Arun Gupta, Miles to go ...

Day 2 @ The Server Side Java Symposium

In the opening keynote of Day 2 (Day 1), Joe Ottinger, Editor-in-chief of TheServerSide, asked the following questions, to an audience of approx 500 Java developers, receiving instant feedback using little handy devices on each attendees table. As with any surveys, the data may be skewed because of multiple reasons (not all participating, voting twice, pressing the wrong key etc). But here are the questions and their answers:

Which languages do you use most often ?

I could not capture the exact percentage but the priority order is listed below. This being a Java conference, the percentage for Java developers is well expected.

Which version of JavaEE API do you use ?

How do you call Remote services ?

I gave a talk on JAX-WS and WSIT: Tangoing with .NET yesterday and it went well. The two demos in the talk are also available as screencast in #ws1 and #ws3. I always leave time for Q&A and this time the discussions were way after the session was over. And I like it that way The key message is WSIT, available in GlassFish v2, gives you first-class interoperability with Microsoft .NET 3.0 framework and comes with fully integrated development experience in NetBeans 5.5.1 IDE.

I enjoyed a panel discussion on "Open Source Business Panel" and there were representatives from Alfresco, JBoss, SpikeSource, LifeRay, Interface21. The monetization model for all the participating companies was by selling professional services, technical support and training. Sun Java System Application Server (product version of GlassFish v2) offer training, services and support. Read Ed Ort's detailed summary of the session here.

I spent the afternoon with Joe Ottinger, Editor-in-chief of TheServerSide.com, deploying a trivial deployment-descriptor-free Web service on GlassFish v2. Basically we used the instructions as I described in an earlier entry. He was using GlassFish v2 b33 and was not able to get it working. On my laptop, with v2 b39, the service deployed easily. And even with b33 it worked. Anyway, Joe is going to install a fresh copy of b33 and try it. He also gave some good feedback in terms of how java.sun.com/webservices should be structured. We are already working on cleaning up the website and you'll see the changes in the weeks to come.

I spent the evening walking on the strip and took bunch of pictures.

Technorati: theserverside webservices wsit glassfish

Posted by Arun Gupta in webservices  |  Comments[6]

Day 1 @ The Server Side Java Symposium

I've been in Las Vegas for past 2 days attending The Server Side Java Symposium. Sun is the only platinum sponsor.

The conference is at The Venetian, one of the nicest hotels on the strip, but found two irritating issues for working people:

• Using fitness center facilities require you to pay $35/day charge. That is ridiculous to me. They anyway charge fortune for the room so why this extra fee ? I used the facility yesterday without knowing the charge but found out about the charge as there were folks lined up on the "reservation desk" for the fitness center. I've never seen that for a fitness center in a hotel.
• There are no power connections on the office table. There is a personalized fax machine but I'd rather have a power connection to make it convenient.

TheServerSide sponsored the travel and lodging and check out the pictures of the suite, it's pretty cool!

I missed the opening keynote by Karen Tegan Padir but heard it went well. Later that day, I attended a session by Ben Galbraith and Dion Alamer (co-founders of Ajaxian) on "State of Ajax".

The session started by asking "Does anyone here not know how to do Ajax ?". There were few hands raised and so the session started by creating a simple HTML form that takes a zip code and returns the corresponding city using XMLHttpRequest without any page refresh. Then the talk explained three main Ajaxian architectures:

• Return data (JSON / XML) - Smart clients, parse XML and JSON and populate the front end.
• Return HTML (responseText + innerHTML) - Slightly dumb client, just shows the results as is.
• Return JavaScript (eval) - Really dumb client, invoke the script sent by server.

The talk identified Google Maps, Google Suggest, Housingmaps,  TaDaList as Ajax innovators. In my opinion, Google Suggest was really the first effort that showed Ajax-like interactions.

Ben and Dion divided JavaScript in two camps: "JavaScript is Good" and "JavaScript is Bad". jMaki was classified in the first camp, Google Web Toolkit in the second camp and Direct Web Remoting in partly both the camps. Project Phobos was also classified in "JavaScript is Good" camp as it enables server-side scripting. Ben will be uploading a new video on jMaki showing Craig's list mashup so stay tuned for that.

Prototype, Scriptaculous and Dojo were rated as the most popular toolkits in a survey conducted last year on Ajaxian. The speakers classified Dojo as "Huge Elephant of JavaScript" with support for offline storage, presentation, remoting, charts and many other features.

IntelliJ IDEA 6.0 and NetBeans 5.5 for development and FireBug for debugging were the recommended tools. Then there were few slides on offline storage, especially the upcoming capabilities in Firefox 3 (off-line cache, off-line events, persistent cache), dojo.storage package and Adobe Apollo with offline flash. There was a brief mention of Project Tamarin that will provide approx 10 times faster JavaScript runtime and this will be integrated in a later version of Firefox. And the talk concluded by giving a future slide including topics such as off-line Ajax, fast JavaScript interpreters, HTML 5 and others.

A complete Day 1 report is available here. Ed Ort also posted notes.

Technorati: theserverside Ajax venetian

Posted by Arun Gupta in webservices  |  Comments[2]

Day 2 @ Ajax World - Part 2

Following from previous entry, I spent rest of my day at Sun pod showing various demos and talking to users. The evening was fun with a 2-hour cruise trip.

The boat was shaking a lot so I could not get any good pictures of the New York City skyline or Statue of Liberty. But it was nice spending time with other friends.

Technorati: ajaxworld sun swdp web2.0

Posted by Arun Gupta in web2.0  |  Comments[0]