jaxlondonblog

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Spikey hair and Spikey events - Shazam’s Tech Evangelist Colin Vipurs goes under the hood

If you were at JAX London last week you may have seen or met a guy strutting about sporting a pink mohawk.  That guy was Tech Evangelist for Shazam and all round nice punk (!) Colin Vipurs.

Yesterday Colin featured in an interesting blog post from the people at RecWorks (yep, them ones that help power the LJC).

'Java Development at Shazam Under the Hood' is a good post and refreshing to see a recruiting company actually focus on what life at a company is all about.  

There’s a fresh perspective here.  Barry Cranford of RecWorks comments in the post that some devs have this misconception that ‘all the interesting work is done in boring companies’.  Vipurs paints a picture of Shazam that is anything but boring, a place where they don’t do things the traditional way, a place where it seems there is an ethos of innovation through inidivdual and team empowerment.  He goes through the ins and outs that the dev team use when approaching ‘spikey’ events such as bottleneck traffic and data efficiency, whilst stressing that it’s not all about being cutting edge,  sometimes simplicity is enough.

A nice piece we thought we’d share - enjoy!

[jaxlondonblog]

No pain, all gain at JAX London’s free community events - Have you registered?

Whether you are attending this year’s JAX London or cannot make it for the full conference we wanted to make you aware of the great free-to-attend evening activities taking place.

So even if you can’t make the main event but are in London on 28th or 29th October, check out the night time activities you can take in.  

BIRT ‘n’ Beer night @ JAX London

Eclipse OS BIRT Project founders Actuate will join forces with JAX London on Monday 28th October to offer developers a free tour of BIRT.  Meet Actuate’s BI experts, who will deliver complimentary training with a cold beer and slice of pizza to help digest it all. Not only that but there are Raspberry Pis on offer for 10 of the registered attendees.  Places are limited though, so get in there now.

                        REGISTER HERE TO BOOK YOUR PLACE

Features:

Complimentary training on how to get started with BIRT

An understanding of the dynamic capabilities of BIRT, HTML5, Flash and Interactive Viewer to deliver exciting, interactive content

Raspberry Pis on offer for 10 of the registered attendees.

Prize draw: 1 BIRT - A Field Guide the eclipse series

FREE software evaluation licenses 

Access to BIRT Exchange Marketplace apps  

JAX London 2013 Community Night

The JAX London Community Night will be a food, drink and code fuelled ‘taster’ of the main conference, in conjunction with UK user groups and sponsors. If you are attending the main conference you are automatically registered and this is a great way to meet the communities helping the Java ecosystem thrive, if you aren’t registered for JAX London but want to attend the Community Night on Tuesday 29th October, sign up now.  

Featuring:

London Java Community Meetup with Jamie Allen (Typesafe), Ted Neward (CTO & Co-Founder) and Guillaume LaForge (SpringSource). 

Google Dart Code Lab with Chris Buckett (Entity Group)

Big Data Meet-up with Akmal B. Chaudhri (Hortonworks), Hayato Shimizu (Datastax) and Dai Clegg (Acunu)

Glassfish User Group with Arun Gupta (Oracle)

FOR A FULL LINEUP AND ABSTRACTS PLEASE VISIT OUR COMMUNITY PAGE HERE

  The JAX London Team

[jaxlondonblog]

JAX London's FREE Community Night | Tuesday 29th October - Beer, Code, Labs and Talks!

              The JAX London Community Night is a beer, wine and code fuelled ‘taster’ of the main conference, in conjunction with UK user groups and sponsors.  If you don’t have the time to attend the full conference or can’t get a ticket, come on down to community night on Tuesday 29th October for an evening packed with activities.

You’ll get a flavour of the main event and the chance to meet up with other coders from UK, European and Worldwide Java, JVM and Big Data development scenes.

REGISTER HERE FOR YOUR FREE TICKET!

JAX London Community Night Schedule

6pm : Doors 

6pm - 7pm : Drinks

7pm : Sessions and hands-on coding

Special thanks to Community Night sponsors Actuate and Oracle. 

JAX Community Night activities

London Java Community Meetup

The LJC will host an evening of talks from some of the JAX London speakers as part of the conferences Community Night. Described as a beer, wine and code fuelled ‘taster’ of the main conference, the community night brings various user groups together and gives us a chance to hear from people not regularly on these shores.

We have 3 talks running:

Building Reactive applications for Java developers - Jamie Allen

Typesafe Director of Consulting and JAX London keynote presenter, Jamie Allen, jets in from Silicon Valley and talks about building reactive applications for Java developers, and how to do that with the Typesafe stack.  He will also compare and contrast how that is done with Java versus Scala.  

Confessions of a Startup CTO – Ted Neward

In this session, Seattle-based recent CTO and co-founder Ted Neward will talk about “making the jump” into the startup/entrepreneur world and the lessons he’s learned (and continues to learn) thus far about making that leap. He’ll cover the technical decisions and decision-making process, and how that relates (or doesn’t) back to the world he came from—enterprise business applications. Even if you’ve never thought about getting into a startup, come on by for a discussion of the “modern web app” architecture, what he’s discovered along the way that relates purely on an architectural level, and how some of the new “startup literature” can apply equally well to in-house enterprise applications.

Little words of wisdom for the developer – Guillaume Laforge

Through some famous quotes and pictures that will make you think, Guillaume Laforge, Head of Groovy Development for SpringSource, will illustrate some simple principles that he has followed on the projects he’s worked on, and walk through the lessons he’s learned throughout the journey. Guillaume is the official Groovy Project Manager, and the spec lead of JSR-241, the JSR that standardizes the Groovy dynamic language. He also initiated the creation of the Grails web application framework, and founded the Gaelyk project, a lightweight toolkit for developing applications in Groovy for Google App Engine. 

Google Dart Code Lab with Chris Buckett

In this self-paced, hands-on codelab, you’ll learn how to build a simple single-page app for desktop and mobile browsers using Dart.  Along the way, you’ll learn some of the Dart language and its libraries, create web components, perform client-side templating, use declarative dynamic DOM generation, bind data models to the UI, store data locally in your browser and optimize the app for mobile devices.  You should come along with some familiarity with HTML and CSS and object-orientated programming, but you don’t need to be an expert in web programming to enjoy this codelab.  You’ll also need a computer running Windows (Vista, 7, 8), Linux or Mac to run the Dart Editor.

Big Data Meet-up

On hand will be a plethora of experts from the UK Big Data scene, with a program of short presentations and the chance to offer up your own lightning talks.  Full line-up details coming soon………

Glassfish User Group - Code-driven introduction to Java EE 7, with Arun Gupta

The Java EE 7 platform focuses on Boosting Productivity and Embracing HTML5. JAX-RS 2 adds a new Client API to invoke the RESTful endpoints. JMS 2 introduces a new simplified API to align with improvements in the Java language. Long awaited Batch Processing API and Concurrency Utilities are now part of platform offering richer functionality. A new API to build WebSocket driven applications and JSON parsing and generation is now included in the platform. JavaServer Faces has added support for HTML5 forms. Several other improvements are available in this latest version of the platform. Together these APIs will allow you to be more productive by simplifying enterprise development. This session will provide an introduction to the Java EE 7 platform. The attendees will learn the design patterns of building an application using Java EE 7.

London GlassFish User Group (GUG) aims to distribute GlassFish related knowledge and provide a meeting place for GlassFish users to get information, share resources, expand GlassFish Technology expertise, and above all - drink beer, eat pizza and have fun. GUG is organised and sponsored by C2B2 Consulting- The leading Independent Middleware Experts.

  Don’t miss out. Sign up now for free!

[jaxlondonblog]

3 weeks to go! JAX London calling all devs!

Your apps are healthy, your boss is reasonably happy (just the one rant a day), and building that platform is less of a faraway dream - in short, things are pretty good.

But there’s always new stuff to know and new tools to start playing with. And your angry nerds T-shirt has faded, and you haven’t had any decent conference swag for months. Time to swap your four morning Red Bulls for some delicious conference coffee down at JAX London!

This year’s JAX London event is shaping up to be the best yet, and that’s not just hyperbole. As well as the usual outstanding mix of Java and JVM topics that typifies JAX London, we’re pleased to announce the return of Big Data Con, which will be offering up a mass of insights and best practice.

In all, there are more than 70 sessions, keynotes and workshops to choose from. There’s just too much to list in this email, so head on over to the website and check out the schedule of content and speakers on this year’s program.

Meet with speakers and experts from the Java & Big Data ecosystems

Keynotes presentations from Dwight Merriman, James Governor & Jamie Allen

70 + sessions, workshops & keynotes to choose from

Take the chance to discuss your own projects

Evaluate current & future challenges

Network with friends and meet new people

Enjoy Community Night – code lab, hacks, social events and a coming together of user groups

See you there! 

[jaxlondonblog]

Free BIRT Training - BIRT ‘n’ Beer @ JAX London 2013

*Just confirmed*

JAX London will host a special evening dedicated to learning about all things BIRT, with a spattering of Beer and Pizza thrown in to help digest it all.

This free evening event runs on Monday 28th October and will help you overcome things like the dreaded app report your boss always demands.

You know the score. You’ve spent an age structuring and processing your data, but somehow the result is a sorry looking table or maybe even just a list. It just doesn’t do justice to all your hard work. In fact, just the thought of presenting flushes your face with a tinge of embarrassment.…

So enter BIRT, part of Eclipse OS BIRT project. Grab a beer and a slice of pizza, on us whilst learning how to make your reports stand out from the rest with top BI experts Pierre Richer and John Riglar of Actuate.

Join us for BIRT ‘n’ Beer @ JAX London for an evening, including:

3 in-depth presentations

An understanding of the dynamic capabilities of BIRT, HTML5, Flash and Interactive Viewer to deliver exciting, interactive content

Raspberry Pi giveaways

FREE software evaluation licenses

Access to BIRT Exchange Marketplace apps

Check out the schedule and sign up here. Places are limited so we’d suggest early registration to avoid disappointment.

We look forward to seeing you!

[jaxlondonblog]

Evolving database access for new programming models

ORMs have been accepted as the standard solution for database access in the Java enterprise world for a long time. Like other patterns in Java enterprise programming they are based on a traditional model of object-oriented programming with object identity, mutable state, behavior and encapsulation. In practice, this leads to two problems: This programming model is inherently imperative, unlike the declarative languages used for database access which describe the constraints on the data that should be queried but leave the execution strategy up to the database engine. It is practically impossible to predict the data access patterns in an imperative, mutable-state-based application in an automated way so that a minimum number of efficient database queries could be generated, thus leading to the biggest part of the well-known "impedance mismatch" of ORMs. The usual work-around consists of annotating the data model with hints for fetching certain data, or writing performance-critical queries explicitly, thus foregoing the convenience of the imperative data mapping. In recent years, however, the traditional object-oriented programming model itself has come under attack. As CPUs are gaining more and more cores and the performance of the individual cores is not increasing by much, multi-threaded programming has become a requirement for scalable applications but this is very difficult to do in imperative programming with mutable state. The solution has been known for a long time: functional programming. Taken to its extremes, it completely eschews mutable state, object identity and eager evaluation. Much like in a database query language, you only state what data you need, but not when or in what order it should be computed. A more pragmatic solution is provided by languages like Scala which gives you the power of abstraction from both object-oriented and functional programming and avoids mutable state in many cases but still allows you to use it when you want. This new approach to programming also requires a new way of thinking about database access. Instead of object-relational mapping we need something akin to functional-relational mapping that allows us to compose database queries the same way we can compose functions, and then materialize the data in the form of immutable objects in the application. This is the approach taken by Slick, Typesafe's database library for Scala, which treats database tables like Scala collections and compiles queries to a single SQL statement. This is only possible by using a host language as powerful as Scala which is well suited to building expressive DSLs that can be verified at type-checking time.

Stefan Zeiger is a Senior Software Engineer at Typesafe and the tech lead for Slick, the Scala database library

[jaxlondonblog]

Neal Ford Interview: 'The future of the JVM is polyglot'

Can you sum up your JAX London session and workshops in 140 characters?

Continuous Delivery defines principles & technical practices enabling rapid,incremental delivery of high quality, valuable new functionality

Why is the theme of your session important to developers right now? What issues does it tackle?

All software must go to production eventually, and it’s the most painful part of the process in many organizations. Continuous Delivery provides practices, techniques, and tools to ease the pain of deployment.

What are you most looking forward to at JAX London?

London restaurants!

How did you get into coding and how old were you when you first started?

I was in high school and worked at Radio Shack as my summer job, and learned BASIC on the TRS/80 because I had computers sitting around me.

Which area, or specific projects, within the industry are catching your eye at the moment?

Functional programming generally and Clojure specifically – it’s the most elegant new language to come along in a decade.

What does the future hold for Java and the JVM? 

The future of the JVM is polyglot – there is no one true language to solve every problem. Instead, we’re going to get better at integrating language strengths within the same JVM.

What’s the soundtrack to your work?

Often, Philip Glass’ Einstein on the Beachor some other minimalist work. I find that it fits the cadence of programming nicely.

And finally, would you rather fight one horse-sized duck or 100 duck-sized horses? Explain your reasoning.

N/A - I never pick fights with either ducks or horses regardless of size or demeanor.

Neal Ford is Director, Software Architect, and Meme Wrangler at ThoughtWorks, a global IT consultancy with an exclusive focus on end-to-end software development and delivery. He is also the designer and developer of applications, magazine articles, video/DVD presentations, and author and/or editor of eight books spanning a variety of subjects and technologies, including the most recent Presentation Patterns. He focuses on designing and building of large-scale enterprise applications. He is also an internationally acclaimed speaker, speaking at over 300 developer conferences worldwide, delivering more than 2000 presentations. Check out his web site at nealford.com. He welcomes feedback and can be reached at nford@thoughtworks.com.  

[jaxlondonblog]

'Produce awesome software at a rapid pace, it's not a myth!'

Firstly lets start with the technical session, "Practical Garbage Collection tuning for the Hotspot JVM". At this point even many hard core Java developers are running for the hills as fast as possible. Well, run no further! This is a really important topic for Java/JVM developers of any experience level, and it's actually *fun* to do as well.

A common production problem that Java/JVM developers are facing to today is that their applications are freezing/pausing unexpectedly and/or dying from memory leaks. These issues have become more common place because Java/JVM applications are getting much larger in terms of their memory requirements ("Heap size"). Unfortunately, this means that the Hotspot Garbage Collector algorithms have to check more live objects as well as  pausing larger numbers of application threads.

This talk will help you dive into Hotspot's Garbage Collection sub system learn to tune common performance issues to stop your applications from pausing, falling over and doing other strange things! "Habits of Highly Effective Teams" is a methodology talk that will give you the questions/ammunition/techniques you can apply to *your* team(s). For years, existing traditional and agile methodologies have tried to dictate how a highly effective team should behave. The reality is that they all behave very differently! This talk will cover the core habits that world class teams exhibit, as well as anti-patterns that dog poorly performing teams. You spend most of your days at work - why not make them enjoyable ones? You and your colleagues can to produce awesome software at a rapid pace, it's not a myth!

Martijn Verburg (CTO - jClarity) has over 10 years experience as a technology professional and OSS mentor in a variety of environments from start-ups to large enterprises. He is the co-leader of the London Java User Group (LJC), and leads the global effort of JUG members who contribute to JSRs and the OpenJDK. Martijn's first book "The Well-Grounded Java Developer" with Ben Evans is being published by Manning. As a leading expert on technical team optimisation, his talks and presentations are in high demand by major conferences (JavaOne, Devoxx, JAX etc) where he's known for challenging the industry status quo as the "Diabolical Developer".

[jaxlondonblog]

James Gough JAX Interview - 'Java 8 is going to be the biggest change in Java for years'

Can you sum up your JAX London session in 140 characters?

The session will explore one approach to TDD, breaking down problems, how mocking comes into the process and what benefits there are.

Why is the theme of your session important to developers right now? What issues does it tackle?

TDD is a well known methodology, yet many people get put off by the test element or have not had time to demystify what advantages can really be gained. It often goes on the CV and not much more thought is put into it. The session is important to people looking to find out more in a condensed session from someone who this time last year did not practice TDD and find out practical advice on how to get started and decide if it is for them. The session is aimed to present facts and experiences so the audience can form their own opinion.

What are you most looking forward to at JAX London?

The community night. The community night was one of the best events at JAX last year bringing in everyone from the community for keynotes and networking. As I am no longer based in London it's also always a great opportunity to catch up with some of the key members of the London Java Community.

How did you get into coding and how old were you when you first started?

I was 6 years old when I first used an introduction to Commodore 64 programming book to write a program to play a tune on the computer. After writing a few small programs I properly got into Objected Oriented programming at 16, writing Sweet Child of Mine in Pascal to be played on the sound card.

Which area, or specific projects, within the industry are catching your eye at the moment?

Adopt-a-JSR is a project that is close to my heart. After working on the original prototype project which helped defined the global program today is something I am very proud of and it's amazing to see the diversity and number of people getting involved in driving Java forwards.

What does the future hold for Java and the JVM?

Java 8 is going to be the biggest change in Java for years, and it will be interesting to see how people react to moving to Java 8 and what the introduction of Lambdas, Java Date Time API and other features bring. For the JVM, it's interesting to see how many languages have risen over the last 5 years - will these become stronger and have wider adoption or will some be lost at the introduction of Java 8? Timing is everything, as to how things will fall or rise - it will be interesting to see.

What’s the soundtrack to your work?

Currently it's a bit like Iron Man 2, AC/DC on random.

And finally, would you rather fight one horse-sized duck or 100 duck-sized horses? Explain your reasoning.

Probably 100 duck sized horses, better to break the problem down after all. But I'd have to write a test and get back to you on that :-).

James (Jim) Gough graduated Warwick University in 2007 with a keen interest in building communities and a passion for technology, Java in particular. After moving to London he became member of the London Java Community (LJC). He sits on both the Associates group and the Java Community Process group within the LJC. His recent focus has been on JSR-310 and Adopt a JSR to help target a release of the reference implementation in Java 8. Jim's involvement began as a lightning talk, but has since grown to helping build the TCK and discussing critical design decisions for the new library. Jim is an expert in Java development in investment banks, and has worked for two of the largest global investment banks. Jim works closely with newer members of the community and is a mentor to new professionals and takes part in the Meet a Mentor program with the London Graduate Community. In the last year Jim has spoken at Java One, JAX London, LJC Open Conference and Open Crete on a variety of issues and technologies impacting developers on a day-to-day basis.

[jaxlondonblog]

Brent Beer is here to 'blow people's minds' about the enterprise world

The enterprise world isn't likely going to go away. However, that doesn't mean that people shouldn't be able to have the flexibility of working. When most people think of enterprise they probably think of cubicles, isolation, clear focused job, and repetitiveness. I'd love if it if I could blow people's minds about this frame of thinking.

  If people were able to collaborate and communicate to each other through the power of GitHub and general open source practices, they'd have a less boring job, and people would also just have a less glum outlook on the enterprise world. I know when I was leaving university, I was struggling with two paths: Enterprise World or Startup World. One of these screamed security but boring, the other was about using cool new technology and also ran the risk of putting me out of work very fast. I'm young so I chose Startups, and I don't regret it.

  However, if enterprise companies were able to let me know of the type of work that occurred with in their company, of the workflows and philosophies they practiced, and the general day to day communications between developers, I may have been convinced to try it out.

  This talk is important for both people looking for new jobs and in the same situation I was in, as well as enterprise developers wishing for a different and better way of working within their company and some clear steps on how to reach those goals.

  Brent has been a passionate user of Git and GitHub for a number of years beginning in university where he constantly tried to adopt the way students collaborated. After graduation, Brent moved out to work in San Francisco to work as a web developer and later became a member of the GitHub:Training team.

[jaxlondonblog]

jClarity’s John Oliver: ‘Memory consumption quickly seems to become the limiting factor’

Can you sum up your JAX London session in 140 characters?

Using Big Data, want to apply analytics? This talk will cover working with data and applying good science to get the right answers

Why is the theme of your session important to developers right now? What issues does it tackle?

Machine learning and Big Data are very fashionable topics at the moment. But while many of us have spent years learning about how to write software, not a huge amount of emphasis has been placed on how to collect and understand data. So while there are libraries springing up like mad for machine learning, no amount of good algorithms, large sample sets and fast hardware will get around rubbish in rubbish out.

What are you most looking forward to at JAX London?

"Big data from the LHC commissioning: practical lessons from big science" Certainly looks like another very good session from people who are taking a good scientific approach to Big Data.

How did you get into coding and how old were you when you first started?

Earliest I can remember programming was trying to figure out how Gorillas and Nibbles worked in QBasic. At about 14, dived into C++ then hastily retreated realising I may have dived in a bit too deep and went back to Basic/VB. Started doing most of my own projects after starting to learn electronics at about 17 and creating stuff like home made burglar alarms that would send emails when a window was opened.

Which area, or specific projects, within the industry are catching your eye at the moment?

Vert.x is certainly a fairly big focus for us at the moment. It does free you from many of the painful issues while writing multi-threaded code as well as encouraging you to design programs that are naturally scalable.

What data challenges do we face?

Having tried a number of libraries for data analysis, memory consumption quickly seems to become the limiting factor. So likely even more focus on efficiently scaling out the process of machine learning.

What’s the soundtrack to your work?

Pretty much anything I can tune out, been a reasonable fan of Whisperings solo piano radio, or Soma fm Groove Salad.

And finally, would you rather fight one horse-sized duck or 100 duck-sized horses? Explain your reasoning.

100 duck-sized horses no question, only problem would be getting tired from all the kicking.

John has performed research and development in many languages for 15 years, on various platforms from micro controllers, robots, simulations, desktop applications and web services. Currently he is working at jClarity, applying the tools of machine learning to analyse and diagnose performance problems. John holds a PhD in Engineering from Warwick University working on algorithms for coordinating mobile robotic teams. During his study he performed extensive work on both physical and simulated robotic platforms, competing in a number of national and international robotics competitions.  

[jaxlondonblog]

GitHub's Brent Beer talks collaboration, ducks and Git

Can you sum up your JAX London session/workshop in 140 characters?

Learn how Git and GitHub can change enterprise software development by making it more fun and increasing collaboration and communication

Why is the theme of your session important to developers right now? What issues does it tackle?

This is important to developers right now because so many of them are trapped in a cubical of enterprise development. i want to show them how to get out of this and work with other colleagues better by communicating and collaborating better.

What are you most looking forward to at JAX London?

I'm most looking forward to talking to other developers about their experience with their work styles and big data challenges they deal with at work.

How did you get into coding and how old were you when you first started?

Got into coding from my dad also being a developer. I toyed around with it when i was maybe 12, but didn't really code until i was 18 in school.

Which area, or specific projects, within the industry are catching your eye at the moment?

Visual Analytics are really catching my eye right now. Making sense of all of the data that's out there is nice.

What future data challenges do we face?

One of the biggest data challenges we face is making sense of all of the data we're able to consume and not lose anything or not store anything for so long that we forget about it.

What’s the soundtrack to your work?

The soundtrack to my work is definitely some mixes that coworkers of mine have made. Or this.

And finally, would you rather fight one horse-sized duck or 100 duck-sized horses? Explain your reasoning.

100 duck sized horses because they wouldn't be able to fly. Once you have the ground advantage on them you win. Also seriously, imagine a duck flying around thats the size of a horse, it only needs to wait to land on you to destroy you.

Brent has been a passionate user of Git and GitHub for a number of years beginning in university where he constantly tried to adopt the way students collaborated. After graduation, Brent moved out to work in San Francisco to work as a web developer and later became a member of the GitHub:Training team.

[jaxlondonblog]

IBM's Java guru Graeme Johnson discusses Java and the JVM's future

JAX : Can you sum up your JAX London session/workshop in 140 characters? GJ: See the JVM provide hypervisor-like ability to run multiple applications side-by-side without changing a line of code. Smaller faster Java. JAX: Why is the theme of your session important to developers right now? What issues does it tackle? GJ: Multitenancy is all about running more applications on a given piece of hardware. Memory constraints are usually the limiting factor in high-density Java deployments and our multitenant JVM addresses this problem by reducing the amount of memory required to run an application (2-5x) by aggressive sharing of runtime artifacts. By reducing memory footprint less hardware is needed to do the same work which results in energy and admin savings. JAX: What are you most looking forward to at JAX London? GJ: Meeting new people and learning about new tech. It's always cool to hear about what others are building and the challenges they faced and overcame. JAX has experts on a wide variety of topics so there's definitely lots in the 'new' category, and the plethora of JVM language talks look particularly interesting. JAX: How did you get into coding and how old were you when you first started? GJ: I first started coding on the Apple II when I was about 12. Like most kids, I was into games and this lea to writing demos (sprites, simple sound stuff) which got me into programming. JAX: Which area, or specific projects, within the industry are catching your eye at the moment? GJ: I'm a programming languages guy at heart and both Rust and Go languages look interesting and are on my to-do list to experiment with. As a former tool builder I'm interested in the shift of IDEs to the cloud (Eclipse Orion / Cloud9) and looking forward to the day when I can use these for C/C++ development. JAX: What does the future hold for Java and the JVM? GJ: Efficient access to data, and movement of data is a big challenge. Streamlining Java access to native data structures and easier foreign function calling is an area I predict will drive language and JVM evolution (unsigned types anyone?). Efficient zero-copy data movement is the other angle: RDMA libraries and support in hypervisors is improving rapidly and Java needs a good answer for moving lots of data between machines efficiently. JAX: What’s the soundtrack to your work? GJ: Noisy electronic stuff or 90's industrial. Lots of Daft Punk lately. JAX: And finally, would you rather fight one horse-sized duck or 100 duck-sized horses? Explain your reasoning. GJ: Duck-sized horses for sure. I'm Canadian and having seen the attitude a dog-sized Canada goose brings to the table I imagine a horse-sized duck would be a formidable foe. I'm assuming that the horses can't fly so eliminating the possibility of aerial attack also seems prudent.

Graeme Johnson (Java 7 Technical Lead, Architect JVM Customizations for Cloud) has been developing virtual machines and debuggers since he joined IBM in 1994, and has worked on both VisualAge for Java and IBM/OTI Smalltalk runtimes.Recently Graeme has been focusing on making Java a better runtime for the Cloud by building in support for multi-tenant applications and improving cooperation with hypervisors. In past lives Graeme worked on the VM interface for the Apache Harmony project, Java/PHP runtime support for IBM's Project Zero (http://projectzero.org), and JIT/Debugger interfaces to the JVM.Some of Graeme's previous talks include: Apache Harmony at JavaOne 2006, Multi-Platform C Development at EclipseCon 2007, and an examination of the PHP runtime at International PHP 2006 (also published in International PHP Magazine).  

[jaxlondonblog]

Pavlo Baron chats to JAX London about data, ducks and windmills

codecentric AG's Pavlo Baron is next up for our JAX London 2013 interview.

  Can you sum up your JAX London session 'What (near-) realtime analytics mean for technology choice' in 140 characters?

It's about wrong and right approaches and technologies when trying to do non-stop, low-latency analytics.

  Why is the theme of your session important to developers right now? What issues does it tackle?

The myth of "Big Data" implies to some people I've met that it's possible to derive quality decisions based on any sort, any amount and any diversity of data. The issue is not only that this is just a myth, but also that decisions typically need to be made fast. Real fast. Not once a week rewiring data mountains in the batch and trying to find patterns in it, but as the data flies in. This puts some very hard restrictions and constraints on the choice of technology, data quality, analytical effort and time-boundedness.

  What are you most looking forward to at JAX London?

Seeing some people I know, meeting some new interesting people, have some new impulses and motivation and visit some pubs.

  How did you get into coding and how old were you when you first started?

I've started as a 15yo over 20 years ago, soldered my first computer and tried to mess around with game programming. After losing interest in games, I switched over to writing DOS drivers for printers, writing some hobby tools to manipulate running systems and so on.

  Which area, or specific projects, within the industry are catching your eye at the moment?

Clearly live data-mining as the topic - non-stop, continuous analytics. Any approach, technology or piece of math related to it is within my current focus of interest and work. A lot to learn, but it's a lot of fun to combine tech with math.

  What does the future hold for Java and the JVM?

The JVM will win (if there is any sort of battle at all, anyway), but people need to learn approaches and languages other than Java (on the JVM and outside it) to get the most out of their creative juices. This means their time, their machines and to face the huge data challenges coming: lifeless objects that talk together, machines that derive and prepare decision options from gazilions of factors within seconds. Obvious consume-orientation and short-term-thinking of the richer part of this world as well as news and generally information flow that we've never seen before and that will even grow further.

What’s the soundtrack to your work?

Any album from my collection of progressive & jazz rock works, which one just depends on the situation and mood.

And finally, would you rather fight one horse-sized duck or 100 duck-sized horses? Explain your reasoning.

None of them would survive longer than a couple minutes, since they'll destroy themselves for reasons of laws of nature. Also, magic unicorns only exist in naive dreams. And much more important: I won't ever fight windmills.

Pavlo Baron is lead data technologist & scientist with codecentric AG. His current focus of work are near-realtime analytics, event processing and data flows. Pavlo has written several german books: "Big Data for IT decision makers", “Erlang/OTP”, “Pragmatic IT Architecture” and “Fragile Agile”.

[jaxlondonblog]

Oracle Java Technology Evangelist Simon Ritter discusses Lambdas and Raspberry Pi

Can you sum up your JAXConf sessions in 140 characters?

Project Lambda: Functional Programming Constructs in Java

Lambda expressions and the new APIs in the Collections classes are going to have the biggest impact on Java since generics. Find out how.

Do you like coffee with your dessert? Java and the Raspberry Pi Find out some of the cool things you can do with the £25 Raspberry Pi computer using Java. There'll be mind-controlled LEGO and more!

Why is the theme of your session important to developers right now? What issues does it tackle?

Project Lambda: Functional Programming Constructs in Java

Java SE 8 is scheduled for release early next year. Get a start on learning the new features so you can hit the ground running. Lambda expressions simplify the syntax of Java for many common situations using single abstract method types; combining this with new APIs in the Collections classes is going to help remove the distinction between developing inherently serial code, or code that could be serial or parallel. More cores and processors means we have to learn how to write reliable parallel code. Let the libraries take the strain.

Do you like coffee with your dessert? Java and the Raspberry Pi

The Raspberry Pi is a cheap computer that uses an ARM based processor. This is an ideal platform to start experimenting with developing embedded application code using either Java SE Embedded or Java ME Embedded. The Internet of Things promises to be the next wave of the internet; using Java to program embedded devices makes things simple and allows you to use your existing Java skills.

What are you most looking forward to at JAX London?

Meeting lots of developers and having discussions about all things Java.

How did you get into coding and how old were you when you first started?

My Dad bought us a TRS-80 (with 16Kb RAM) way back in 1980 and I started learning BASIC and assembler. I would have been 12.

Which area, or specific projects, within the industry are catching your eye at the moment?

The Internet of Things is changing the way we gather data, and how much we generate. Turning data into useful information is the big challenge.

What does the future hold for Java and the JVM? 

The future is bright. I see the language, libraries and JVM continuing to evolve to make developers lives easier, adapting to the new types of applications being created and the platforms they're being deployed to.

What’s the soundtrack to your work?

Depends on how the coding is going. If I'm on a roll, probably Nickelback; for more thoughtful work, Pink Floyd and for bug fixing Beethoven works well for me.

And finally, would you rather fight one horse-sized duck or 100 duck-sized horses? Explain your reasoning.

I guess 100 duck-sized horses, since I would be bigger than them. I don't like the idea of a horse-sized duck going at me with a bill that's scaled to that size.

Simon Ritter is a Java Technology Evangelist at Oracle Corporation. Simon has been in the IT business since 1984 and holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Physics from Brunel University in the U.K.Originally working in the area of UNIX development for AT&T UNIX System Labs and then Novell, Simon moved to Sun in 1996. At this time he started working with Java technology and has spent time working both in Java technology development and consultancy. Having moved to Oracle as part of the Sun acquisition he now focuses on the core Java platform, Java for client applications and embedded Java. He also continues to develop demonstrations that push the boundaries of Java for applications like gestural interfaces and embedded robot controllers.Follow him on Twitter, @speakjava and his blog at blogs.oracle.com/speakjava.

[jaxlondonblog]

The Polyglot VM is here! JAX London chats to Oracle's Marcus Lagergren

Can you sum up your JAX London session in 140 characters?

"The JVM is dead - long live the polyglot VM" How the JVM is becoming a universal multi language runtime.

Why is the theme of your session important to developers right now? What issues does it tackle?

Deploying non-Java languages on the JVM is one of the hotter things people are trying to do right now. There is a plethora of non-Java JVM languages that are emerging. JRuby is probably most mature by now, but for example, Clojure is also heavily used in the industry.

Now Oracle's new JavaScript implementation Nashorn is also arriving onto the scene. By using the JVM as the runtime for your non-Java language, you save yourself a lot of work in the language implementation - no need to write a garbage collector of your own or spend fifty man years optimizing bytecode into efficient native code.

The problem so far has been performance. Java bytecode is called "Java" bytecode for a reason. However, as of Java 7 invokedynamic, java.lang.invoke.* and other mechanisms have existed that make it possible to deploy languages that look less like Java on the same runtime. There is on-going work on this feature, also in performance. We hope this work will help us start the real JVM multi language revolution. 

What are you most looking forward to at JAX London?

JAX is always a very professionally run setup and I like how efficiently everything always fits together. I'm looking forward to going to a couple of sessions that seem very interesting (unless they clash with mine of course) and visiting old friends that I haven't seen for years.

How did you get into coding and how old were you when you first started?

My dad gave me a Commodore 64 in 1984, when I was 9. No one else was available for trading games where I lived, in the Arctic, I guess I had to write my own. I still wonder in awe what I could have accomplished given the resources now available on the Internet instead of trial and error with my hex monitor, but maybe that would have made me into more of a "cheesecake mix" programmer and less of a chef. 

Which area, or specific projects, within the industry are catching your eye at the moment?

I tend to be everywhere. But if you press me to name three different things: I like LLVM. I like whatever people do with Raspberry PIs. I like Java 8.

What does the future hold for Java and the JVM? 

The JVM will definitely turn into more than just a Java runtime. It will have large parts of its internals redesigned, and it will possibly move into more front end pluggability to further support this, not just "bytecode as we know it".  Java will continue mutating into a powerful, useful and less verbose language with each release. It will never give up backwards compatibility though. You will always be able to run that class file you compiled in 1996. 

What’s the soundtrack to your work?

Everything from Mozart to 80s synth pop to Norwegian Black Metal, but mostly somewhere between Tom Petty and Norwegian Black Metal  

And finally, would you rather fight one horse-sized duck or 100 duck-sized horses? Explain your reasoning.

The question is incomplete. If this is hand-to-hand combat, I would certainly prefer 100 duck-sized horses. Then I could sort of stomp on them and not take too much damage, as they would be too small to hurt you seriously with kicks. Were I to be given any kind of projectile weapon, though, give me the horse-sized duck. One shot/one target and much less messy. Probably also delicious.

Marcus Lagergren was one of the founding members of Appeal Virtual Machines, the company that developed the JRockit JVM, bought by BEA Systems in 2002. Marcus has been team lead and architect for the JRockit code generators and has been involved in pretty much every other aspect of JVMs over the years. Between 2007 and 2010, Marcus worked for Oracle on fast Virtualization technology. As of September 2011, he is a member of the Oracle Java language team, investigating dynamic languages on the JVM and general runtime futurist. He is the co-author of the book "Oracle JRockit - the definitive guide", which, despite the product centric title, has been praised as the best book ever written on JVM internals.

[jaxlondonblog]

TDD: The Benefits are more than just the tests

Back when I first started my career as a developer following University I was unleashed with little training in best practices, development methodologies or what to expect from the uncertainties in real world development. Before I could start to learn all these things I was quickly placed in my first job. The type of role I was placed into was fix problems and develop new features - with only guidance relating to the specific tasks at hand. There was no training on industry best practices, which underpin the quality of the software as professionals we strive to deliver - my own development languished. 

Several years on, in my own time and through quizzing various industry leading technologists like Sandro Mancuso (at JAX London 2012) and Martijn Verburg (at numerous beverage centric establishments) I started to discover my personal points of improvement. I realised that there were steps I could take to improve the approaches I had in my toolbox for software problems. I took a look at my peers and people that were applying for job roles. Many listed Test Drive Development (TDD) as something that they used on a regular basis. I very quickly realised that a lot of people claim to practice TDD, but either don't do this at all or write integration tests rather than unit tests, as well as other ideas about what TDD is. 

My talk at JAX London 2013 is designed for developers who have been too busy to appreciate the less obvious benefits of TDD, particularly the side effects and task breakdown from a cognitive perspective. The session will cover the basics of TDD, the use of mocking and how this helps break up the coding complexity using code and architecture examples. I will also convey my own experience of converting to TDD along with the benefits I have realised and how to convince developers who don't want to test the approach has merits outside of just high test coverage. The talk does not aim to sell TDD, but instead present facts and experiences that I have gained over the last year so developers can form their own opinions. 

From taking these steps myself I produce code closer to the requirements, more maintainable code that is able to respond quickly to changes and my colleagues can look at the code and tests and quickly understand what is going on. Conferences are often the catalyst for personal improvement, and people interested in this space but haven't had time to explore it themselves will get some good practical advice on how to get going and what to expect.

James (Jim) Gough graduated Warwick University in 2007 with a keen interest in building communities and a passion for technology, Java in particular. After moving to London he became member of the London Java Community (LJC). He sits on both the Associates group and the Java Community Process group within the LJC. His recent focus has been on JSR-310 and Adopt a JSR to help target a release of the reference implementation in Java 8. Jim's involvement began as a lightning talk, but has since grown to helping build the TCK and discussing critical design decisions for the new library. Jim is an expert in Java development in investment banks, and has worked for two of the largest global investment banks. Jim works closely with newer members of the community and is a mentor to new professionals and takes part in the Meet a Mentor program with the London Graduate Community. In the last year Jim has spoken at Java One, JAX London, LJC Open Conference and Open Crete on a variety of issues and technologies impacting developers on a day-to-day basis.