QCon Wednesday (3)

A quick note from the QCon. We got really busy, from 9:00 AM till 19.30 PM there were a lot of presentations in a lot of tracks. Although some of the presentations turn out to be poor, Bart and I are having a good time and learning a lot of new stuff.

Erich Gamma – How Eclipse changed my views on software development
A good keynote by a famous name about the development of Eclipse with points about architecture, open source, process etc. At the end he demonstrated Jazz, a really (really) big environment for large distributed software development. It’s looks interesting, alas no open source.

Building smart client applications with Visual Studio .Net 2008
Daniel Moth demonstrated some interesting new features of Visual Studio. He did this at such a record speed that, to understand it, the public will have to download the videos from his blog and play them at half speed. Still, it’s nice to see what can be done nowadays.

Agile mashups
A talk about how teams in the field don’t follow the XP/DSDM/Scrum-book, but combine practices that work for them. Nothing really new, but a nice confirmation from the speaker who has a lot of contacts in the field. The room is packed, testifying to the continuing interest in agile methodologies. By the way, a ‘Ziffer’ is a Zero Feature Iteration. By the way, the percentage of women in the audience is significantly higher than in our students. Maybe it's just a dutch problem?

Real Time Java for banking applications
I couldn’t see the screen and couldn’t understand the speaker with his french (?) accent. When my neighbour started snoring, I threw in the towel. But this RTJS might be interesting to explore sometime for our TI-students.

From betting to gaming to Tradefair
About the the challenges that Betfair (a betting site) faces and how they took their expertise of transaction processing to start a new company Tradefair in the financial domain. This was all very interesting but when the juicy part came up, they didn’t want to show their cards. So just how they solved those interesting problems wasn’t disclosed.

Liquidity Hub
These people faced about the same problems as the previous ones. They had to achieve something like 20.000 transactions *per second* with a latency of maximum 100ms. They achieved this using Java! The key was Weblogic Real Time, a alternative JVM implementation with real time guarantees.

Does my bus look big in this?
A keynote by Martin Fowler himself and another guy. It was funny and fastpaced to keep us awake. We had a good laugh, but the clou was lost on me. Don't use an Enterprise Service Bus, just use the web (?)

Please note that all the slides will become available on the QCon site. I have a lot more notes about sites to visit and technologies to check, but I won’t put them all here.

Quotes of the day:
(Erich Gamma about releasing closed software to the open source community) “It’s like a christmas present. You have to include the batteries, otherwise it’s no fun.”
(Standard message about evacuating the building when the building gets on fire) “You MUST take care when crossing the road.”