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Jazoon Cut is a nice idea: You got a project, they give you 20 minutes to present it (i.e. “cut” as in “cutting edge”). In this Cut, we had NetKernel, iGesture, Interactive Paper, and Privacy Supporting Identity Systems. A rather interesting mix.

The presentation of iGesture was a disaster from my point of view. The software is a workbench to create gesture recognition software or configuration packages for a gesture recognizer. That’s it. And it took the people in the audience about the same time to figure this out as it took you to read this. After that, we waited for something to happen and nothing did. Shame. My suggestion: Next time, bring a laptop, show the first two slides of your presentation and then take a mouse and show the real thing: Train the thing and see the people rip it out of your hands.

I did learn a few tricks how you can recognize gestures, though. The most simple way is to filter the input until you have general directions like up (U), left (L), right (R) or down (D), then simply create a string with these characters and use a regular expression to describe the gesture (a rectangle would then be /U+R+D+L+/).

Jazoon Cut is a nice idea: You got a project, they give you 20 minutes to present it (i.e. “cut” as in “cutting edge”). In this Cut, we had NetKernel, iGesture, Interactive Paper, and Privacy Supporting Identity Systems. A rather interesting mix.

In the NetKernel talk, Brian Sletten again tried to sell his “RDF is the best and you should use it everywhere.” Basically, NetKernel is a little core where you can register translation services (called … I don’t know what he called them and I can’t find the link to the actual presentation, just the abstract :/). So when a service needs some data (or “resource”), he calls the kernel and the kernel figures out who might be able to serve that request which might go through several hoops before it comes back. Nothing fancy here, Unix pipes do that for ages with the exception that they don’t build themselves.

His demo was to show how you could calculate Fibonacci numbers by using a “bsh” service (BeanShell, that’s JavaScript) to add two intermediate numbers of the result. You would imagine that this is slow as hell with all that creating messages, sending them around, starting a JavaScript interpreter and run each add. As you might remember, the Fibonacci generators are usually implemented recursively and that should kill the NetKernel.

Only it doesn’t. If you look at the runtime graphs, the Java version of the Fibonacci generator needs exponential time as the input grows. Around 30, the Java version takes seconds to run while the NetKernel version always needs to same amount of time. The nice thing about the design is that you can cache the results. So the call to fibonacci(30) will just add the cached results of fibonacci(29) and fibonacci(28) and be done. One level of recursion required.

While this is mighty impressive and surprising, the question remains how that will scale in reality. After all, caching a 500MB result from some service might not be feasible or even possible.

Not one of my favorite talks, to be frank. Brian Sletten tried to explain how we would write less code in the future because data would become more important. Seeing is believing and I haven’t seen nothing, yet.

He has a few good point like that we should be able to recall data sets which we created with Web 2.0 sites (kind of like bookmarks on steroids that can save the state of the web 2.0 app as you bookmark it). Also, that the semantic web will make a lot of things possible and happen.

I buy that. But on the other hand, we don’t even have a decent UI framework for Java yet and that’s eight (8) years after Swing came out. This sure looks promising; I just wonder if I will be still around when it starts to deliver and companies get the CPU power and network throughput to really run all their data through RDF converters. And see the result before you get downsized.

If you ever tried to develop a nice you with Java, you’ll know the pain. Swing: Old, steep learning curve, unweildy widgets. SWT: Nice, good learning curve, “which JAR’s do I need, Sir?” and who puts that DLL in my search path. There might be other contenders but I don’t even remember their names.

So the guys at Canoo faces the dragon and chipped a few scales off it. As Bruno Schäffer said in his talk:

Developers should focus on the what and not how.

They used Swing, some components from SwingX, JGoodies Smart Client and Jemmy for testing for the UI and something called c3pO for JDBC connection pooling to build a smart client. openArchitectureWare was used to generate a model editor for the data model, so they could generate the DAO classes for that efficiently.

Their application is split into modules but they don’t use OSGi or any other module framework out there because they got in their way, it’s just good old, traditioal loading on demand from the classpath. I can relate to that. OSGi is so great and stuff … but it somehow lost contact to the base. It’s just eithet not flexible enough or not simple enough for me to understand and use.

Good talk but less product placement for your company next time, Bruno.

So this is day one of the Jazzon with the keynotes and talks. I’ll go through things as they happened.

Scalable Languages

Martin Odersky, father of Scala, gave an introduction to scalable languages or rather to Scala. Well, Scala looks really promising with its traits and other features. But my original objection still remainds: The syntax is just ugly. Proves my point that there are only five people on this planet who can design a language and of them, I only know Guido van Rossum.

Adoption-Led Market

Simon Phipps followed wth a talk about the “Adoption-Led Market“. It’s astonishing how many OSS projects Sun supports or started and how little is known about that. Marketing again. *sigh* His talk wasn’t all about Sun but how people start to despise vendors or rather their promise that their product is going to deliver to the promise … after you’ve paid for it. Of course in an OSS world, where you can just download something and try it out, it becomes increasingly hard for them to “justify their 1000% profit margin.”

This is a very good point. With OSS software, you pay for what you need (and not what the vendor things is best for himbbbyou). If you need a feature, support or whatnot, well, you can always pay someone to give it to you. But then, you pay when you need it. That makes is a justifiable cost, not an arbitrary one. Also, support gets you what you need when you need it. Just imagine to ask MicroSoft for a specific feature in Windows which you need. How much would that cost? What are you’re chances to actually get it? Forget it! But with OSS, for the first time in software history, you can get what you need for a reasonable price and you might even make someone on the other side of the planet very happy.

Of course, “the greatest threat to freedom is a happy slave” but the talk gave a lot of arguments how to sell OSS to your company, even if that company happens to be the government.

He also gave a good reason which OSS license to chose for your next OSS project:

A license is the constitution of a community

Eben Moglen

Nice guy, good talk. If you can, vote for his photo at his website.

Innovation

The third keynote was by Rod Johnson: “Where will tomorrows innovation in Java Enterprise come from?” After explaining where innovation comes from, he shows how standards kill innovation and how committees can’t drive innocation due to political games by the companies who dispatch the people that form these committees plus general group stupidity.

After the more or less failure of the JCP in recent years, attributed mostly to ignoring feedback from the community and drowning ideas in ceremony, he hopes that JSR 316 (that’s Java Enterprise version 6) will help to fix Java EE. If it does, then that might mean that a good sign that the JCP has become a helper for the Java cause instead of another reason to abandon it.