{"id":70,"date":"2010-03-29T23:08:00","date_gmt":"2010-03-29T21:08:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2023-03-20T12:34:09","modified_gmt":"2023-03-20T11:34:09","slug":"4developers-2010-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/touk.pl\/blog\/2010\/03\/29\/4developers-2010-review\/","title":{"rendered":"4Developers 2010 Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve been to 4Developers in 2009 in Cracow, together with Tomasz Przybysz and we had very nice impressions, no wonder then I wanted to signed up for 2010 edition in Pozna\u0144<\/a> as well. Tomasz was sick, but Jakub Kurlenda decided to come with me. This time our company was sponsoring the conference so I had a stand-up banner to carry.<\/p>\n

Getting up at 4am is annoying, and you need to get up so early to get to Pozna\u0144 by car. Thanks god it was\u00a0 Friday, I could be dangerous if woken up at this hour on Saturday.<\/p>\n

After arrival we were invited by high-heels hostesses. Now I\u2019ll be a bit stereotypical programmer for a while: what on earth are so lovely hostesses doing on an IT conference? Yeah, sure they look nice, but hey, I thought I\u2019m paying my money for the knowledge. If I wanted to go for good looking girls, I\u2019d visit a local Salsa club. The best high-heels can do is distract me. And I\u2019d rather you spend my bucks on better food, more speakers or just lower the price instead of this.<\/p>\n

Unless, of course, these were local IT students helping for free. I strongly doubt if Pozna\u0144 has so many female IT students all together in all its higher education facilities, but if that is the case, I\u2019m starting to regret I\u2019ve not moved to Pozna\u0144.<\/p>\n

While I am at the organizational part, lets say that the rest was quite flawless, with tasty sandwiches, drinks, cookies and console games in between lectures. Two exceptions were: a bad lunch, served at Orbis Polonez hotel (and a total rip-off at 50z\u0142) and no place to sit down while outside of conference rooms.<\/p>\n

Not that we had any time, mind you. All the presentations had a tendency to take more than scheduled, and while it\u2019s quite fine with me (it actually means there are people who\u2019d rather listen than go for a cookie and coffee), the host didn\u2019t seem to like it much. I think there should be more buffer time for breaks or maybe even an open space in between, to make everyone happy.<\/p>\n

Fighting for live<\/span><\/p>\n

Let\u2019s get back to the lectures. The conference had four tracks, and I\u2019ve started with \u2018Fighting for live \u2013 derivatives and successors of Java are taking over the world\u2019 by Michael Hunger. That was a big disappointment. Michael was way too theoretical. I\u2019m afraid nothing from his speech would be useful to anyone in the room. And he didn\u2019t give us much more than what we can actually find on wikipedia: just a brief list of some from 400+ languages running on JVM. The only interesting parts were actually played from youtube. I\u2019ve not been waking up at 4am to watch youtube in Pozna\u0144. I can do it back home, you know.\u00a0 As I said, a total disappointment.<\/p>\n

Microsoft Cloud: Windows Azure<\/span><\/p>\n

Angry and sad at the same time, I\u2019ve decided to switch rooms to see Maarten Balliauw talking about Windows Azure. I\u2019ve been thinking about using Google App Engine for my next project, so I wanted to know what Microsoft has to offer in terms of cloud computing. And boy, they do have stuff in there.<\/p>\n

Maarten gave us a quick overview of a few projects surrounding the M$ cloud, and after that showed us how to move a simple ASP.NET application to Azure. Jakub Kurlenda, who I believe never had a chance to work with .NET, was amazed. It can't be that simple<\/code> \u2013 he said \u2013 There's got to be a lot of problems with complex solutions<\/code>. Well my friend, remember that M$ has inherited all the good stuff from Borland togethere with Anders Hejlsberg<\/a>. Sure it sometimes doesn\u2019t work perfectly, but still their tools are quite sexy. And way easier than anything you can find in Java world.<\/p>\n

The Microsoft Azure does look very interesting. You get an MS SQL, Storage Service for unstructured data, front end web servers, back end servers and a AppFabric Service Bus to connect different services in a via-VPN-like manner. You even get an information marketplace Codename \u201cDallas\u201d, to sell and buy services and data. Now this sound like an App Store of cloud computing, doesn\u2019t it?<\/p>\n

I think the war between cloud computing providers is going to be quite a show soon. And no matter whoever wins, I think that Microsoft won\u2019t lose.<\/p>\n

Not so Funky It Management<\/span><\/p>\n

For the third lecture I\u2019ve visited the IT Management<\/code> track, where Peter Horsten<\/a>, a guy who moved from Netherlands to Poland to create his company (Goyello) in Gda\u0144sk, gave a speech about Funky It Management<\/code>, but after half an hour I\u2019ve returned to Java track uninspired. Peter is a great speaker, but for the first thirty minutes I heard nothing I could actually use or didn\u2019t know already, so I wasn\u2019t going to risk the rest of the time.<\/p>\n

TopLink Grid and Oracle Coherence<\/span><\/p>\n

That made me see only half of presentation from Waldemar Kot about TopLink Grid and Oracle Coherence, and I really regret that. Waldi, as he is sometimes called by friends (and notoriously by Jacek Laskowski<\/a>) works for BEA\u2026 errr\u2026 Oracle, and while I do not know whether he is only consulting or also building systems for his clients, he is sharp as a Gillette, precise as a laser and full of knowledge. I really enjoyed his talk, there was a nice mix of theory and practice, and finally, some stuff I could actually use at work. Thanks Waldi.<\/p>\n

Flex 4 and iPhone news<\/span><\/p>\n

After a horrible lunch, Piotr Walczyszyn gave us a tutorial in using Flex 4. Years ago, I had a chance to use AMF to communicate between a heavy Flash frontend and a PHP backend, and it worked quite well. I have to note that especially debugging was nice, something I wouldn\u2019t expect from a binary and proprietary format. For the last two years, I\u2019ve been hearing about how easy it is to have a Java backend and Flex rich frontend. A lot of people I\u2019ve met at the last year\u2019s GeeCON conference actually worked that way. I was very interested in the topic and after the show I can tell you this, Flex is a way to go if you want to have a rich (heavy?) Intranet client. I think though, that its use for public\/Internet services should be considered carefully. Too much bells and whistles and you are going down on frontend complexity and throughput. But you already know that, don\u2019t you?<\/p>\n

If using Java, I\u2019d go for Flex 4 if Wicket is not rich<\/code> enough for the solution. If Wicket is fine, I\u2019d stay away from anything more complex (and difficult to test). I don\u2019t have a lot of love for GWT, after what I\u2019ve seen at work. But that could be a GXT fault, not a Google failure.<\/p>\n

One of the most interesting news Piotr spread, was that Flex is being implemented on Android and\u2026 wait for it\u2026 iPhone! How\u2019s that possible, you ask? We all know Apple doesn\u2019t want to loose its AppStore market to on-line flash applications. Well, they are building a native Flex to Objective-C compiler, that\u2019s how. If they manage to implement a runtime on Symbian and Windows Mobile, it may be the only truly portable technology. Unless you call HTML 5 a programming language, of course.<\/p>\n

Java SE 7<\/span><\/p>\n

After that Marcin Katas was talking about Java SE 7, which is scheduled for the end of this year. There was a lot about new Garbage Collector, that I don\u2019t really care about, a few thing about OSGi-like solutions to dependency hell,\u00a0 support for dynamic languages, new concurrency classes, closures and\u00a0 Project Coin (small changes\/additions to the language).<\/p>\n

The only thing I can say is: why so late? And why so little?<\/p>\n

Especially for Project Coin.\u00a0 This is actually quite sad. Java as a language is being left behind its competitors. Really, Automatic Resource Management is a concept implemented YEARS ago with using<\/code> in C#. Come on people, I\u2019d at least expect stuff like .NET LINQ in new version of JDK, not even mentioning some long needed fixes for stuff like collections and generics. It\u2019s been four long years since Java SE 6, there should be a Java SE 8 already.<\/p>\n

I really think they should release a new version in a fixed interval of time, like Ubuntu is doing, like it was before Java SE 6. And forget about the hardcore backward compatibility, like with fu\u2026-up generics. Banks that are still using J2SE 1.4 are not updating anyway.<\/p>\n

Sob\u00f3tka on Craftsmanship<\/span><\/p>\n

And finally, I\u2019ve been waiting for this one, S\u0142awomir Sob\u00f3tka, owner of Bottega<\/a>, guy whose blog<\/a> I\u2019m actively reading, shared his thoughts about software craftsmanship.<\/p>\n

That was by far the best presentation at the conference. Absolutely brilliant. I would not be able to put more meaningful information in such a short time and accessible way even had I tried for months. And to be honest, that was also the most important subject, useful to everyone, touching the work of every software developer in the room (and in the other .NET room as well). Kudos to you S\u0142awek.<\/p>\n

Too bad, there wasn\u2019t anything new to me then. But maybe I should be actually glad, maybe it means I\u2019m keeping up with the front line. Maybe, or maybe we are just reading the same books, groups and feeds (or I\u2019m reading his blog actually). Anyway, I\u2019m very happy about this lecture. What a beautiful world would it be if everyone was as passionate for craftsmanship and quality as\u00a0 S\u0142awek is.<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t make it for OSGi speech from Jacek Laskowski. Sorry Jacek, but waking up at 4am doesn\u2019t leave you a lot of strength for the last lecture. I\u2019ve seen Jacek in action a few times, and it\u2019s always a pleasure as he is a great showman (in a positive sense). I hope I\u2019ll see you again at Warsaw\u2019s JUG meetings, but now I\u2019d rather get back to bed before midnight than get sick after the conference like all my friends did. Yeah, I\u2019ve heard that Jakub Kurlenda got down just like Tomasz Przybysz a week ago, after the Winter Agile Tunning.<\/p>\n

The price of knowledge has always been high, I guess.<\/p>\n

Alltogether it was a very interesting conference and definitely worth the money.<\/p>\n

Reviews (in Polish) from others can be seen here<\/a> and here<\/a> and here<\/a> and here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I’ve been to 4Developers in 2009 in Cracow, together with Tomasz Przybysz and we had very nice impressions, no wonder then I wanted to signed up for 2010 edition in Pozna\u0144 as well. Tomasz was sick, but Jakub Kurlenda decided to come with me. This time…I’ve been to 4Developers in 2009 in Cracow, together with Tomasz Przybysz and we had very nice impressions, no wonder then I wanted to signed up for 2010 edition in Pozna\u0144 as well. Tomasz was sick, but Jakub Kurlenda decided to come with me. This time…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,238],"tags":[21],"class_list":{"0":"post-70","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-development-design","7":"category-news-events","8":"tag-conference"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/touk.pl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/touk.pl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/touk.pl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/touk.pl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/touk.pl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=70"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/touk.pl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15327,"href":"https:\/\/touk.pl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70\/revisions\/15327"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/touk.pl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/touk.pl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=70"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/touk.pl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=70"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}