after the sunny Florida I drove up all the Interstate 95 and I reached Reston VA to attend to 2GX Groovy and Grails Experience!

It was absolutely great!

First I would like to compliments Jay and the NFJS team , because the organization was absolutely wonderful and professional, we arrived and find all that we need to enjoy the show(schedules, slides and so on…). I never attended to a NFJS event , because I’m european , but from now on I will be very happy if NFJS tours will reach the other side of the atlantic;)

All session I’ve attended showed up with great contents and interesting topics, from metaprogramming to ui mashup and testing… really good works folks!

I really believe that  we’ve found the in Groovy the new Java 2.0 ,as said many times during the conference, with the ability to reuse all the good stuff that the Java World has created(and there’s a lot of good stuff out there!) and in Grails a easy path to web application development. It was a long time that I felt so positive about a new technology… and that’s great! Moreover the community is growing fast and steady , and the community is THE base for any successful opensource project (maybe someone has forgot that…).

I will advise everyone that as the opportunity to not miss the next 2GX in San Jose coming in October…

so, when in Europe , or better in some beautiful place in Italy?

sorry for the huge delay but it was a busy week traveling all around the USA, from Orlando to Washington;)

Anyway on third and final day:

JBoss Messaging: This brand new version is interesting because is not tied to the AS only but might be embedded in all kind of applications very easily, so if you need reliable messaging system , it may be worth adding these few jars and you’re done;)

JBoss ESB: Here we have a nice ESB solution, the feature are “pretty” standard for this kind of products, I hope to see a thigh integration with Groovy(or Java 2.0 if you prefer;) ) so services can be deployed and developed in a much simpler way, one thing I learned is that  is that with simplicity comes great power!

After all I have to admit that I’m quite surprised and disappointed that Linux was not so “present&pushed” and there was no talk on the excellent job on IcedTea…why?

Summing all up I would say that was a great experience and opportunity to get in touch with some great core developers and, even better became a official microntainer committer for the spring integration module;)!

Bye see you , next year

here a shot from my flickr account:

Hibernate Shards: It’s a interesting project that enable horizontal partitioning “under” hibernate. It can be very useful if you have huge amounts of data or/and want to distribute databases(shards) to reduce loads or show “localized” data based on some parameters like user role, location and so on…

Then after a break we got the bus for Disney Pleasure Island;)

The party was on a disco called “Moover”, any way JBoss kindly provided access to all the clubs on the island,but the las bus to the hotlel was at 1 .am (way too early for us… ) . And well the party was a “standard” party, you know, music ,nice live music from “Hip Kittens”…

After the party we get to the hoetl and had a great talk with some real smart guys: Andrew and Rob, two JBoss developers, about about tooling and dynamic languages, especially groovy and ruby and how they can fit in the enterprise markets.

Then about 3 AM I hit the bed….

yesterday was a very long day and ended very late after the party @ Pleasure Isalnd… so I had no time to write a up a picture of the day.

Before starting I would like to point you out that on www.jbossworld.com you can see the videos of the keynotes.

So let’s start with a brief summary of the morning:

Introduction to JBoss Application Server 5.0 : Just like the title say it was an introduction on what’s new on AS5 and, basically I would say that is 98% new, based on the new JBossMicrocontainer (yep the one I hacked yesterday…!!), so there are a lot of new things in there but now we really hope to ses AS5 GA out quickly…

Performance Tuning JBoss Enterprise Application Platform on Linux: Here the room was full with people also sitted on the floor… so someone here seems to use Linux … anyway I get some useful tips on specific memory handling and some native hooks that we ca use on our penguin-powered boxes… so sysadmins I warn you , when I get back we should test them out !

Visionary Keynote : I skip commets on this one… just fluff no stuff… you know a 20k meters high view of SOA, service orcherstation , federation….

Optimizing the Enterprise: Using JBoss, Red Hat and Virtualization Technologies Within a SOA: sounds quite familiar uh? We in byte-code are developing a similar solution for our customers. The idea is the same behind our architecture but I think that our is more comprehensive(especially in the configuration management stuff).

JBoss and Accenture: French Tax Department Case Study: Nice case, with 250(!) application server and rhel deployment! Huge! In France citizens can declare their taxes online(will it ever happen in italy??) and this application manges this stuff, so it has many interesting challenges from availability to security and privacy of data handled, and all is handled by opensource technologies except for the db that is Oracle(the project started in 2004.

Ok, it’s enough for part one… come back later for ” JBoss World Party at Disney’s Pleasure Island”, the main event … you know;)

After the NASA case study I attend the presentation on Microcontainer and OSGi: it was a nice introduction to both topics but it just gave me a overview of those technologies and how MC will support the osgi specification. The current problem, from my point of view , is that java enterprise has so many complicated JSRish papers and standard but people seem they don’t have enough…

Anyway after those we dived into the keynotes:

The first keynote was from Jim Whitehurst,Red Hat CEO, and of course it was interesting to see a non-IT extraction CEO speaking to a 800 it guys…, summarizing the keynote Jim described the “power” of the enterprise opensource model and the ability to steadly innovate and in the same time keeping rock-solid performances ad meet the business needing.

The second one was held by Sacha Laborey, JBoss CTO, and it basically showed up how RH will be reorganized in to business units to support a more flexible and targeted business, then moved on and talked a bit about some products like ESB and developer studio… also said that from tomorrow they will announce something very intersting… let’s wait and see… also during the keynote there were some “technical” problem and on the big screen some Windog showed up…:((I sadly saw way to much windows today… and not in the other attendee I mean…)

After a fast buffet dinner(not bad!) I get into the hackton with John and Ales (MicroContainer Project lead) and after 2h of “hard” work and some coffes we get our hack in place;) , probably tomorrow we’ll clean up a bit a the code and patch it into the repos.

Now it’s really really late…. 1 am here,and tomorrow night there’s the only we’re here: The JBoss Party on Pleasure Island

Night guys,

D

One noticeable thing, for a real clusterable HA database they choose MySql over the big O… nice;)

Well, this application is one rare JEE application that does not involve just a web interface but do really some business(hard)… and it’s great, I’m just fedup with dumbassed crud applications…

as “usual” in the sunny Florida is raining;) and yesterday we also get a “funny” tornado alert!

Anyway we managed to get to our first conference JBoss World. And the hotel is whaoooo! Soon you’ll see some shots on flikr!

I’m now attending @ “Leveraging Ajax and Metdata for Hoc-Reporting” from a Penthao guy and it looks promising(even if the slides are graphically horrible…), I will give you a brief review of each speech I will attend.

today Grails 1.0 was released, as usual I prepared the package for rpm-based systems.

Get it here , and congratulations to all the Grails&Groovy community.

Davide

given some requests I publish a classresolver for Wicket that enable groovy pages & components to be hot reloaded in development mode.
I suppose you have a project with maven and so let’s start…

1. Get the “mighty” GrovvyClassResolver
2. (fix up the package)
3. Open the WebApplication class and do something like that (remember that I use maven & jetty for dev, If u have a different project structure change the path of the BASE_SRC constant pointing to your source dirs)

   1. 
      
      /**
      
       *
      
       * @author Byte-Code Srl 2004-2007
      
       */
      
      public class GroovierWebApplication extends WebApplication {
      
      
      
          public static final String BASE_SRC = "src/main/java/";
      
      
      
      
      
          protected void init() {
      
              initSpringContext();
      
      
      
      
      
              getResourceSettings().setThrowExceptionOnMissingResource(false);
      
      
      
              String configurationType = getConfigurationType();
      
              if (configurationType.equals(DEVELOPMENT)) {
      
                  getResourceSettings().addResourceFolder(BASE_SRC);
      
      
      
                  getApplicationSettings().setClassResolver(new GroovyClassResolver(BASE_SRC));
      
              }
      
          } }

4. You’re done! Now you can develop in wicekt using groovy & hot reload pages and components.
5. As a side note remember to create a production profile so when you deploy the war the groovy class are compiled and you won’t loose any performances!
6. Ok, now you have to transfer some bucks to my account… or it won’t work!

Ok, that’s all folks, if u have problem just drop me an email!

D