Report from JHUG Java Day, Athens June 7, 2008

For the last time before summer, the Java Hellenic User Group (JHUG) organized an excellent event for the Greek developer’s community. Participation was high and I was very excited to meet again several friends and old colleagues, like Panagiotis, Christos, Thanassis, Ioannis and Spyros (sorry if I forget someone).

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…