Jazoon 2012: Divide&Conquer: Efficient Java for Multicore World

29. June, 2012

Not much new in the talk “Divide&Conquer: Efficient Java for Multicore World” by Sunil Mundluri and Velmurugan Periasamy.

Amdahl’s law shows that you can’t get an arbitrary speed-up when running part of your code in parallel. In practice, you can expect serial code to execute 2-4 times faster if you run it with, say, the fork/join framework of Java 7. This is due to setup + join cost and the fact that the tasks themselves don’t get faster – you just execute more of them at the same time. So if a task takes 10 seconds and you can run all of them in parallel, the total execution time will be a bit over 10s.

If you want to use fork/join with Java 6, you can add the jsr166y.jar to your classpath.

Again, functional programming makes everything more simple. With Java 8 and lambda expressions, syntactic sugar will make things even more readable but at a price.

You might want to check one of today’s new languages like Xtend, Scala or Groovy to get these features today with Java 6.

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Jazoon 2012: Akka 2.0 – Scaling up and out with Actors

29. June, 2012

Concurrency is too hard but we need it. In his talk “Akka 2.0 – Scaling up and out with Actors,” Viktor Johan Klang showed new features of Akka 2.0.

The framework now uses Future to create pipes between actors and Promise to write data to, say, a stream (docs).

To make error handling more simple, there is now “parental supervision.”

Decoupling actors becomes even more with the Event Bus API.

There is support for ZeroMQ to create grids/meshes of actors (docs).

But every framework has its limitations. If you hit one of those, it’s usually either “Use the Source, Luke” or “You’re out of luck”. Akka 2.0 comes with a new extensions mechanism to hook into the framework.

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Jazoon 2011, Day 2 – JavaFX 2.0 With Alternative Languages – Groovy, Clojure, Scala, Fantom, and Visage – Stephen Chin

26. June, 2011

JavaFX 2.0 With Alternative Languages – Groovy, Clojure, Scala, Fantom, and Visage – Stephen Chin

Stephen showed how to use JavaFX 2.0 with other programming languages like Groovy or Scala. This is possible because the next version of JavaFX has a pure Java API for everything.

It was nice to see how well Groovy and Scala fared versus JavaFX itself. Even a dedicated Xtext-based DSL might not yield much better results.

Links:

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