December 15, 2010
Devoxx – Day one – Java, Performance and Devops # In his keynote Mark Reinhold provided some information on the very interesting features to be included in the Java 7 release. Generics will be easier to declare with the diamond operator. Nested try-finally constructs that are nowadays needed to safely close resources will no longer be necessary – their will be the option of implementing a Closeable interface supporting a method close() that get’s called whenever objects of that class’s type go out of scope.
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December 12, 2010
Teddy in Antwerp # When at Devoxx Teddy went to the city taking a few pictures of the Grote Markt, the Haven as well as the main train station.
December 11, 2010
Apache Lunch Devoxx # On Twitter I suggested to host an Apache dinner during Devoxx. Matthias Wesendorf of Apache MyFaces was so kind to take up the discussion carrying it over to the Apache community mailing-list. It quickly turned out that there was quite some interest with several members and committers attending Devoxx. We scheduled the meetup for Friday after the conference during lunch time.
I pinged a few Apache related people I knew would attend the conference (being a speaker and a committer at some Apache project almost certainly resulted in getting a ping).
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December 10, 2010
Devoxx – Day three # The panel discussion on the future of Java was driven by visitor submitted and voted questions on the current state and future of Java. The general take-aways for me included the clear statement that the TCK will never be made available to the ASF. The promise of Oracle to continue supporting the Java community and remaining active in the JCP.
There was some discussion on whether coming Java versions should be backwards-incompatible.
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December 9, 2010
Devoxx – Day 2 HBase # Devoxx featured several interesting case studies of how HBase and Hadoop can be used to scale data analysis back ends as well as data serving front ends. Twitter
Dmitry Ryaboy from Twitter explained how to scale high load and large data systems using Cassandra. Looking at the sheer amount of tweets generated each day it becomes obvious that with a system like MySQL alone this site cannot be run.
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December 8, 2010
Devoxx – Day two – Hadoop and HBase # In his session on the current state of Hadoop Tom went into a little more detail not only on the features released in the latest release or on the roadmap for upcoming releases (including Kerberos based security, append support, warm standby namenode and others).
He also gave a very interesting view on the current Hadoop ecosystem. More and more projects are currently being created that either extend Hadoop or are built on top of Hadoop.
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December 7, 2010
Devoxx – Day two – Caching # Day two started with a really good talk on caching architectures by Greg Luck. He first motivated why caching works: Even with SSIDs being available now there is still a huge performance gap between RAM access times and having to go to disk. The issue is even worse in systems that are architected in a distributed way making frequent calls to remote systems.
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December 6, 2010
Devoxx – University – Cassandra, HBase # During the morning session FIXME Ellison gave an introduction to the distributed NoSQL database Cassandra. Being generally based on the Dynamo paper from Amazon the key-value store distributes key/value pairs according to a consistent hashing schema. Nodes can be added dynamically making the system well suited for elastic scaling. In contrast to Dynamo, Cassandra can be tuned for the required consistency level. The system is tuned for storing moderately sized key/value pairs.
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December 4, 2010
Devoxx University – Productive programmer, HBase # The first day at Devoxx featured several tutorials – most interesting to me was the pragramatic programmer. The speaker also is the author of the equally named book at O’Reilly. The book was the result of the observation that developers today are more and more IDE bound, no longer able to use the command line effectively. The result are developers that are unnecessarily slow when creating software.
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December 3, 2010
Devoxx Antwerp # With 3000 attendees Devoxx is the largest Java Community conference world-wide. Each year in autumn it takes place in Antwerp/ Belgium, in recent years in the Metropolis cinema. The conference tickets were sold out long before doors were opened this year.
The focus of the presentations are mainly on enterprise Java featuring talks by famous Joshua Bloch, Mark Reihnhold and others on new features of the upcoming JDK release as well as intricacies of the Java programming language itself.
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