JAX India 2007 – Day 4 Report

After yesterday, most of my friend’s dropped out of the conference today. Me and Kannan went to catch the post-lunch session.

We reached the auditorium in time to catch the last 10 minutes of the session Introduction to GMF by Raj Madhuram. From whatever little I saw it was a sensible no-nonsense introduction to GMF. I worked on GMF about a year ago, and one of the big pain points then was to export a GMF-generated editor as a standalone RCP application. From Raj’s talk it looks like that problem is solved now. GMF is a very interesting technology; it enables rapid development of high quality graphical editors for a model. I should take another look at GMF sometime soon.

The next session we attended was Groovy and Grails Tutorial by Harshad Oak. Many things went wrong with this session. Firstly, the talk was all over the place; Harshad tried to introduce too many topics spreading it real thin. Closures, builders, dynamic typing, string interpolation, literal syntax for lists and maps and higher-order functions in the space of 10 minutes confused the audience. It did not occur to me then, but many people seem to have had trouble understanding the notion of the Java platform – and Harshad, unfortunately, skipped over this key concept. Secondly, Harshad took question during the session. When a bunch of Java programmers are introduced to a modern language like Groovy for the first time, people would have gazillion questions popping up in the mind – encouraging them to voice them loudly is simply asking for trouble. 🙂 Thirdly, Harshad himself was very disorganized in his talk – and one of his demos went wrong during the session. Harshad might do well to watch seasoned speakers like Neal Ford and get his sessions a bit more organized. Overall, I got to see how Grails development looks like – I should be checking it out some time soon. (This is a recurring theme, isnt it? 🙂 My backlog is quite full!)

During tea-time I got to speak to Harshad. I really appreciate his writing. It was nice to meet him finally in person. I also got to meet couple of gentlemen who were talking to Harshad and Sangeetha. One of them was working with Sun; I have no idea about the other person. Here is an interesting tidbit of conversation I overheard between these two:

Sun guy: In Java 6 the class verification phase is significantly improved. They are using split bytecode verification, which was first tried in J2ME. This should improve the startup times significantly.

Other guy (with a funny accent): Oh like using an MD5 hash blah blah blah blah

Sun guy: Like what?

Other guy (with a funny accent): You know, information verification? Verifying that some information is not tampered with. blah blah blah

The rest of the audience (me, Harshad and Sangeetha) had to politely suppress the giggles. From the conversation it looked like this guy is in charge of making technical decisions; it was amusing that he had not even heard of byte code verification. The Sun guy was repeatedly trying to say how cool Sun was, which was really annoying. I eventually tried to be equally annoying by asking “Now that Sun has lost the IDE race to Eclipse, what is the feeling within Sun? Do you guys think you can still make it with NetBeans?” – it was fun to watch him stare back at me with his mouth agape 🙂

After tea we went to the SOA Industry Panel. We were looking forward to some honest discussion on SOA, but when an HP guy came up to pimp his product we realized that it was going to be a vendor-pitch-fest. We left the conference by then.

So, that was my day.