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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 spent last evening in the Paris google office which gladly hosted the javacamp4, a barcamp dedicated to java technology.

They were two sessions of around 1 hour each.
First sessions were : cloud computing, html5, spring 3 and mda.
Second sessions were : tdd, ddd and jquery vs gwt

I went to the cloud computing session, as I have a project of putting a java webapp on the clouds I wanted to share my views on it and also learn from others experiences. Unfortunately I was the only one there working on a real life project. Discussion was good, although more aimed at describing what are the current cloud computing offers : infrastructure ( google for your domain) and amazon s3, hosting gandi, wc2, azure and application: appengine.
We did have a refreshing talk on what could be be the future IDE, David describe it well here.
Good session overall, (roti 3)

I then join the talk titled: “jquery vs prototype vs gwt: which help produce the most industrial code. ” leaded by Eric.
I believe javascript code is difficult to industrialize, who unit test javascript code, let alone continuously build it ? They were suggestion on using selenium, which is good testing although it’s more integration testing than unit testing. But you can’t get rid of javascript if you’re going to write some nice web UI. Plain GWT on the other hand as good reputation when it comes to javascript, since you’re not going to see a line of javascript if you don’t want to. But the way GWT application are written are more “Application” than “Web Site”. Crawler problem arise among other things.
The talk ended is the unsatisfying conclusion that JQuery is probably the cleanest and easiest way to go, but you got to know Javascript…
Pretty good session, I learned quite a few things. (roti 4)

We were numerous to tweet during the evening, check this twitter search to have a feeling of the evening.

The buffet following was nice, and discussion went well with all the participants. In this kind of events, the after sessions discussion are at least as important as the sessions themselves.
A very nice evening, I definitely looking forward to the next camp.
Thank to the organizers, Luc & Philippe

Shots:

Links :

• JavaCampParis4 page
• Twitter search
• David post
• Nicolas post

I saw many tweets on a new service called tweetstats.com which displays graphs on tweet per day/ density etc.., charts and word clouds on your the twitter account of your choice.
Too bad I started tweeting in French, and tweetstats.com does not recognize French stopwords. (btw I don’t know how he could do it, I mean detecting the language should be difficult) So as of today my top 5 words are “�, une, pour, la, le.”… I just switched the language I use on twitter from French to English.

I won’t say this often of a site using flash, but it’s nicely done, and Flash is used only when it brings really something (not on the cloud for instance).

Eric Lefevre has spent some times, setting up a feed aggregation for former Valtech employees blog. This is called Valtech Alumni.

I’m proud this blog and my personal tweeter feed contribute to it.

By syndicating once to theses feeds ( blogs or tweets) you get all the brain juice of many people.

Thanks Eric.

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.

J’ai eu la chance de pouvoir assister au barcamp JavaCampParis organisé chez Octo hier soir, avec Ulrich un collègue de Vidal.

Le format était sympa pour juste une soirée : 4 salles, 2 sessions d’1 heure environ. ça fait 8 sujets potentiels et 2 auxquels on peut assister pleinement (forcément il y a de la frustration, plusieurs sujets intéressant ont lieu en même temps). On peut toujours passer d’un sujet à l’autre, mais le risque de louper le début ou la fin des débats est génant..

J’ai tout d’abord assisté après le rituel de choix des sujets à une discussion autour du développement piloté par les tests (TDD). Après les définitions d’usage, on a abordé des sujets de cas de tests “limites”, comme les tests de couche graphique web, comme jsf, gwt qui pose des problèmes. C’était intéressant mais une partie de la table était pro-tdd à fond (toutes mes équipes en font, y’a que le test first dans la vie… ) et l’autre moitié de la salle savait à peine ce que précisément le terme de TDD voulait dire.

Je voulais rejoindre la discussion autour des licences open-source, qui j’en suis sur n’a pas manqué d’aborder le buzz du moment autour de la politique de support de springsource, mais j’ai échanger autour de scrum et le marché des projets scrum en France avec Eric Mignot en tentant de rejoindre la salle.

J’ai ensuite rejoint le panel sur “scrum dans la vrai vie”, que Nicolas décrit très bien. Les échanges étaient intéressant avec quelques analogies originales. Ca m’a permis de prendre un peu de recul sur ma pratique de scrum tout les jours.

Mention spéciale pour l’organisation, c’était un sans faute, même le buffet était pas mal du tout. Les salles se rejoignaient toutes au même endroit ce qui facilite les rencontres.

Au final, une très bonne soirée ou les participant étaient accessibles de part leur nombre réduit (environ 30 personnes) et les débats passionnés mais raisonnables (si si, c’est possible). La liberté que l’on a dans les propositions de sujets, le fait de pouvoir passer de l’un à l’autre font du barcamp un format de conférence agréable et enrichissant.

Voici les slides de la présentation que j’ai pu faire avec Marc Cherfi à l’université du si d’Octo, le 2 juillet dernier.

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