TechJava

The Java User Group Hamburg (JUG-HH) organizes another event at Lehmanns Bookstore in Hamburg. This time the subject of the talk is build management and project automation with help of an open-source tool called Maven. Maven is a software project management and comprehension tool. Based on the concept of a project object model (POM), Maven can manage a project’s build, reporting and documentation from a central piece of information.

On June 16th another Eclipse Demo Camp took place in Hamburg. Organized by Peter Friese of itemis and Martin Lippert of it-agile, Eclipse enthusiasts and presenters met in a former coffee exchange in the harbor of Hamburg, the so called “Hafencity”.

The evening started with an interesting preview of Xtext 2.0 by Sven Efftinge (also itemis). Xtext 2.0 is rewritten from scratch and provides better performance than its predecessor. The current plan for release is about October 2008. The talk was followed by a presentation given by Matthias Lübken (akquinet it-agile) who demostrated how to use the google web toolkit (GWT) in conjunction with serverside Equinox framework. Matthias talked about some of the tweaks which are necessary in order to get the two working together and also showed a little live demo. He was followed by Stefan Reichert of Lufthansa Systems who introduced his ‘wicked shell’ for Eclipse. This handy tool started as tech-demo how to bind an external process to a SWT widget. Finally, it turned into a command line, shell, bash… integration for Eclipse – featuring code completion and history. Reginald Stadlbauer (CEO froglogic) showed how to automize GUI testing of GWT and other Java based GUIs using froglogics Squish. Squish offers scripting languages like Perl, Python or JavaScript to the user to automatize application gui testing. The tool, not an Eclipse application itself, is currently rewritten and will feature full Eclipse integration sometime soon. Finally, Frank Zimmermann (Prof. at the Nordakademie) and two of his students Stefan Tanck and Henning Banneitz showed how model-driven software development (MDSD) using oAWs XText can be used to generate adapters for SAP SI in order to transform EDIFACT messages to XML and back. Unfortunately, a talk about Spring dynamic modules with OSGi was not held, the presenter Gerd Wütherich (independant consulting) was ill.

Apart from the interesting talks, it was nice to see many familiar faces, which attended the Eclipse Demo Camp in Hamburg at the end of 2007. The Eclipse Demo Camp seems to build a community. Thanks to the organizers for enabling this great event.

Yesterday, as reported earlier a great session on Java EE 5 featured by Adam Bien took place in Lehmanns Buchhandlung in Hamburg. It was a full success, having approx. 100 developers taking part. Adam asked for the experiences with Java EE and it seemed to be a bunch of professionals. The session slides contained only headings, the rest of the story has been done in NetBeans 6.1 and Glassfish. The entire session has been executed on pretty high speed – to be honest, Adam spoke that quick I just could understand. The session took place in the bookstore, that basically sells two types of books: computer and medical. Adam noticed that the shelf to the right of him contained books on psychiatry, and pointed each time he wanted to express that the antipattern leads to…

Regarding the content, Adam focused on two main directions: the basic enterprise patterns and enterprise anti-patterns (this could be a good book title, btw.). General ideas, like support of DRY principle, convention over configuration and IoC, that are on my opinion the greatest achievements of Java EE 5 has been explained in a very plastic way. Especially, Adam really showed, that the bad-artifacts that made J2EE development boring disappeared in Java EE (or may be better to say: can be avoided). The last part of the talk was attended to the nonfunctional activities around the developed software. Adam focused on testing, management, monitoring, performance, etc… It was pretty interesting to see that Java EE community listens to the developer voices and push the technology towards modern, pragmatic and efficient programming platform.

During and after the session one could ask questions around the topics. Adam told a lot during the answers and proved again his excellent expertise in the Java in general and Java EE in particular. I really enjoyed the session and hope that the next one will not let us wait for several years again. Adam spoke about possible JavaFX session – this would be also very interesting.

( more photos in my photostream)

May 19th, 2008 seems to become an important day for the computer science in Hamburg.

Modelling BPEL Using Abstract State Machines

May 19th, 15:30 – 16:30
Ditze Hörsaal, Schwarzenbergstr. 95, 016 (AudiMax I building), 21073 Hamburg
by Prof. Egon Börger from the University of Pisa, Italy. ( original announcement)

It starts with an invited talk of a Prof. Dr. Egon Börger, famous computer science researcher, applying the concepts of Abstract State Mashines to the software and hardware design at Hamburg University of Technology.

Pragmatic Java EE 5 Hacking – Rethinking Best Practices

May 19th, 20:00 – 22:00
Lehmanns Fachbuchhandlung (am Hauptbahnhof)
Kurze Mühren 6, 20095 Hamburg
by Adam Bien ( original announcement)

On the same day the meeting of the Java User Group Hamburg takes place at Lehmanns Fachbuchhandlung. This time an invited talk on “Progmatic Java EE 5 Hacking” by Adam Bien. Java Champion Adam Bien is a self-employed consultant, lecturer, software architect, developer, and author in the enterprise Java sector in Germany who implements Java technology on a large scale. He is also the author of several books and articles on Java and J2EE technology, as well as distributed Java programming. His books include J2EE Patterns, J2EE HotSpots, Java EE 5 Architectures, Enterprise Architectures, Enterprise Java Frameworks, SOA Expert Knowledge, and Struts, all published in German.

Java EE 5 is a revolution, not an evolution. Perhaps it goes not far enough – however some best-practices and patterns need to be pimped up, re-thought or pruned. After a short introduction into Java EE 5 / Java EE 6 (with a from scratch creation of a simple application with all “enterprise features”). The talk will provide the concept, patterns, best practices and discuss the context, advantages as well as shortcomings and provide suggestions / solutions for Java EE 5/6. This session will be interactive / openspace like. I’m really open for constructive criticism and will try to answer all questions with …code and real world context. Some upcoming Java EE 6 features will be presented as well.

So, see you there…

Yesterday, the first “Eclipse Stammtisch Hamburg” took place in Bolero in Ottensen. It was a full success, about 50 people were there. I was glad to see people I known from Eclipse Democamp again. I liked the location, having a separated room, big enough for another 50 people. I spoke with Ralph on the intended frequency of the event – it could be good to have it four times a year.
The rest of the pictures can be seen in my FlickR gallery.