agilejava.eu

Having attended all previous Øredev conferences I think I am pretty qualified when I say that this year’s conference was by far the best. Great topics, excellent speakers and flawless organization. Even the closing panel debate, which usually is just something you have to suffer through to be able to win prices in the raffle at the end, was interesting this year.

Since it is such a diverse conference, it is difficult to point out a single item that was the main trend at the conference. But if I should pick one thing, I guess it would be that most of the talks I attended more or less circled around the Get Real! theme of the conference. Hopefully this means that the industry is getting more mature. Don’t want to be a self-fulfilling pessimist, so it is just to be optimistic

See you there next year!

Usually, when I come home from work, I am pretty tired of programming and rarely ever do any programmin during weekends. But this weekend was different. I have been coding pretty much at work lately, so it should not be because of abstinence from coding. Anyhow, I set down and contributed to a small open source project started by a former colleague of mine. It is called Architect’s Java DAO Generator, and you can find it on Sourceforge. In short it is a maven plugin that generates most of the boilerplate code you usually have to code by hand. It also abstracts the data access layer from your domain logic in a nice way. Version 1.5 is soon going to be available and is absolutely worth a look.

I have agreed to contribute with a post once in a while on the corporate blog, or newsroom as they call it. I know I have not been very active on this blog lately, but hopefully this will inspire me to be more active here as well. Having just come back from a couple of weeks of total relaxation and diving in Dahab, Egypt, I should be full of energy and an urge to get started writing.

But first I want it to be absolute crystal clear that the stuff I write her on AgileJava is my view, and my view only. It is by no means affiliated with the company blog or anything thereunder. The posts on the newsroom will be reviewed by company representatives before published whereas AgileJava is only reviewed by myself.

The first time I attended JavaOne was 1999 and I have only missed it once since then. Sadly, this year will be the second time I am not present there. I have become kind of used to the week in San Francisco every year. It is the perfect way to start the summer with a visit to that beautiful city. Since it is in September this year, it would probably been the perfect way to end the summer (…we have short summers here in Scandinavia…).

I will for sure miss the massive input and inspiration this conference gives me and enables me to keep up-to-date on everything that is happening in the Java Community. This year’s conference is also special since it is the first time Oracle is hosting the show. It feels like a good idea to co-host it with Oracle Develop and I hope it will be a success to be continued. Next year, I will definitely be attending, one way or the other…!

While I was reading up a little on Scala recently, I found out that I might as well contribute a little while doing it. So I translated the Scala Tutorial to Norwegian since that was one of the translations missing. You can find it among the other translations on scala-lang.org or simply click on the image below to access it directly.

Developing Android applications using NetBeans is usually as easy as stealing candy from a baby. But the last couple of days I have been struggling with an application that uses a couple of external libraries. The other developers (using Eclipse) have a couple of scripts that they run to get the .so files included in the .apk file. When I tried running the same scrips on the .apk generated from NetBeans, the application failed to start in the emulator. I nearly switched to Eclipse (god forbid), but then I saw the light again. As it turns out, NetBeans does not include the java api jar-files in the external libs in the dex-file by default which resulted in a ClassNotFoundException.

The solution is as simple as you would expect when you have used NetBeans for a while. Add the following to the build.xml file in the project root (replace the dummy values for the signjar target):

<target name="-pre-jar">
   <copy todir="${build.classes.dir}">
      <fileset dir="${external.libs.dir}">
         <include name="*.jar"/>
      </fileset>
   </copy>
</target>
<target name="-post-jar">
   <zip update="true" destfile="${dist.apk}">
      <zipfileset dir="${external.libs.dir}" includes="*.so" prefix="lib/armeabi"/>
   </zip>
   <zip destfile="tmp.apk">
      <zipfileset src="${dist.apk}">
         <exclude name="META-INF/*.*" />
      </zipfileset>
   </zip>
   <move file="tmp.apk" tofile="${dist.apk}" />
   <signjar jar="${dist.apk}" alias="alias" storepass="secret" keypass="secret2" keystore="my_keystore"/>
</target>

You also need to add external.libs.dir=<your lib folder> to you <project root>/nbproject/project.properties file.

Now you can install the resulting .apk file using adb install or by running/debugging directly from NetBeans. Remember to follow the tip for asset-files in a previous post if you have that kind of resources.

This week Yammer was introduced to the entire company. Simply put, Yammer is a company internal twitter where coworkers can connect and share information by posting messages.

At first, I was skeptical to the whole idea thinking it would generate an overload of noise for a couple of weeks until dying slowly like most initiatives to share knowledge within companies. But after having thought about it, I really hope that will not happen. It is actually a brilliant way of building a knowledge base within the company. Everyone who has tried to establish some form of knowledge exchange know how hard it is to get people to contribute.

But by “hiding” it behind some familiar technology like twitter, people actually contribute without knowing it. If you think about it, only the things people are interested in will be posted and discussed in such a forum. People will only put energy in discussions they have strong feelings for. The things most people have feelings for are probably pretty relevant things for your organization. And it is by default fully searchable with the newest items most visible.

So with my limited experience of yammer (have used it two days), I will conclude that it is actually a good thing. Now we just have to hope that it does not die a silent death when it is not that new-and-cool anymore…

I made an interesting observation when I was at one of the sessions at the Øredev conference today that struck me as kind of weird…

Even though we are out there exposing ourselves on facebook, blogs and twitter, we are not comfortable sitting next to someone that are watching us typing while we are writing our blog post or tweet. As soon as we hit the submit button everything changes. Now we actually want people to read the stuff. That is why I call this

our irrational fear of real-time exposure

Exposure is fine, which the popularity of facebook and twitter are evidence of, as long as we are not caught doing it. Feel free to tweet, blog or comment on this

I was not present at the conference yesterday, so this is actually my second day here, and that also explains why there were no post from yesterday. Another explanation could have been that I was lazy, but that is not the case this time…

Well, over to what this post is all about: the conference. The keynote was held by Scott Hanselman. He gave an excellent talk about effectiveness and efficiency. Some really good stuff to bring back from that speech. Will try to list some of the techniques and tools he mentioned in a later blog post.

I will also summarize the rest of the sessions I attended today very soon here…

Great conference!

The conference was opened with a keynote by Marc Lesser. He talked about how to accomplish more by doing less. It was a kind of usual opening of a technology oriented conference, but I guess a bit of zen thinking early in the morning can only do us good.

Ola Bini presented the folding language Ioke. I will definitely download this and play around with it. Hopefully, I can use it in some presentation in near future. Really cool and fun!

The next presentation I attended was Neal Ford’s presentation about XP in practice. Nothing really new there, but more a confirmation that what I feel we are doing right applies to others as well. And, more valuable, tips and techniques for how to improve on what we are doing not so right. At last a kind of nerdy way of looking at pair programming:

• 100 eyes
• 010 brains
• 001 mind

Continuing on the agile track, Dan North gave an excellent talk about our obsession with efficiency. The three key points to remember from his talk is:

• You get what you measure
• Not all vendors are bad guys
• Efficiency isn’t effective

Back to the languages track, I attended a talk by Neal Ford where he compared Groovy and JRuby. It gave me a pretty good comparison of the benefits and drawbacks of both languages.

The only session on the Java track was a disappointment. The only thing I really got from this presentation was that I could charge my netbook’s batteries. Still running OpenSolaris on it, by the way, and is generally happy with it!

Last technical presentation today was about clojure. Kind of tough thing to jump into this late in the afternoon, but the presenter, Stuart Halloway, did a great job.

In the afternoon keynote, Cameron Purdy did a comparison of Java and C++.

Overall experience from the first day of the conference is good. It is impressive that they have gathered so many international speakers. If I should pick on something, it has to be that the opening of the conference would benefit from being a little more flashy. Maybe have the opener learn his speech and practice on the English pronunciation…?

And now, it is time for mingle and beer!