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I’ll be presenting at ValtechDays 2009 on November 17th a talk titled “Where are my Beans, Contracts and workflows? WOA and Rest: An enterprise mindset shift” with Sadek Drobi.

Here’s the summary :
“With the rise of web 2.0, Rest and Web Oriented Architecture emerged as inevitable solutions to today’s business challenges. However, to realize the benefits of this approach requires a comprehensive look at the whole model together with its composing technologies, design patterns and best practices. In this talk, we will go with you discovering this approach, highlighting its principal elements (standard Web technologies, linked data, Mashups…) helping you finding architecture values you care about in a dynamic, extremely extensible model, hoping you get an “AHA!” moment by the end of the day.”

If you’re a JavaScript hater, a SOA lord or a GWT geek come in to exchange with us on the differents views to solve a common problem.

For once, the slides are already done, we have done one “perfection game” and will do another one at Vidal sometimes before the 17th.
We will demo some cool mashups during this talk, especially one integrating some REST and WOA stuff with GoogleWave.

The talk will be in French, you’ll find the summary in French on valtech days page.

Sadek has opened a couple of public Google Waves on the subject, in English and French, feel free to join us overthere.

I’m in the train, mostly awaken, back from the Devoxx 2008 Conference in Antwerp Belgium. I’ve taken a couple notes but mostly I tweeted when I saw something nice.

A special “Bravo” for the organizers of the Belgium JUG, sincerely it’s the best conference in term of organization I’ve attended so far. A beatboxer, Free beers and french fries, a movie, can we ask for more ?

Here’s a couple of sessions I feel were the most interesting for me and I’ve taken shots with an iPhone :

REST Session (A must see if you’re asking yourself whether REST is for you or not, goes deep into what you could do to be really RESTFull and not only spit xml though http)	Scala session with Bill Venners (very impressive speaker, check the video when it will be available)
Enterprise Build with Jason Van Zyl (Very direct presentation, loved the starting rant on annotations)	JavaPosse 221 recording, hilarious ! Didn’t learn much, since everything was already covered during talk and sessions in Devoxx.
Amazon Web Service & Elastic Grid talk, learn a little bit of details of the myriad of web services around AWS offering, seen the ElasticFox plugin in use, nice !	Android Talk : Gradient, painters and the like, the media changes, not the high level techniques
DIY Multitouch with Java (and a tiny bit of JavaFX):

I come to this kind of conference to have a feeling of what is going on in the Java world, and meet people. It’s a special time, during which you can put aside current tasks and “urgent” things at work and take the time to look at what you are doing, and where the industry is going, and see if it matches, or not. So here’s a list of things, I found appealing during the sessions, and didn’t have time to go deep enough during the 3 days of Devoxx to see if it’s BS or real interesting things.

• AWS : Must see in details if it’s difficult to put in place EBS for log and persistent storage and the effect of it on the price of an EC2 platform hosting. Must investigate and find which kinds of services are targeted by CloudFront. Eager to see what they will provide in term of load balancing. Must install the ElasticFox plugin and see if it works better for me than CLI.
• JavaPosse : Will subscribe to the podcast into iTunes, it was too much fun.
• Effective Java : Should have bought the book for the generics stuff, I’m not so good at it.
• REST : Should try Jersey and maybe other JAX-RS implem (JBoss RESTeasy…) until I find something really good, and see how it matches with the “Resource” way of thinking. As a side note, I didn’t attend the spring session, but I heard Spring MVC 3 looks more RESTfull that ever. A very very good points are expries meta data and eTag. Still have not find a solution for collections of resources, should they all be represented with atom or atom pub, or in plain xml. Don’t know the answer.
• JavaFX: Try the latest jdk 1.6u11( looks like its smaller in dl size), quite disapointed by the apparent lack of mobile oriented stuff. Should wait a little bit and see. But why not use it for small standalone eye-candy app.
• Security: Must read part of OWASP documentation, print it out to coder and admin-sys alike if it’s good.
• Scala: Looks very powerful, don’t know how to find the time to learn it, Coding Dojo ?. Must take a look at a thing called Hamcrest who does some nice things to java it seems.
• Maven: Jason said he will support Hudson (Arrgghhh) so it builds maven project better, I’ve the feeling Hudson’s going to be maven best friend, but sometimes next year, cleary not ready today. The integration between m2eclipse plugin and nexus is too powerful too miss. Must digg into Nexus pro, and their release helper thing.
• TeamCity: Meet the developers, nice people. Must upgrade to 4.0 asap. Should spend an hour or two playing with intelliJ with ctrl-s mapped to compile to see if it does the trick. Take a look at plugin example code in TC 4.0, to see if packaging is easier ?
• Android500$ to get an Android phone, will see with my company if we could buy some. SDK is a roll royce compared to the iPhone one (especially due of the objective-c age…), I’ve used both.
• XWiki: They have a new syntax, that really rocks, consistent and powerful, I’m eager to try it by upgrading to 1.7. Must also try their eclipseRCP based standalone client, and WebDAV mode, those should please the developers and wiki gardeners, back at work. Their technical demonstration of live editing of a wiki page is promising.

If you want to go into the details, and speak French :

• Le touilleur Express
• Paris JUG (thx for the t-shirt)
• Octo

J’ai pu passer une bonne journée aux Valtech Days le 21 octobre dernier la conférence organisé par Valtech.

J’ai particulièrement bien apprécié le talk sur les rétrospectives d’Eric Lefevre et Laurent Bossavit, ça m’a redonné envie de tenter des variations dans nos rétrospective de sprint. J’ai re-découvert les rétrospectives de projet mais je suis pas bien sur que dans mon contexte ça passe bien. A réfléchir et creuser en en parlant en interne avec nos product owners.

J’ai trouvé formidable qu’on s’attache enfin a des problèmatique d’utilisabilité du code dans le talk présenté par Régis Medina. Qui pose en terme simple la problématique. J’ai trouvé malin le parallèle entre ergonomie d’UI et ergonomie de code. Par contre au niveau des solutions je suis pas toujours d’accord, et c’est normal puisqu’il y a plusieurs solution a chaque problématique, notamment sur le découpage pseudo fonctionnel pseudo technique des packages (qui reste un vaste sujet).

Mention spéciale pour le talk sur l’expérience LinQ de Sadek Drobi, d’une richesse et d’un niveau tel que pas grand monde dans la salle à du piger de quoi il s’agissait, vu les regards hagards de l’assistance. Faut dire qu’un speech en anglais de 20 slides en 20 minutes (donc bien rythmé…) sur la différence entre programmation fonctionelle et orienté objet, coincé entre un speech strastosphérique sur Spring dm et un autre plus ludique sur Silverlight, tout deux en Francais, il y avait de quoi être surpris. ça n’avait pas grand chose à voir avec une démo de LinQ, ce à quoi on pouvait légitimement s’attendre au vu du contexte. C’est probablement le talk qui m’a le plus fait réfléchir de la journée, malgré tout.

Pour finir je citerais une expérience très intéressante : Il y avait une projection des tweets lié à la conférence en direct: original, geek à souhait, utile (!).

Je regrette vivement de ne pas avoir pu me libérer pour la seconde journée, plus axée rencontre au travers d’une grande session Open Space Technology.

Plus de détail sur la conférence sur le wiki dédié et un beau blog report (à l’heure celui là) sur le nouveau blog d’Ulrich.