Conferences
This will be the first time I would be heading to developer conferences within EU. This year I had plans to attend FOSDEM, but they did not materilize, there is always next year.

Devoxx: This conference is an Antwerp, a city which I had the pleasure of staying in summer of 2009. This conference is definitely on the top of my list.
JAOO: is a Danish Java conference in Arahus (roughly 4 hours away from where I live by Ferry and Train). I have already put my name on the Volunteers list for this conference
JavaZone: A java conference held in Oslo. Interestingly I found about this by watching a funny movie trailer for this conference just this weekend. I think the very first time I watched a  video of a conference back in 2007 was when i was reseaching framework selection and watched  Matt Raible talking about frameworks in this conference in 2007. Oslo is also 4 hours away from where I live.

Unfortunately my budget wont let me permit to go to Oredev, but I think I have my schedule already full

Books
Although I am a strong proponent of learning by practice and experience, one cannot ignore that learning technology from books released in a timely manner is probably the best resource for developers.
I am very interested in the following books. You must be able to tell that this is very Spring centric list

Spring in a Nutshell
Enterprise OSGi in Action
OSGi in Action
Spring in Action, Third Edition
Spring in Practice 3rd Edition
Spring Integration in Action
Spring Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach, Second Edition  (already have the beta)
Spring Security 3 (already released, on my reading list)

I think I would be getting access to most of these books online soon, if only I didn’t have to to spend my savings on going to conferences . I will try to update this page with more things I come acoress. Let me know if you know of a good conference within EU and upcoming books related to JavaEE.

I cannot discuss the idea or the solution in more details due to NDA.  I hope that later I can publish more details in public since I need to write the whole thing in the form of a thesis any way. But I would like to mention is the choice of technology for this project. This project could have been done in almost any platform as the client never had any specific requirement. I proposed JavaEE (Spring/Hibernate) for the following reasons

• Familiarity (I have been working on Spring/Hibernate for some good time now and I am familiar with how things work)
• Portability (the solution produced by this stack is highly portable, can be run in any environment based on tweaks, starting from Google App Engine to good old Unix server)
• Reliability (the systems produced by this stack are under use all over the world in like of Financial, Datawarehousing, corporate IT industries)
• Tooling (with advent of spring ROO and STS getting free we now have very good tooling support to rapidly prototype enterprise applications, I will talk about my experiences with ROO a bit later)

There are so many other good reasons to use Spring/Hibernate stack and those reasons can be found in various white papers and case studies published by spring source. Overall I am quite happy that I had a chance to learn lots of new things. Now the not so fun part of actually writing a thesis has begun which I have to deliver by the end of this academic year (Aug 2010). As of today I have officially wrapped up my work for the software portion of my thesis, lets see how many bugs popup during the next few months.It has been a nice learning experience so far and I hope to be a part of this project in the future when it goes commercial (in real sense).

I am posting this blog entry to chronicle my new endeavors in software development. These days software development is all about the cloud and web/Internet development in general. At the same time there is this notion of renisnace in software development with upcoming languages and paradigms (some thing I am totally psyched about). I have been fortunate enough to get a taste of some of these new languages through my course work at Chalmers and plan to continue on learning advanced features of languages in coming quarters.

In the last few weeks I have come to notice things coming out of SpringSource, namely STS, Spring ROO and Grails.

Grails is a natural choice if you want to cook up a web based application on the fly. It’s power relies on simplicity of Groovy, principles akin to ruby-on-rails, core and plugins which utilize proven Java technologies like Spring/Hibernate, JMS etc and last but not least built in Google AppEngine support.

Spring Roo is a newly released console based system for cooking up a Spring 3.0 application. It’s power relies on constructing a base spring application which is flexible (can be detached from spring roo at any point).

STS is essentially an Eclipse based IDE by Spring source, made free for developer use.

In the beginning I took Grails to be an attempt to rip off Ruby on Rails, and to some extent that feeling could be attributed to being a fanboy of RoR. Now you can call me a bigger fan boy of Springsource or some one with skeptical view of rails and 37signals.

The first thing which bothers me about rails is performance. Twitter is visible example with it’s massive outages, rails is not the primary contender in the performance arena (but that is probably overrated as likes of Twitter have a really large volume and not every RoR app would reach that volume). The second problem is too much power in ruby. I think that ruby is a nice language, but there are lots of features which are bit too scary for a first time developer, compared to Groovy i think Ruby would take more time to learn (I have to admit that I have been lazy learning both, but in my defense these are both not the primary languages at work or school). Last but not least with Springsource backing Grails makes Ruby-on-Rails the less enterprise friendly choice (in my opinion). There is an interesting comparison done here.

I will be focusing on even newer frameworks and paradigms as time permits, but for now I am stuck with what spring source has to offer. The primary reason is the current projects I am involved with are based on Spring 2.0 and it’s evolution is highly coupled within the ’spring family’.

The new frameworks/languages I am looking forward to are Scala(Lift), Erlang, Ocaml and perhaps even F# (from Microsoft). Scala is some thing I have yet to touch (I plan to work on it during my functional programming course this Fall). I have gotten a bit of hype on it from Java Posse pod cast which I have begun listening to (along with SERadio.net) Lift is to Scala what rails is to Ruby. I wonder if some thing similar exists for Erlang.