Agilists and Architects

Rebecca Parsons and Martin Fowler gave a keynote on Agilists and Architects at QCon last year. The video from the keynote is available at InfoQ. In their talk they talk about how the role of the architect is different in an agile environment. Among other things they mentioned the importance of transparency. It is much better to have a system that makes visible what is actually happening, rather than tell what should happen and then try to force it through. A lot of architects could benefit from having that attitude. I wrote a post about the Agile Architect back in February.

Another thing they said, which is fairly obvious, but nevertheless done wrong again and again, is how to focus on reuse. If you are going to get reuse, you do not get it by building something reusable and expect people to go ahead and use it. It is much more effective to build something that is actually usable and then harvest reusable things from that.

cuke4duke

I came over a cool tool called Cucumber the other day. Cucumber is a tool for Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD) that focuses on the communication between stakeholders and developers. It looks kind of cool, it works with Java and is written by Aslak Hellsøy, a former colleague of mine. So I gave it a try.

First I just ran the examples in plain ruby, then I tried it with JRuby (did not get the colors to work there…) and lastly I found cuke4duke which basically is Cucumber packaged in a Jar file. It has  a maven plugin and annotation support for writing the steps defined in the features. I am definitely going to lab some more with it and see if I can apply it on a project. Me like 🙂

Aslak will present Cucumber at Öredev in November.

Twitter

Well, I finally got on Twitter as well. You can find it at http://twitter.com/ivar_grimstad or by watching the tweets in the box to the right. Actually I have had a twitter account for quite a while, but have not gotten around to start twittering yet. We will see how it goes 🙂

Was 2009 the last JavaOne

Usually, there has always been a sign on the top of the escalator in Moscone North with the dates of the next JavaOne Conference. This year, the sign said “Thanks for joining us this year.”.

Was this the last JavaOne

I am absolutely sure there will be some sort of large java conference, but it will be up to Oracle to decide on the format and if they want to continue running the JavaOne conferences. I surely hope they will! This was my tenth JavaOne and I hope to be adding to that number…

JavaOne 2009 Wrap-up

The 2009 JavaOne Conference is over. As always, Sun manages to pull offf a great show even if it was not very much new stuff presented. The focus was on JavaFX and The Cloud and I think these are things we are going to be hearing a lot of in the future as well.

The JavaFX platform is getting more mature and tools supporting it are popping up everywhere. It has never been easier to create great user interfaces. Let’s just hope we developers let the designers do their job and focus on the logic behind…

The cloud is hotter than ever and there are some great products out there. Take a look at the Sun Cloud Computing web site for an overview.

JavaOne 2009 – Day 4

The keynote on the last day of JavaOne is all about toys. James Gosling presented a wide array of projects and products that have used the power of java in all sorts of ways.

I spent the rest of the day attending technical sessions. The most interesting one was an introduction to Google Guice. I am definitely going to take a closer look at that. Guice will probably form the foundation for JSR 330: Dependency Injection for Java, so it should not be too much of an effort migrating over to this standard from Guice in the future if that is desirable.

JavaOne 2009 – Day 3

The third day of JavaOne is always kind of weird. Your are in the middle of the conference, but painfully close to the end. The pavillion closes (as I have pointed out in my evaluation forms every year!) too early! Why do they have to start packing down all the stuff at 14:00? Do they have so tight schedule at Mocsone to prepare for the Apple Developer Connection that they can’t wait a couple of hours more..?

After the Swing Rocks presentation, I spent some time on the pavillion before attending a presentation on Bean Validation (JSR 303). Validation of input has always been a pain in-the-ass so I embrace this JSR with my heart.

The night ended with a couple of parties before heading back to the hotel. Tomorrow is the last day of JavaOne 2009. I wonder if there will be a JavaOne 2010….

Swing Rocks at JavaOne 2009

I am not usually attending the Swing presentations at JavaOne, but this year I had to make an exception. A couple of friends from Malmö (Pär and Martin) gave a presentation called Swing Rocks: A tribute to Filthy-Rich Clients.

Here is a picture of them right before the presentation starts
Before the presentation

And one taken during the presentation
During the presentation

For more information about what they are up to to get the source code from their examples, check out their website, swing-rocks.com

JavaOne 2009 – Day 2

Day 2 at JavaOne 2009 started with a keynote given by Sony Ericsson. They talked a lot about the importance of user experience and their focus of delivering seamless service experience to the end users. The whole history of PlayNow arena was gone through on the big screen all the way from 2004 until today. Sony Ericsson wants to be seen as “The Communication Entertainment Brand”, and PlayNow arena is a part of that strategy. They also announced that applications will soon be supported by PlayNow.

All the time during the presentation, Erik Hellman coded a JavaFX application combining Google Maps and Twitter to show all the tweets submitted during the presentation in the San Francisco area. The application was finally deployed on three different phone platforms.

At the end of the keynote, Sony Ericsson announced the Sony Ericsson Content Submission submit.sonyericsson.com.

The rest of the conference day was as it normally is. Lots of great presentations. Joshua Bloch gave is inevitable Effective Java presentation. This year, it was a bit of a copy from last year’s, but his presentations are usually well worth attending.

The day ended at a party held by Adobe and SpringSource in combination. They gave a short presentation of  spring-flex before opening the bar…