Jazoon '07 - day 1

The conference started with an exciting presentation of Ted Neward about “Why the Next Five Years Will Be About Languages”. He talked about the Java language history, his cousins(Ruby, Groovy, .NET, etc) and feature perspectives. He summarized the efforts needed to develop a new language and shown the biggest challenges and creating a good one. It seems that in the next years it will be hard to appear new languages build from scratch, but the existing one will evolve and some will be created on top of existing ones.

What's wrong with Java? A look over the horizon.
The speaker seems to be Ruby, Groovy evangelist.
He gave some "Nice" example of using Groovy, Ruby:

- you do not need to write gettter/setter ... they now properties and Java not yet. What a big deal :)?

The given an example about how to write a simple web application to implement a simple knowledge base

- Java + Hibernate 3.2 -> 4 Kloc, 1 week

- Ruby - 1 Kloc, 1 week

- Groovy - <>

His examples were forced to reduce the power of Java and the need of effortless development languages. I would say this is a poor marketing strategy L.

I think he is one of the Groovy authors or he does not know java :). I am joking, I appreciate his interests in new languages, but I had expected more from the topic. I did not expect to see marketing material at such core topic.

UI Automated Testing of Java Applications
Poor guy, it was stressed about the presentation, that was not really able to keep the presentation cursively. It was embarrassing for me to leave the room, but I thought that I can find another presentation more interesting than this one kept by an inexperienced speaker.

Sun SPOTs
Nice presentation and demos about the SUN Spots. I know now which will be my next wished present: “Spot development kit”. Look to: http://www.sunspotworld.com/. This is a real cool technology; for sure I will like to play with some of the new gadgets.

Enterprise application testing using Open Source tools
It was a very good presentation about functional and UI testing. It were presented the following frameworks:

- fitness

- selenium

Java SE 7

The estimated release of Java SE 7 is end of 2008; but I guess it will be beginning of 2009.

Cool features in Java SE 7.0:

- JavaFX

- Powerfull and performant Swing

- JAM

- Super packages(expose only specific interface to the client of a package)

- Modular JRE

- Quick starter for JRE

My impressions after the first day:

- very good organization

- some good speaker

- some amateurs (SUN came with a bunch of devs from Praga. Some of them are really unexperienced)

- a lot of marketing. I did not expect this from such conference

Let’s hope that tomorrow more interesting topics will come.