Not Just Java

Well, day two picked up a little.  I attended some fun sessions and the crowd seemed to warm up a bit.  My favorate session was the GWT presentation.  Brian Johnson gave a talk and explained the basic premise behind the toolkit.  I was really into it and I am definitely going to download it and see what I can do.  I didn’t realize that it’s actually open source. That is rare for Google, so I am impressed.  The other neat talk was by Ola Bini on JRuby.  I liked seeing the Ruby syntax invoking Java objects. That was really cool.  It made me start thinking about how lambda reduction and aspects are really the same thing.  I should pitch that idea to the Spring contingent tomorrow and see what they say.

Last night for dinner we took the local metro subway to the waterfront and ate at a place called 7portes. It was awesome!   We had paella and it was one of the best meals I’ve ever had in my life.  The salad was good, the wine was good and the main course was amazing.  The music was funny though - they had a piano player who was playing American hits from the 80s like Richard Marx, which was a little weird.  But other than that, it was cool.  The metro was pretty neat. You can get all over town once you learn to read the color-coded signs.  So, this weekend, I’m going to visit several museums and go to the beach. I can’t wait!

-jasen

We are doing the European TSS show and I thought it would be fun to do some daily posts like I did for JavaOne.  I have noticed some interesting cultural differences between European techies and us Americans.  First of all, they don’t care about slinkys as much here.  We couldn’t keep our free slinkys on the table at JavaOne, here people always look at them and keep walking.  We have given some away, but people always laugh at them like they’re ridiculous.  A couple British people take them, but they always ask first which is also uncommon.  So to summarize:

1) Americans:  love slinkys, will try to trick you to get one for free, aren’t bringing them home for kids (that’s a lie they want it for their office to play with)

2) British:  partially amused by slinkys, will apologize for thinking of taking one, bringing them home to make fun of Americans

3) Germans:  think slinkys are foolish, will stare at you silently if you offer them one, may take one home to show kinder (children) how silly Americans are

4) All other Europeans:  think slinkys are part of our product, don’t realize they are toys, may take one home to beef up their car’s suspension

As for Appistry’s software however, there is a lot of interest, especially by GigaSpaces employees.  (I know they monitor use of their company name on blogs so this is a meta-joke to see if I can get their CEO to come say "Hi" to me.)  But seriously the crowd is full of architects and developers and they like to discuss how to scale Java appllications on commodity hardware.  They always ask great questions that show that they are engaged and are thinking about our solution.  From that perspective all the countires are on the same page, they don’t like complexity and expense.  Offering a simple easy to use product that cuts processing costs by an order of magnitude makes sense no matter where you’re from.

-jasen

I ran across this cool post on a Natural Language Processing blog.  The site distributes a tool that I’m using for an NLP project as part of my masters degree.  The post discusses how they refactored to use generics and has some great discussion and recources on the topic.

"My major complaint about Java when I first saw it was the lack of parametric typing. Many, if not most, of my programming errors are from assigning something to the wrong argument. I’m hopeless in Perl, for instance. As always, be careful what you wish for. Little prepared me for the complexity of Java 1.5 generics."  Read the entire post here.