Randell’s Dev Blog

Last June 17-19, I attended the Sun Tech Days at Shangri-la, Makati (which makes this post a little bit late) – the first Sun event I’ve attended.  I intended to post the event by the day but I found myself tired coming from the event, and I’ve been busy.

I realized that discussing each topic would require individual posts, so I’ll just go over the outline of each presenter as briefly as I can.  I also collected the blog posts from the presenters and posts from other bloggers.  And, of course, pictures!

Day 1 (June 17) – Free NetBeans Deepdive Session

The session had three speakers: Tim Boudreau – a Senior Staff Engineer from Sun Microsystems, Sang Shin – a Technology Evangelist from Sun Microsystems, Geertjan Wielenga – a Technical Writer for NetBeans in Prague.  Yes, Sang Shin was there! I didn’t know that he was one of the presenters coming to Manila until that day.  Somehow I’m a fan because I took some of his Javapassion courses.

Tim Boudreau, covered the following:

• New and Cool Features in NetBeans 6.1
• Using NetBeans for Enterprise Development
• Using NetBeans for Desktop Development

He started off by introducing what NetBeans is – an IDE that works out-of-the-box for most of the things you need.  He also discussed the NetBeans philosophy which is to support technologies as they emerge and to make all developers more productive.  He briefly talked about the history of NetBeans.

Some of the new stuff in NetBeans 6.1 he mentioned are the following:

• Performance – made the features from NetBeans 6.0 faster, start-up time improvement, faster code completion
• Editor features – smart code templates, more editor hints and refactoring
• JavaScript support – warnings on codes that is not compatible with all browsers, refactoring, debugger
• Ruby support
• Integrated Profiliing
• RESTful Web Service support

His last note was to get involved by participating in mailing lists, file bugs and enhancement requests, help translate netbeans, and write plug-ins and RCP applications.

Sang Shin covered the technologies supported by NetBeans:

• Hibernate
• Spring Framework
• JSF & Visual Web Application Development
• JPA
• Web Services
• Web Services Interoperability Technology
• RESTful Web Service
• soapUI
• Building Web 2.0 Applications using jMaki
• SOA & BPEL & Composite Application

His presentation was fast-paced.  Imagine covering those topics in just minutes.  Good thing everything is available from his website http://www.javapassion.com/.  Here are the important links from Javapassion.com:

• Sang’s topics and slides for the NetBeans Deepdive Session
  
• Using NetBeans for Web and Enterprise Development
• Demos: Hibernate step-by-step, Spring MVC, Visual JSF, JPA Basics, Web Services Basics, WSIT, RESTful Web Services, soapUI, jMaki Mashup, BPEL, Composite apps

After the coffee break, Geertjan Wielenga discussed about using NetBeans for desktop development.  He covered the following:

• Matisse GUI Builder – demonstrated by creating a “find” dialog box
• JSR-296 Tooling – demonstrated by creating a Swing desktop application integrated with Flickr
• NetBeans Platform – a generic desktop framework that provides application “plumbing” – saving state

Geertjan’s presentation can be found here.

Here are the resources for the Matisse GUI Builder:

• Java GUI Application Learning Trail
  
• Tomas Pavek’s Blog – lead developer of the GUI Builder in NetBeans

Day 2 (June 18)

The day started with a keynote from Aisling Macrunnels, Senior Vice President of Software Marketing, Sun Microsystems. Ms Ash is full of energy.  I even saw her dance beside the stage before the keynote.

She talked about the platforms that power the web economy.  She talked about how software development has evolved from being corporate driven to community driven.  She emphasized on why the open source economy is on the rise, enabling global opportunities.  She also made a comparison of the platforms that enable developer innovation: open-source vs closed-source with regards to developer environment, database/storage platform, application infrastructure, virtualization, operating system, servers, storage, networking, and microprocessor.

Then she had a demo on xVM VirtualBox, discussed how MySQL and Java is widely used, discussed a little on Glassfish being a complete open source web platform, on JavaFX and how it lets developers build new RIA easily, on NetBeans being the one IDE for all your open development.

After the keynote of Aisling Macrunnels, the attendees had to choose from four different tracks that were held at the same time:  Enterprise Track, Desktop Track, OpenSolaris Track, and Sys-Admin & Hands-on Lab Track.  Too bad that I can only choose one track at a time.  I wanted to attend all of them.

The Enterprise Track covered the following:

• Java EE, GlassFish and Their Future
• Oracle Technical Session
• Rapid Development with Groovy and Grails
• Java Persistence API: Further Simplifying Persistence
• OSGi: Development and Deployment
• Java EE with Spring and Seam

The Desktop Track covered the following:

• A Rich Application Platform: JavaFX
• Java SE 6 Top 10 Features and Java SE 7
• Easy Deployment: A Leaner and Meaner Runtime
• Swing Back With a Zing
• Using NetBeans with your Existing Projects
• Java Troubleshooting Tips

The OpenSolaris Track covered the following:

• What Makes OpenSolaris Interesting?
• Getting Started with OpenSolaris: New Features for Building OpenSolaris Packages
• Building High Performance Applications for OpenSolaris Using Sun Studio Compilers and Tools
• Performance Tuning With Sun Studio Analyzer, Race Detection Tools, Dtrace
• OpenSolaris and the AMP Stack: Support for Web 2.0 Development
• The OpenSolaris Operating System and Storage

The Sys-Admin and Hands-on Lab Track covered the following:

• LAB-8430 Isolating Performance Bottlenecks with NetBeans Profiler
• SYS-ADMIN: Advances in Solaris Network Infrastructure
• SYS-ADMIN: Solaris Virtualization for System Administrators
• LAB-7350 Rich Clients with JavaFX

I attended the Enterprise Track.  If you attended the other tracks, feel free to share the sessions.

The first session was Java EE, Glassfish and Their Future presented by Carol McDonald, Java Architect at Sun Microsystems.  She started off by giving an overview of Java EE: ease of development, default configurations, pojo, extensive use of annotations, resource injection.  Then listed the specification changes in Java EE 5: JAX-WS replaces JAX-RPC, JPA, EJB 3.0, JAXB 2.0, JSF 1.2, StAX.

And then she discussed about Glassfish: Java EE 5 compliant app server, open-source, enterprise quality.  Then briefly talked about the Glassfish open source business model, it’s timeline from its launching up to version 3, the tools that support Glassfish (NetBeans, Eclipse, IntellijIDEA), its partners, adoption stories, and its direction.

Resources:

• Glassfish
  
• Glassfish Wiki
  
• The Aquarium

Next up was Oracle Technical Session by Joey Tan, Director of Technology Business Unit, Oracle.  He talked about XTP (Extreme Transaction Processing), Scalability (as well as Linear and Predictable Scalability), Performance and Coherence (scalability infrastructure for the application-tier).  We went on discussing more about what Coherence is and what it does – provides powerful parallel processing capabilities (query, events, transactions), reliable data management / data abstraction layer, effortless cluster applications, business continuity and disaster recovery.

After the lunch break, it was Rapid Development with Groovy and Grails by Chuk Munn Lee, Senior Developer Consultant and Technology Evangelist for Technology Outreach at Sun.  This was one of the presentations that received a lot of oohs and aahs.

He introduced what Groovy is (a dynamic language built on top of JVM with Java-like syntax).  Then compared a Java code implemented in Groovy, which was obviously shorter. Then he gave an overview of Grails (MVC framework for web applications), its principles (CoC, DRY), and comparison to RoR.  He went on by explaining the benefits of using Grails (addresses the ugly JSPs with scriptlets and complexity of JSP custom tags, numerous layers and configuration files, and the ORM layer that can be overly difficult to master).  Then he presented a demo by creating a Grails application showing the directory structure, URL mappings, constraints, persistent methods, queries, and console.

Links:

• Download Groovy
• Download Grails

Next was Java Persistence API: Further Simplifying Persistence by Sang Shin.  He covered he following:

• Java Persistence Requirements
• What is an entity
• JPA Programming Model
• Entity Manager & Entity Life Cycle
• Persistence Context and Entity Manager
• Transactions
• Detached Entities
• Entity Relationships
• O/R Mappings
• Embedded Objects
• Compound primary key
• Entity Listeners
• Query

His slide on JPA is downloadable here.

Links:

• Sang’s topics and slides for June 18, 2008
• Glassfish persistence homepage
• Persistence support page
• Blog on using persistence in web applications
• Blog on schema generation

After the afternoon break (yes, this is different from the lunch break and the food was good!), it was OSGi: Development and Deployment by Joey Shen.  He first gave an overview of OSGi (a dynamic, service-oriented, module system for Java platform).  It solves JAR file hell, code reusability, large systems having too many classes, and complex development (re: various platforms, various profiles).  Then he went on discussing the OSGi platform and its layers: Module, Life Cycle, Services, and Security.  Then he showed examples on developing OSGi bundles.  And then he discussed JSR 277 – Java Module System.

OSGi Implementations:

• Apache Felix
• Knopflerfish
• Equinox

The last presenter for the day was Carol McDonald (the one who also presented Java EE, Glassfish and Their Future).  This time she discussed Java EE with Spring (AOP and POJO based, annotation and configuration centric, provides own way for transaction management & data sources) and Seam (builds on Java EE) and how each open source project provides a different approach to how an application is built.

Resources:

• Carol McDonald’s Blog
• Java EE with Spring and/or Seam on Glassfish

Day 3 (June 19)

The day started with the Sun Community Keynote by Matt Thompson, Senior Director, Technology Outreach – SDN.  You can checkout Matt’s developer quiz on Em’s blog post.  I only got 10 points.  Here the link to Matt’s twitter.

After Matt’s keynote, it was time for the Strange and Unusual Talent Show.  Sang Shin called on 6 volunteers from the attendees to show their talents.  The price was a brown leather Sun jacket (estimated cost: $1000 according to Sang).  The talents:

• Bending of fingers the opposite way (ewe)
• Headstand from a chubby guy (Sang thought it was impossible for the guy’s size. LOL)
• Screeching for 30 seconds (I think it didn’t really last 30 seconds)
• Singing (desperate to get the jacket. LOL)
• Moonwalking (the guy performed another talent I can’t remember)
• The winner – the guy who can move his ears, chest muscles (individually or at the same time), butt cheeks (individually or at the same time), belly.  He won because his talent was funny especially the voluntary movement of the butt cheeks.  I can’t do that (especially when all 5 big screens is focused your butt)!

Then Sang Shin danced with the winner. Yeah! I wonder if I can prepare a talent for next year’s event. Hmmm…

After the morning break, the attendees had to choose from four tracks: Web 2.0 Track, Java Development and Deployment Track, OpenSolaris Track, and Hands-on Labs Track.

The Web 2.0 covered the following:

• Ajax and Web 2.0 Related Frameworks and Toolkits
• Building Rich Web Applications using jMaki
• BI 2.0 with Elixir Repertoire NetBeans Plugin
• JSF and Ajax with Project Woodstock
• SOA Using OpenESB, BPEL and NetBeans
• MySQL: A Java Developer Perspective

The Java Development and Deployment Track covered the following:

• Programming for Cool Devices using the Open Source Java ME PhoneME Stack
• Java development overview for Mobile Platforms
• Metro and REST: Everyday Web Services
• Java Development on Mac: Tips and Tricks
• Java ME and Ajax
• Performance Tuning Applications: GC Friendly Java Programming

The OpenSolaris Track covered the following:

• How to Develop OpenSolaris Parallel Applications
• OpenSolaris Testing
• AMD Technical Session: Optimizing for Quad-core Solaris Systems based on AMD Platforms
• OpenSolaris Security For Developers
• Develop, Consolidate and Manage Virtual Environments Entirely in Open Source

I attended the Web 2.0 Track.  If you attended the other tracks, feel free to share the sessions.

First up was Ajax and Web 2.0 Related Frameworks and Toolkits by Sang Shin.  He covered the following:

• Client-side JavaScript libraries (Dojo)
• RMI-like remoting via proxy (DWR)
• Integrator (jMaki)
• Java to JavaScript/HTML Translator (GWT)
• AJAX-enabled JSF component
• Dynamic Faces
• Portlets and Ajax
• Web Application Frameworks with AJAX extension

If I remember correctly, he also presented a demo on using jMaki with Yahoo! and Google Maps mash-up. You can download his presentation here.

Next was Building Rich Web Applications using jMaki presented by Carol McDonald.  She gave an introduction about jMaki (allows you to use the best Ajax components  and toolkits) then discussed how jMaki supports server side implementation for multiple languages and platforms.

Resources:

• Main jMaki site
• jMaki Widgets site

After the lunch break, it was BI 2.0 with Elixir Repertoire NetBeans Plugin by Shih Hor Lau, CEO of Elixir Technology.  First, he talked about their company, their product (Elixir Repertoire, an Integrated Business Intelligence Suite based on Web 2.0 SOA), awards and customers.  Then he went on to discuss about Integrated Business Intelligence which eliminates integration and incompatibility that includes a dashboard, reporting, data ETL and scheduler.  Then on with business intelligence as a service (simpler, embeddable, more accessible), data navigation and visualization, data presentation and delivery, data aggregation and transformation, data activation and automation.  Then he compared their product with those of Oracle, IBM, Microsoft and Jaspersoft.

Honestly, while he was presenting what their product can do, I was thinking “What’s so special about this product? Everything he said so far can be coded given the right amount of time”, until he presented a demo of their product, which I think was impressive! It was like drag and drop and then comes the graph in split-second.  It looked fast enough for me because I remember having this program where generating 8000 records in pdf format took seconds.  Well, or course, like any other product, it has to be tested for more cases.  Their product can be used for financial tracking, CRM analytics, revenue collection, call center monitoring, security surveillance, and operations management.

Resources:

• Elixir Repertoire NetBeans Plugin

Before the afternoon break, it was JSF and Ajax with Project Woodstock by Tao Michael Li, Technology Evangelist, Sun Microsystems.  He started off by giving a brief discussion on what Ajax is what it does behind the scene.  Then gave the classic definition of JSF – a server-side user interface component framework for building Java technology-based web applications.  Then he talked about the UI components, value and method binding, beans.  And then he went on explaining the why’s and how’s of JSF + AJAX: decreases complexity, solves cross browser incompatibilities, internationalization, script management and versioning.  Then we talked about Dynafaces and Project Woodstock.  Too bad his demo was unsuccessful because of internet/NetBeans problem.

References:

• JSF home page
• Woodstock home page
• Dynamic faces home page

After the afternoon break, it was Sang Shin again.  This time he discussed SOA Using OpenESB, BPEL and NetBeans.  He covered the following:

• Composite Applications
• BPEL
• Services
• JBI
• Java EE Service Engine
• Open ESB
• Open ESB runtime, tools, and sample apps

You can download his presentation here.

The last presenter for the whole Sun Tech Days 2008 Manila was Colin Charles.  He presented MySQL: A Java Developer Perspective.  He was so cool!  He talked about storage engines, indexes, data types, SQL performance tips, connectors, resources.  Here are a couple of important points from his presentation:

• Right storage engine can greatly improve performance in many applications
• Transaction-safe tables (InnoDB) are safer
• MyISAM has excellent INSERT performance and has small footprint
• Know when to use INT, TINYINT UNSIGNED, BIT, BIGINT AUTO_INCREMENT
• Know when to use CHAR vs VARCHAR
• Use NOT NULL
• 1,000 small queries is worse than 1 slow query
• Scan operations are better than multiple seek operations
• Don’t use sub-queries.  Use JOIN instead.

Resources:

• MySQL Forge and the Forge Wiki
• Planet MySQL
• MySQL DevZone
• 5-day Training course
• Colin Charles Agenda

What else? There were t-shirt and squeeze Duke give-aways for those who were able to answer/ask questions from the presenters.  I was able to get two white t-shirts for answering a question gibberishly.  In Sang Shin’s words, “I can’t really understand what this man is saying, but I think he’s right.” LOL.  They also gave away back packs, notebooks, and pens.  Those who attended the OpenSolaris track said that Sun UltraSPARC servers and LCD monitors were raffled.  And of course, there was also the N95 raffle.

Pictures (it did happen!):

Blog posts of the event from the presenters:

• Manila; Moderation done right; Breadcrumbs for NetBeans by Tim Boudreau
• NetBeans in Manila by Geertjan Wielenga
• Sun Tech Days, Day 1, Manila, 2008 by Geertjan Wielenga
• Sun Tech Days, Day 2, Manila, 2008 by Geertjan Wielenga
• NetBeans in Manila: Standing Room Only… by Geertjan Wielenga on Dzone
• MySQL Rocks: Wen Huang, in Makati City, Philippines by Colin Charles
• Firefox Download Day by Colin Charles

Others who blogged about the event:

• Sun Tech Days in Manila 2008 by nightfox on The Armorer’s CodeX
• Sun Tech Days Manila by Joy Isaguirre on Musing of a Blog Convert
• My Sun Tech Days Experience by Em on Shirushimasu!
• Guess who was at Sun Tech Days in Manila by Clair on  New Linux User
• Sun Tech Days in Manila by missyosigirl in psst… yosi tayo

I’m looking forward to next year’s event!

Related posts:

1. Sun Tech Days Philippines update
2. Ruby, JRuby, and Rails Application Development (with Passion!) starts today