JavaPosse 2009 Roundup Summary
This post is rather overdue. It’s over a week now since I returned home from the roundup. I should have posted earlier, but I blame jet lag and busy days. Though the reality is closer to a bit of laziness.
The main thing I took away
What I primarily got out off the roundup was Scala and JavaFX. Although the roundup in general is a lot about our profession, the stuff outside the sessions focused more on the fun bits, ie. programming. I have heard about Scala before, especially since it’s basically mentioned in every JavaPosse podcast. I have also looked at some Scala code. But during the Roundup I got to see a lot more code, and learn more about the language. I even went online to Amazon during the roundup to order my own copy off the Scala book, only to later hear that Bill Venners brought some for us all to buy. I guess I should have checked with him. I’ll probably post more about Scala as I learn more.
JavaFX I also found interesting. This is also something I have played a bit with on my own. It’s really interesting to look at a language that is designed with a specific use-case in mind, rather than being more general like the languages I usually use. The bind stuff is awesome, and having keywords such as tween and duration literals seems really nice. In a normal language these would be too special case to have as language constructs. But in a language dealing with animation they fit right in.
The sessions
There where quite a few good sessions to attend to. I really enjoyed the one on Developer Communication, and I hope it gets out soon so I can share it with others at work, and management. The session on Code Generation was also interesting. I am basically opposed to it. But the session started off mostly looking at cases where code generation is useful. And it’s mostly in adaptor patterns. I think the ideal here is that the generator just creates an interface that is used together with a framework in your application. Then the framework deals with translating calls to the interface to the underlying architecture, say web services.
Another good session was on dynamic vs static languages. Since Python is the language I work in now, I was hoping to come to some defence off the dynamic languages at least. Typically in a room off static language users, the bias is towards static languages. I am sure the reverse would be true at a python conference. I do see a tendency though for newer static languages to borrow useful principles from dynamic languages. Here again Scala and JavaFX are good examples of how static languages don’t need to be overly verbose. I also think dynamic languages sometimes benefit from stealing from static languages. Pythons module system and strong typing is examples off this.
All in all, the conference was great. There are proabably stuff I missed here, but they will all appear as the podcasts off the sessions get out. I am really hopefull that I can attend the roundup again next year.