, so you get a whole bunch of results from mailing lists, forums, etc. that might have little value to you.
4. With snitch.name you get all the results expanded in your page so you can print them all at once and have them available
   when you are away from your computer.

Why everything loads inside the browser?

This way you access the social sites using your own credential and get authorized for the maximum amount of information you are allowed to. Many social sites don’t have public/open APIs (eg. LinkedIn) and even the ones that do have would need you to authenticate again. This could be very impractical. With snitch.name the cookies you have stored in your browser already do all the work to authenticate you.

Is it better than other people-search-services?

Try yourself to see how superior snitch.name is!

Many thanks to Christos Stathis, Fotis Stamatlopoulos, Kostas Troulos & Panagiotis Astithas, for their early feedback.

Read the full article here: http://www.infoq.com/news/2009/01/java7-updated

Read the full article here: http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/12/servlet3_debate

Read the full article here: http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/12/websockets-vs-comet-ajax

Read the full article here: http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/11/web_default

“Mark Reinhold, Principal Engineer at Sun Microsystems, has been advocating about how “cool” would be for the Sun JDK to be modular. He’s is putting up a good argument about how the complexity is hurting the platform and how the Java Kernel and Quickstarter features in the JDK 6u10 release just address the symptoms of JDK’s long-term interconnected growth.”

Read full article here: http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/11/modular_jdk

Read the full article here: http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/11/qconsf08_jcp

In order to get there I had to take the Caltrain from SF Station to Menlo Park.

At Menlo Park Station Aaron picked me up and we drove up to Sun’s Campus. There I had

the chanch to see where all the JUG magic is being done and also meet Mark Dehart.

I also had a chance to meet with Reginald Hutcherson who is a Java Evangelist that has been regularly visiting us in Athens, Greece with his team.

We also visited the office of Doris Chen, one of our beloved Java Evangelists, but she wasn’t there.

After that we walked through various places of the campus, one of which was the exhibition center, AKA Geek Disneyland.

One of the things that also impressed me was the cafeteria that employees had their lunch. Talk about choices! BBQ, Oriental, American, vegetarian and huge selection of bevereges. I could definetly gain (even) more weight here

As we were going through corridor after corridor, Aaron stuck his head in a door and started to talk to some employee. At some point of the conversation I heard the name “James” and immediately notices the sighn next to the door “James Gosling”. This was actually the pinnacle of my visit there. I had the chance to pay my respect to the father of Java and invite him to visit us in Greece.

This was actually the pinnacle of my visit there. I had the chance to pay my respect to the father of Java and invite him to visit us in Greece.

NOTE: Have you registered for “JHUG Mini tech day” on 2008-11-22?

Read full article here: http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/11/ioke

Full article here: http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/10/java6u10_released

The LCG, which was launched in 2003, aims to integrate thousands of computers in hundreds of data centers worldwide into a global computing resource to store and analyze the huge amounts of data that the LHC will collect. The LHC is estimated to produce roughly 15 petabytes (15 million gigabytes) of data annually. This is the equivalent of filling more than 1.7 million dual-layer DVDs a year! Thousands of scientists around the world want to access and analyze this data, so CERN is collaborating with institutions in 33 different countries to operate the LCG.

More of this article on: http://www.infoq.com/articles/lhc-grid

You can visit the project page, the FireStatus Google Group,the FireStatus FaceBook page or check out the buzz on the twittersphere.

And don’t forget to leave a review here.

PS: We’d like to thank our #1 beta tester Costas for his valuable feedback!

UPDATE: See Christos’s blog post on the story behind FireStatus.

Read more at: http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/09/jresig-tracemonkey

Read it at: http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/08/tracemonkey

The sessions started around 1.30 PM and covered:

• SpringSource Portfolio
• What’s New in Spring 2.5
• Plans for Spring 3.0
• Building a Web App with SpringSource Application Platform (Demo)

Although there was a severe heat wave and most people are still on vacations the turnout proved very good and Iwein created a warm and friendly atmosphere. Participants left with several Spring leads to investigate the following days.

This version adds support for Java SE 6, Spring, Comet, improved Operations Control, FastSwap Deployment and more.

http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/08/first-oracle-weblogic

http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/07/dylan_schiemann_qna

]]> http://synodinos.net/2008/07/23/dylan-schiemann-on-dojo-toolbox-comet-gwt-javascript-2-web-as-a-platform-flex-ie8-bayeux-servlets-v3/feed/ 0 synodinos http://synodinos.net/2008/07/21/bye-bye-internet-explorer-6/ http://synodinos.net/2008/07/21/bye-bye-internet-explorer-6/#comments Mon, 21 Jul 2008 17:21:29 +0000 Dionysios Synodinos http://synodinos.wordpress.com/?p=210 Continue reading →]]> Since attaining a peak of about 95% usage share during 2002 and 2003, Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) has been rapidly losing market share. As the end of 2008 approaches, significant online services, vendors and web frameworks are dropping support for IE6 (Apple, 37signals, etc.)! Will this (finally) year be the end of IE6..?

Includes original quotes by:

• Douglas Crockford, senior JavaScript Architect at Yahoo and creator of JSON
  
• John Resig, who is a JavaScript Evangelist for Mozilla and creator jQuery
  
• Dylan Schiemann, CEO of SitePen and co-creator of Dojo
  
• Jeffrey Zeldman author of several books on web design and co-founder of the Web Standards Project

http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/07/ie6_on_its_way_out

More on: http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/07/vote-for-browsers

http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/06/jboss-as5-rc1

http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/06/grizzly-atmosphere

“JBoss Cache is an enterprise-grade clustering solutions for Java-based applications, that aims to provide high availability and dramatically improve performance by caching frequently accessed Java objects. In this post InfoQ has a round-up interview with project lead Manik Surtani.”

more…

The early draft for JSR 314 has been released for review under the Java Community Process Program. This JSR aims to update the 1.2 version of the JavaServer Faces specification to version 2.0. This next generation of JSF is an attempt to bring the best ideas in web application development to the Java EE platform and is already receiving positive feedback from the community, especially because of its improved AJAX support….

more on InfoQ.com…

The event started of with Paris giving out a small introductory and several Java goodies like t-shirts an books.

Here is a short outline of the talks that followed:

Mikhail Kondratyev – Netbeans (NB) 6.1 Overview

• Intro to NB 6.1
• Focused mostly on Java features
• Gave a short history of the NB IDE
• New features of 6-6.1:
  • Added run configurations
  • Better deployment for Java Web Start
  • Added test libs
  • Better support for shared libs
  • Jemmy test framework
  • Project Groups
  • Several Editor enhancements
  • Local History
  • MySQL support
  • Restful WS (generate JavaScript stub!)
  • Integrated Mercurial support
• Upcoming for 6.5 (planned for end of September)
  • Better PHP
  • Client JavaScript debugger for Firefox (IE6/7/8?)
  • Integrated Groovy
  • Even better MySQL tooling

Mark Newton – JBoss Community & JBoss AS 5

Mark gave a nice talk on the evolution of the JBoss business model and how it fits with the open source community.

Kirk Pepperdine – Performance Tuning and Java Optimizations

Kirk kicked a** as usual, explaining how multiple cores are changing the fundamentals of how we code:

• Sequential programming is hard but… concurrent is harder
• Multicore redefine the rules for coding, design and architecture
• Explained the “Quake Principle”
• We will have to adjust algorithms to hardware, as in the past
• Moore’s law revisited: Double parallelism every 18 months
• 1000 cores within this decade
• DBs don’t scale good on clusters – a 20 year old technology
• Amdahls law
• Non uniform memory access
• Transactional memory
• Cliff Clicks lockless concurrent HashTable

“WRITE ONCE, DEBUG EVERYWHERE”

Manik Surtani – JBoss Cache: Clustering enterprise Java for scalability and high availability

Manik’s visit to Greece, was a very good opportunity to chat with him and arrange for an interview/acrticle for InfoQ about JBoss Cache. During his talk he presented the benefits of caching and also the common pitfalls. He also presented several features of JBoss Cache and common architectures for high availability.

More from Paris…

At the time of this writing this the details are:

Location: Athens, Greece

Directions:

Hotel Classical Acropol
1, Pireos Street
GR 105 52 Athens
Greece

Tel: 30 210 5282100
Fax: 30 210 5282175

Start date: Saturday, June 7, 2008

Start time: 09:30 AM

End date: Saturday, June 7, 2008

End time: 03:00 PM

Agenda

• 09.30 – 10.00 : Coffee break
• 10.00 – 10.40 Sun) Sun Hellas OpenSolaris Session (speaker TBA)
• 10.50 – 11.30 : (Sun) Netbeans Team,Mikhail Kondratyev – Netbeans 6.1 Overview
• 11.30 -11.50 : Coffee break
• 11.50 – 12.30 : (RedHat JBoss) Mark Newton – JBoss Community & JBoss AS 5
• 12.40 – 13.20 : Kirk Pepperdine – Perfomance Tuning and Java Optimizations (TBA)
• 13.20 – 14:00 : Lunch Break
• 14.00 – 14:40 : (RedHat JBoss) Manik Surtani – JBoss Cache: Clustering enterprise Java for scalability and high availability

And you can register here and also find more details from the blogs of Paris and Panos.

From twitter users I’d suggest looking for #jhug. Also I suppose a FaceBook event would sound nice…

Will Polyglotism and DSLs make Java the Last Big Language?

Replace Flash with HTML: Convert Flash sites to HTML. Provide pure- HTML alternatives for Flash content.

… and it followed:

Flash is extremely inaccessible. I most cases a Flash site might as well be a black box to blind users, and is often hostile to color-blind, deaf and motion impaired users as well…

It is not a secret that I have a bias opinion when it comes to Flash/Flex and I’m happy that there other people also that are immune to this hype.

Of course the lift of the restrictions regarding the SFW/FLV spec was a very positive think on behalf of Adobe and I hope they keep it up!

Here are some points that are not very trivial:

• You can mess with your friends Google search history with simple basic CSRF
• The OWASP servlet filter is a nice tool
• Mentioned a way to make a double cookie check both on the body and the HTTP headers and said that it was the way DWR works, but didn’t quite elaborate on it.
• They mentioned several times that there is a wrong and right way to use JSON and it would be nice to provide more details but I suppose time was an issue.
• Maybe the corner stone of JavaScript hacking is the action to override Object(). This is also a nice way to do AOP.
• There are many-many places where JavaScript is executed in a web page besides the <script> element like attributes (javascript:), event listeners, browser specific event listeners, CSS (inline and imports), etc. so…
  • … you might consider using AntiSamy
• With XSS you can grab the secret token and then launch a CSRF

Some things that I feel that should also be added in a similar presentation should be:

• • Application layer firewalls like mod_security
  • Hacking browser extensions that users typically have like firebug, Greasemonkey, etc.
  • Protecting your app from malicious JSON
  • Browser standards compliance mode (IE8 ) as a way to protect from attacks that aim at malformed HTML

A few hours ago I attended the “Java Rockstars Panel”, a press only event with:

• Bob Brewin, CTO of Sun Software
• Tim Bray, Director of Web Technologies for Sun
• Jeet Kaul, VP of Developer Products and Programs for Sun
• Eric Klein, VP of Java Marketing for Sun

I will try to summarize some key points:

• This year is about Java on the client, the ubiquity of the platform and the energy of the community.
• Tim Bray likes JavaScript’s ubiquity
• Fact of life: Ruby and Python are (almost) as old as Java (chronologically
• Alternative (scripting) languages that will be able to run on the JVM with automatically increase their potential user base
• “People love the Web platform because it has no platform vendor” – Tim Bray
• Having no real specs for dynamic languages (except JavaScript) makes it hard for people trust them.

Attendants were welcomed in the General Session by various dancing acts.

Then James Gosling was tossing his personally designed t-shirts.

The prediction that a Java Posse member made yesterday at CommunityOne that Jonathan Schwartz will make a joint appearance with Steve Jobs, hug on stage and announce that Java will be available on the iPhone was… not fulfilled.

Instead we were shown a biometric censors experiment held in Moscone during JavaOne. BTW all badges are RFID and scanned with a nokia phone. They also demonstrated the usage of sensors and Java code for measuring and manage climate inside Moscone.

Then Rich Green:

• Invited Ian Freed of Amazon on stage who talked about the Kindle and gave a short presentation that illustrated how Java empowers this device. If you didn’t know it ALL Kindle applications are Java.
• Invited Rikko Sakaguchi from Sony Ericsson on stage who showed a promotional video of a new device that will be launched later this year and said that “Java is the core strategy of Sony Ericsson”!
• Showed a demo with Facebook and LiveConnect app/plugin that uses JavaFX. Showed it also on a JavaME phone. Really impressive, even though the slow Moscone network created problems.
• Continued with a JavaFX demo that demonstrated that emphasized on the design capabilities of the technology. It was really eye pleasing. Also emphasized the 3D, HD video and sound capabilities of the platform.
• Repeated the ConnectedLife demo on the Google Android emulator.
• Talked about Glassfish modular new architecture.

One of the highlights was the appereance of Neil Young on stage. He talked about his effort to collect all his musical legacy to BlueRay and how Java enables him to provide an nice interface to it all. I would have liked it if he could stayed a bit longer and had his guitar with him

After the general session I had the pleasure of accidentally meeting Doris Chen, one of our beloved Java Evangelists that visit Greece regularly to talk about the latest and greatest in Java Land.

The conference is so huge and packet with people from all over the world that I would suggest to Sun to consider something like JavaOne Europe.

Continuying with the individual sessions that I personally found more interesting:

“The Duke and the Elephant: PHP Meets Java? Technology–the Best of Both Worlds” by Rob Nicholson

• Why use PHP (fairly obvious)
• Why use PHP+Java+Groovy: leverage the power and communities of all platforms
• WebSphere sMash: Agile application development using dynamic scripting and RESTful Web Services (based on JSON?)
• They seemed to have implemented some kind of PHP 5 runtime over Java SE. It sounds very interesting and I’ll have to look into the licensing information.

Blogger Q&A with Jonathan Schwartz and Rich Green

• How long Jonathan spents blogging and other related questions
• Bloging company policy and sensorcip
• JavaFX platform questions
• Sun/Google/Android
• Java and iPhone
• more…

“JavaScript? Programming Language: The Language Everybody Loves to Hate” by Roberto Chinnici

Outline:

• Introduction to the functional nature of JavaScript
• Mentioned that you can only have scope through functions (but later showed scope with objects)
• Suggested that some Higher Order Functions library might be useful
• Said that with no tail recursion it is easy to blow a stack
• Browser implementations are primitive
• Made a reference to Google project Caja
• Showed several examples form frameworks like Dojo, jQuery and Prototype that alienated the typical Java programmer.

For those who don’t know yet, Roberto is one of the people that brough us Phobos. As I suggested after the discussion they should really put an effort to making it work with continuation. This is a programming model quite different then the one most web developers are accustomed to and it would strengthen Phobos position as an alternative framework. Especially as we enter more and more to the era of server-side Javascript with products like Jaxter by Aptana and the long awaited Rhino on Rails by Google.

BTW Roberto some of your comments where a bit biased against the functional and prototypical nature of the language but we all know you love it

“Building Secure Mashups with OpenAjax” by Jon Ferraiolo

• What is the OpenAjax Allience
• The interoperability problems between the various toolkits
• OpenHub 1.0 -> enables multiple ajax runtimes to work together (pub/sub). Included in the Dojo framework
• Security issues in mashups
• OpenAjax Hub 1.1 -> Adds pub/sub with the server (eg. Comet) and framework for secure mashups
• OpenAjax Metadata

Moscone Center was surrounded with street signs and people holding signs that pointed to the various designated areas.

The general session that kicked off was broadcasted live on the internet, as one of the speakers informed us.

HD abuse

I’ve spent most of my time in the RedMonk Unconference and also attended the Java Posse podcast recording during lunch time. Their podcast is my favorite one second to the Software Engineering Radio.

Also I attended a session by Zend about their framework and how they are planning to implement Comet applications. I use the word “planning” because from what I understood they don’t actually have any concrete plans. For example the speaker talked about a Comet server implementation in C that a PHP app would use through CLI, but when I approached him with the question if this would be given out as a PECL module or about the licensing, he couldn’t disclose any information. Anyway, since more than 50% of web apps are made in PHP, I’d like this community to overcome the challenges that the Comet paradigm brings and do it in a timely fashion.

I was also happy to accidentally bump into Reginald Hutcherson at the stairs. Regi is a Java Evangelist that has been regularly visiting us in Athens, Greece with his team.

I still have a couple of sessions that I would like to attend and I’ll go back to the hotel to rest since I still haven’t gotten over the jetlag and tomorrow JavaOne opens. This means dozens of great sessions and even more parties

Having a pet dog I really-really enjoyed the fact that there are people inside Moscone that (are allowed to) go around with their dogs. Actually I’ve read that one out of two SF residents has dog. Two thumbs up people!

This was our second day this side of the pond and we’ve spent most of the morning going around on rented bikes and sightseeing.

We were so overwhelmed by the scenery and the Golden Gate Bridge that we went far out of our schedule and couldn’t make it to the GlassFish Unconference that was held in Moscone. This was such a shame since I am very excited about the Comet support and I wanted to meet the team and discuss about v3. I hope I get the chance one of the following days during JavaOne.

After we returned to the hotel and had a few minutes of rest, we visited the party that the Dutch Java User Group – NLJUG had organized at the Carnelian Room. After meeting the NLJUG leader and some of their members I was very impressed about their enthusiasm… NLJUG rocks!

At this party, besides meeting Stephan Jansen from JAVOXX (formerly known as Javapolis), it was a pleasure to meet Aaron Houston in person after all those emails. He has been a source of inspiration and his outgoing nature helped to create a lively conversation regarding all kinds of Java related issues. Aaron the JHUG will be waiting for you in Greece

My friend Panos is keeping a log of our time here in SF, on one of his blogs.

BTW a little bird told me that a SunSpot might be landing soon in Greece for all the JHUG community to play with it and to program it, but will see about that… (update: Panos what is this little box in your bag?)

“Amazon’s Elastic Computer Cloud (EC2), which delivers Hardware as a Service (HaaS), is adding persistent storage to its list of features. Werner Vogels, Amazon’s CTO, describes how storage volumes will attach to EC2 instances and how they handle failure and data consistency; he also talks about how you can store a snapshot of your storage in S3, Amazon’s storage service, as a backup.“

“Amazon upgrades EC2 with Persistent Storage” article for InfoQ -by Dionysios G. Synodinos

It is funny how a small mindmap can generate such a large volume of hate mail

Since this post on how “contemporary Adobe Flex implementations defy and adulterate the very nature of the WWW as we know it”, generated so much interest I thought of updating it and wait for the Adobe horde to hit again.

I’m very excited since JavaOne is the flag-ship of all Java related conferences and probably one of the biggest (if not THE biggest) conferences in the world for software developers. Moreover it’s a celebration where people from all over the globe:

• come together in one of the most beautiful cities in the US,
• get high quality sessions from domain experts
• exchange experiences, ideas and their vision for the Java platform and
• network with their idols and with each other.

There are several sessions I’m eagerly looking forward to attending like:

• “The Java™ Platform Portlet Specification 2.0 (JSR 286)” by Stefan Hepper (WebSphere Portal Server)
• “Asynchronous Ajax for Revolutionary Web Applications” by Jean-François Arcand (Grizzly)
• “The JavaScript™ Programming Language for Enterprise Application Scripting: Five Years of Experience” by Olivier Modica
• “Comet: The Rise of Highly Interactive Web Sites” by Alex Russell (Dojo)
• “JavaScript™ Programming Language: The Language Everybody Loves to Hate” by Roberto Chinnici (Phobos)

We have planned our visit so we can also participate in CommunityOne, one day before JavaOne, where there will be many interesting sessions concerning:

• Projects and Strategy
• Linux Communities
• Databases: MySQL, postgreSQL
• Web and Application Servers: GlassFish, Apache
• Scripting and Rich Internet Applications (RIAs): PHP, Python, Ruby, Javascript, JavaFX, AJAX, jMaki
• Tools and IDEs: NetBeans, Eclipse
• Next Generation Web Applications
• Web Scale Computing
• … and much more

You still have time to join us…

Here is the opening video from last year’s JavaOne: