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How were the Sun Tech Days?

Roman Pichlík ·

On Wednesday, November 15, I headed off eagerly to my second Sun Tech Days (STD from here on). That gives me at least two events to compare. Before giving my verdict, I'll recap the talks I attended and the things that caught my attention.

Keynote
Kafka, Dvořák, Jágr, Havel, or something along those lines, was how Pavel Šuk, head of Sun's Czech office, opened the keynote. I do not know why, but it stuck with me. The most interesting part was the technical demonstrations of what Java technologies could do. If you were there, it may surprise you that I was more interested in the Swing desktop application demo than in the robots chasing each other around a white tablecloth. I would go so far as to call it Swing Next Generation. The application's look and feel was incredible for Swing.
Java EE 5 and Glassfish: A Plunge into the Aquarium
For me, this was the most interesting talk at STD. The GlassFish application server, the reference implementation of J2EE 5.0, also serves as Sun App Server. One of its developers, Harold Carr, presented the server's design and, interestingly, went into the details of the architecture. I was intrigued by Grizzly, their HTTP connector, and the scaling results they showed against, for example, Coyote, the connector Tomcat uses. There was also Phobos, which integrates scripting languages into GlassFish. It supports JavaScript so far.
Sun Java DB, a Small, Easy to Use, Pure Java RDBMS
An introduction to Apache Derby, the standalone versus server model, supported standards and protocols. The possibility of writing database procedures in Java caught my eye. The speaker convinced me Java DB is a good alternative to HSQLDB, though, as he said, it cannot compete with Oracle or SQL Server. They showed some performance figures, and I remember the conclusion about low memory use. I was fairly disappointed by the demo meant to show Java DB in an applet. It was hard to tell what point they were trying to make, and it struck me as a pointless use of this database.
JAX-WS and Tangoing with .NET (WSIT)
Harold Carr again, this time on web services and especially interoperability between Java and .NET. Apparently Sun and Microsoft worked closely together and got transactions, security and so on working over web services. There was also discussion of JAXB 2.0, which serializes and deserializes between Java and XML.
Web 2.0: The Technologies and Tools to Build It
This talk completely disappointed me. Doris Chen said nothing about Web 2.0 or how Sun's tools support it. It was all about JSF, and I have to say it didn't even do that well. It felt like an attempt to cram everything Java Studio Creator can do into the time available. This talk finally convinced me that Web 2.0 is a buzzword. It probably made it into the title because the demo used AJAX components from Java Studio Creator's palette. In other words, the definition of a Web 2.0 application is that it uses AJAX and has “beta” in its name.
In-depth Session: EJB 3.0 and Java Persistence APIs: Experience the Simplicity
A two-hour talk on EJB 3.0 in several parts. Part one: We spent years telling you how great EJB was, then realized in version 3.0 that it was awfully complicated to use. So we replaced deployment descriptors with annotations and saw that Spring's POJOs and IoC had something going for them. Part two: Entity beans are played out and Hibernate does persistence so nicely. Let's take inspiration from it, make something similar and call it Java Persistence API. While we're at it, a developer might want to use JPA in a desktop application too, so let's make that possible. Part three: Of course EJB 3.0 is supported in our development tools, including NetBeans. I found it quite an interesting talk.

All told, I would give the talks a four out of ten. If you went in knowing something about the technology, you usually did not learn anything new, though at least you refreshed what you knew. That was my experience with the sessions I attended. It is debatable whether highly specialized talks are a good fit for STD. Unfortunately, I did not go to any hands-on lab, which might have let me explore a technology in more depth. I can easily imagine STD being packed with new information for Java beginners, though.

STD is also a chance to meet former colleagues and other developers, arrange business and exchange information. The space and facilities made that fairly easy.

I also have to mention QBizm's Java puzzle competition at STD. There were some real trick questions. Here are two that caught my attention, loosely reproduced.

try{

 System.out.println("Hello");

 System.exit(0);

 }finally{

 System.out.println("World");

 }

What will it print?

  1. Hello
  2. HelloWorld
  3. It won't compile

And the second puzzle.

//a.)

 String sql = "ahoj tady " + name + ", jak se mas v " + time + "?";

 

 //b.)

 StringBuffer sql = new StringBuffer();

 sql.append("ahoj tady ");

 sql.append(name);

 sql.append(", jak se mas v ");

 sql.append(time);

 sql.append("?");

Which will be more efficient at runtime?

  1. a
  2. b
  3. a and b are equivalent

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