It is less than a month to RailsWayCon in Berlin, so I thought I’d mention it here. This look like it will be a very nice conference. The dates are May 25 to May 27, in Berlin, Germany.

I will do two presentations and one keynote there. The presentations will be “JRuby Internals” and “Ioke for Ruby developers”. The keynote is called “Present and future of programming languages” and will feature my typical kind of ranting about programming languages.

Anyway. Hope to see you in Berlin! You can find more information here: http://it-republik.de/conferences/railswaycon.

1 Comment | By Ola Bini | In: blogging, ioke | tags: berlin, conference, conferences, ioke, jruby, keynote, presentations, railswaycon. | #

All in all, QCon London this year was amazing. I find it interesting that from the first time I attended QCon I thought they were exceptionally good. And every time they keep getting better. Of course, it is fantastic to be able to meet all these great people at the conference, and you get lots of chances to hang out with them, ask questions and have discussions. But if you take a look at the presentations offered, they all feel very fresh and the quality is consistently of a very high level.

I think the system of having track hosts that put together their own track is a fantastic idea, and I think it might be one of the reasons that there are ALWAYS more than one presentation going that you want to see.

The fact that the QCon crew from InfoQ and Trifork are all lovely people is not a negative either.

If you haven’t visited QCon, I really think you should. It is really very good, and I’m privileged to have been asked to present there more than once. I always have a great time and I hope I will be able to continue to come back there.

No Comments | By Ola Bini | In: blogging | tags: conferences, presentations, qcon, qcon london. | #

So, I literally just got back from San Francisco, having attended QCon there. As always, it turned out to be a great event, with fantastic people and a very interesting presentations on the schedule. As it turns out, me and Nick’s tutorial was on the afternoon of the Monday, so after that everything could just get better. … In fact, the tutorial ended up working very well. I was happy to have Nick there, so I didn’t have to do all the talking myself. And Nick is much better at Rails than me anyway. So it was definitely a success.

The morning before out tutorial I spent in the Erlang tutorial, which was fun. Francesco is a very good teacher, and we got through lots of material.

Having finished my stuff the first day, I spent the rest of the week cruising around, relaxing and hanging out with nice people. The Tuesday I ended up in Martin’s, Neal’s and Rebecca’s tutorial on DSLs. I’ve been in this tutorial several times, but it just keeps getting better. Especially Rebecca’s pieces on parsing turned out to be very well polished this time. And of course, they are all great presenters.

The Wednesday keynote with Martin and Rebecca was about architecture, and how agile can help architecture groups with their problems as well as help bridge the gap between developers and architects, that often exist in larger organizations. Very well done.

The rest of the Wednesday I sat in the “Ruby in the Enterprise” track. I found out that Merb 1.0 runs very well on JRuby. Jason Seifer pronounced JRuby the winner among all the existing Ruby implementations, which was nice.

And then I had to run away and do an impromptu JRuby presentation at the nearby Girls In Tech Developer Forum.

At the end of the day, I saw Dean Wampler mix up all the free floating ideas about polyglot programming, and talk about it in something that approached a cohesive whole (which I’ve never been able to do). A well done presentation.

I can’t say I got too much out of Kent’s evening keynote, though. I ended up going out for a quiet dinner instead.

The Thursday began Tim Bray talking about the future of storage mediums. This presentation was too far away from my interests to produce anything stronger than a “meh…”.

After that I have a large gap in the schedule – I was supposed to see some presentations, but ended up hacking on a new language grammar with Kresten instead. Great fun of course.

After lunch I sat in on Brian’s talk on concurrency with the fork-join framework. This one I think I’d already seen, so I ended up working on Ioke during it.

Dennis Byrne gave a very cool talk on DSLs in Erlang. There is some stuff you can do that’s totally unbelievable. Best talk of the day. Possibly of the week.

After Dennis talk I’m not sure what I did actually. No memory. Oh, that’s right, I looked at the JUG panel and then went to the speakers dinner. The JUG panel was among others Rod Johnson, Bob Lee and one of the Seam guys. There were some mention of Rails in a way that meant the persons mentioning it hadn’t actually used it. There was also some static typing bias (especially from Bob who said that static typing was objectively better than dynamic typing).

During the Friday I spent some time in the functional language track (and saw a very nice talk about using Haskell to work with music), and I also saw Eric Evans give a very good talk about Strategic Design.

And that was QCon San Francisco. A very good conference, as usual.

1 Comment | By Ola Bini | In: blogging | tags: conferences, qcon, qcon san francisco. | #

I almost forgot. I’ll be at QCon San Francisco next week. I’m landing late Sunday, and staying around ’til the next Sunday. As usual, I expect QCon to be a blast. Me and Nick Sieger will hold a tutorial on JRuby, which should be fun too.

Hope to see lots of you there!

1 Comment | By Ola Bini | In: blogging | tags: conferences, qcon. | #

Just came back from the first day of the JVM language summit, and it’s been a very interesting day indeed. I made some bad morning choices – and spending some time fighting Notes – so I ended up arriving ten minutes into the first presentation.

The JVM language summit is a three day event organized by Sun, and the collection of people in the room is quite impressive. There are about 80 people all in all, and several huge names among them. Very fun.

So, the first talk was a quick intro to the Hotspot engine, what kind of features it sport and what we can expect from it in the future. (They’re adding a new GC algorithm, among other things).

After that John Rose talked about the DaVinci machine, and what specifically is part of the JSR292 work (invokedynamic and method handles mostly), but he also talked about other language features that might be nice to have, such as continuations, tail calls, value types and other things. During this talk Mark Reinhold said that invoke dynamic will be a part of Java 7, as I posted earlier.

Bernd Mathiske talked about the Maxine VM, which was quite interesting although I’ve seen more or less the same talk before.

After that there was time for lunch and open spaces discussions. I ended up in the same room as Terence Parr and some other people talking about Antlr. I made the bad decision to quickly tell them about a project I’m working on, and as a result I now have to actually finish it and publish it. Why can’t I just shut up? (Announcement will be posted shortly)

We got a quick intro to the Fan language, talking about some of the issues involved in supporting both the JVM and .NET from the same language. One of the large implications is that Java interop won’t really happen in such a language. Everything you use need to be implementation in the Fan standard library – at least that’s the impression I got.

Scott Davies did a classic introduction to Groovy. It was mostly geared towards Java developers and as such maybe weren’t a perfect match for the audience. He did make some good points from a perspective language designers/implementors don’t generally spend much time on.

Finally, Iulian Dragos talked about some of the ways Scala is optimized, how closures are compiled and what kind of compiler optimizations is done. This was really interesting, although I didn’t get the chance to ask about structural types.

The talk about Fortress was really interesting. If I was in the target audience I would be totally drooling, and as a language implementor it sure seems cool too. Implicit parallelism is hard to get right, but it sure seems like Fortress does it.

During the JVM multiple dispatch talk I sadly zoned out and worked on the project I’d mentioned to Terence. It seemed to be quite interesting, although I’m quite skeptical about the benefits of multiple dispatch in a language like Java. It doesn’t feel like methods should belong to classes in such a system.

Finally, Stuart Halloway hold a lightning talk about how different features of a language contribute to making it easy working in an agile way. Of course, calling it a lightning talk was a bit funny, since it ran to 30-35 minutes…

Looking forward to several session tomorrow. Goslings keynote might be interesting, Attila’s talk will be fun, and the talk about gradual typing in Python looks cool too.

4 Comments | By Ola Bini | In: blogging | tags: conferences, jvm language summit. | #

I’ve landed, gotten mostly back in the right timezone without too many incidents (except running through SFO to board very badly scheduled connection).

After allowing the impressions from the last 6-7 days to sink in a little, it’s time to summarize RailsConf. I’ll go through the sessions I saw and then do some concluding remarks.

The first day was tutorials. I had a good time in Neal Fords and Pat Farleys tutorial on Metaprogramming. I can’t say I learned much from the sessions, but it was very good content, extremely well presented, and I got the impression that many in the room learned lots of crucial things. The kind of knowledge about internals you get from a talk like this allows you to understand how metaprogramming in Ruby actually works, which makes it easier to achieve the effects you want.

After that I sat around hacking in the Community Code Drive for the rest of the day, with lots of other people. I wasn’t involved in gitjour (which by the way is incredibly cool), but I did manage to find a memory leak in iTerms Bonjour handling due to gitjour. Neat. Me and David Chelimsky paired on getting support for multiline plain text story arguments into RSpec, and by the end of the afternoon it was in.

Finally, we headed out to the JRuby hackfest, which ended up being over full with people. That’s a good problem to have. We had a great time, hacking on different things, helping people to get started and debugging various problems. All in all it was a very productive day.

I began the Friday with Joel Spolsky’s keynote. In contrast to many other people I didn’t like it. There wasn’t really any content at all, just some humorous content and lots of jokes about naked women. I expect something a bit more profound for the first keynote of the conference, since they have a tendency to actually set the standard for the rest of the days.

After the keynote, John Lam showed off IronRuby running a few simple Rails requests. This is a great achievement, and I’m very impressed with their results. I have argued that IronRuby would probably never reach this point, and I’m very happy to admit I was wrong and offer my apologies to John Lam and the IronRuby team. That said, the fact that IronRuby runs a few different Rails requests is not the same thing as saying that IronRuby runs Rails. My personal definition of running Rails is more about having the Rails test suite run at a high percentage of success (something like 96-98% would be good enough for almost all Rails apps to work, provided they are the right 98%). (ED: Evan Phoenix just told me that MRI doesn’t run the Rails test suite totally clean either, because of the way the Rails development process works. So a 100% is probably not a good measure of Rails compatibility.) I assume that this is going to be the next goal for the IronRuby team, and I wish them good luck.

I saw the Hosting talk after that, but I have to admit I was wrapped up in a seriously annoying JRuby bug at the moment so I didn’t really pay attention.

The DataMapper talk was very full and gave a good overview of why DataMapper might be a better choice than AR in many cases. The presentation style could possibly have been a bit less dry, but the content was definitely delicious.

If the next two days were the JRuby days, the Friday was the day for all other alternative implementations. I sat in on the Rubinius talk by Evan Phoenix and friends, and then the much talked about MagLev presentation.

I first want to congratulate Rubinius on running several different Rails requests. It’s very cool and a great milestone. The same caveats as for IronRuby applies of course. But wow, the debugging features is awesome. First class meta objects are extremely powerful, and will provide many capabilities to the platform. The presentation was also extremely entertaining. One of the best presentations for the sheer fun everyone seemed to have. Props to Evan, Brian and Wilson for this.

So. The MagLev talk. First, there seems to be some misunderstandings about what MagLev actually is. It is not a hosting service. Gemstone might offer a hosting service around MagLev in the future, but that’s not what is going on here. MagLev is a new virtual machine for Ruby, based on Gemstone/S. Basing it on a Smalltalk machine makes it very easy for Gemstone to implement a large subset of Ruby and having it running cleanly and with good performance. Exactly how much has been implemented at this point is not really clear, since no major applications run, and the RubySpecs have not been used on it yet. I assume that the implementation doesn’t handle enough Ruby features yet to be able to run the mspec runner and other important machinery.

Was this presentation important? Yeah, sure. To a degree. It was a cool presentation, whetting peoples appetite by showing something that might some day become a real Ruby platform with built in support for an incredible OODB. But it’s still early days.

The Saturday began with Jeremy’s keynote. He talked about the new things in Rails 2.1 and also showed the same app running in Ruby 1.8, 1.9, Rubinius and JRuby. Very cool.

I ended up in Nathaniel Talbotts 23 Hacks session which was fun. Good stuff.

After that the JRuby day began in earnest with Nick’s talk about deploying JRuby on Rails. This was mostly the same talk as given at JavaOne, but more geared towards Ruby programmers. Useful information.

Dan Manges and Zak Tamsen gave an extremely useful talk about how to test Rails applications correctly. Very good material. Exactly the strong kind of deep technical knowledge, gained by experience, that people go to conferences to get.

My talk about JRuby on Rails was generally well received. I had a fun time, and of course I managed to run out of time as usual. I wonder why I’m always afraid of running out of material. That has never happened when I’m talking bout JRuby.

The final technical session of the day ended up being a walk-around to all the different presentations going on and taking a peek, and then ending up hacking in the speakers room.

The evening keynote was by Kent Beck, and as usual he is fantastic to listen to.

The Sunday started with the CS nerds anonymous session, held by Evan Phoenix. It ended up being a kind of lightning talk session, and had some nice points.

After that Ezra gave his talk – that had nothing to do with the session title. He presented Vertebra, which is a cloud computing control system, based on XMPP, Erlang and the actors model. Very cool stuff, although it might not be that useful for people who aren’t in charge of a quite large number of computers. But if you have your own botnet, this might be the best way to control them all. =)

The final session of the day was the JRuby Q&A session, which basically flew by. The first ten minutes went in normal time, and then suddenly the session was over. I think we had good attendance, and the right level of questions. You can see all the points covered in Nicks blog, here.

And then it was over.

So, what was good? The technical level was definitely deeper and more rooted in experience. I have to say that this was probably the best Ruby conference I’ve been to, based on the depth and level of the presentations. Kudos to the scheduling people.

And what was bad? A little bit too much hype about MagLev, and everyone’s tendency to use dark colors on black backgrounds in their presentations. Hey, they look good on your computer screen, but it’s really not readable!

No Comments | By Ola Bini | In: Uncategorized | tags: conferences, railsconf, railsconf08, ruby. | #

This week has mostly been taken up with QCon London. I spent most of Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday here, and I thought that I’d take the opportunity to write up some of my impressions and thoughts about the sessions I attended.

First, in general the conference definitely didn’t disappoint me. It held at least as high standard as I had expected from earlier QCon and JAOO conferences. Solid speakers, a wide range of exciting topics and lots of interesting people made for a grade A conference.

I started out on the Monday with listening to my colleagues Neal Ford, Rebecca J Parsons and Martin Fowler give a tutorial on domain specific languages. I’ve seen bits and parts of this tutorial before, but seeing as the three speakers are working on evolving it to a full and coherent “pedagogical framework” for teaching DSLs, the current presentation had changed quite a bit since the last time. I really liked it and I recommend it to anyone interested in getting a firm grasp about what DSLs are. Having Rebecca talk about external DSLs in the context of parsers and grammars makes total sense, and the only real thing I would say was a problem was the time allotted to it. Her part of the subject was large enough that 75 minutes felt a bit rushed. Of course, I don’t see how Martins or Neals parts could be compressed much more either, so maybe the subject actually is too large for a one day tutorial? Anyway, great stuff.

For several reasons I decided to spend the Tuesday working from the office instead of attending tutorials again.

During the Wednesday I mostly spent my time in the exhibition hall, talking to people and doing general networking. For some reason the tracks I was least interested in had all been scheduled on the same day, so I was lazy and worked on other stuff in the ThoughtWorks booth.

The evening keynote on Wednesday by Martin Fowler and Jim Webber was hilarious, and also managed to get a quite important message across. I had a good time.

Thursday started the session attending for me, beginning with Markus Völters presentation of XText in the DSL track. Highly informative and something that I’ll keep in mind if I see something that would be benefit from it. The approach is definitely not for all problem domains, of course.

After that. Venkat Subramaniam gave a talk about how to blend dynamic languages with Java. This talk was useful in explaining why you’d want to do something like this, and why it’s such a powerful technique. It also served to set up my talk – which was next in that track – about evolving the Java platform. My talk went well, but I had the timing for it really messed up, so I ran out of material 10 minutes earlier than I expected. Neal Gafter was in the audience and helped out with some corrections during the talk. =)

Finally I headed back to the DSL track and saw Avi Bryant talk about DSLs in Smalltalk and then Magnus Christerson and Henk Kolk talk about the Intentional Workbench. Lots of neat stuff in both of these presentations.

Then there was the speakers dinner… Lots of interesting discussions with lovely people. =)

And then, more quickly than I had expected, the final day of QCon arrived. Me as a Ruby person and programming language nerd had quite a good selection of tracks. I ended up seeing Ted’s presentation on F#, which made me feel: wow! Microsoft took ML and did exactly what they’ve done to all languages on the CLR – added support for .NET objects in the mix. The talk ended with a quite strange discussion about whether F# actually helps with concurrent programming or not, and why a functional programming language has primitives that allow you to have mutable state.

After that I did my talk in the Ruby track, talking about more advanced things regard JRuby. It ended up being great fun, and I spent lots of time in the talk answering questions and showing how seamlessly things work with JRuby. I ended up eating up 10 minutes of everyone’s lunch time, but I had a great time and I thing most in the audience had too.

Feeling happy and finished with my contributions, I ended up in the Erlang talk by Joe Armstrong. It gave a quite good overview of why Erlang was created and how it solves some of the problems in that particular problem domain. There is no doubt that Armstrong is an entertaining talker, but his buffoon image gets a little tiring and repetitive after a while. Some of the things that interested me in the talk was missing too. He started out saying that Erlang solves a particular problem, but then expanded that into something that sounded like “Erlang should be used for everything, everywhere”. I tried to ask a question related to that, but the answer didn’t really go in the direction I was interested in.

I stayed in the languages track and saw the introduction to Scala, which is always fun, except that I’d already learned most of the things showcased. The most interesting about the presentation was the audience interest and questions.

Finally I realized that my contributions were not over at all, since I’d agreed to be part of the closing Ruby panel. This ended up revolving quite a lot around the question whether Ruby and Windows ever will be a good match, if this is important, and if we really want to push Ruby into all kinds of environments.

The closing panel were OK, but nothing special. It ended the day on a good note, but at that time I was tired enough to fall asleep in my chair. For some reason this always happens that last day of conferencing.

Anyway. I had a great time and I look forward to being back the next time. I can definitely recommend QCon as one of the best conferences around in this industry.

2 Comments | By Ola Bini | In: Uncategorized | tags: conferences, jruby, london, qcon. | #

Today is my last day in Sweden for a while. It’s been an incredible time, and I think that my coworkers from ThoughtWorks have had a wonderful experience in Sweden. What will happen regarding a Swedish office is still up in the air, but I’m cautiously optimistic about it all. In fact, if someone knows a possible client please get in touch. =)

Next week I’m going to Denmark, visiting the castle Hindsgavl where the Danish Java User Group (JavaGruppen) is holding a conference. I will do one presentation on JRuby and one tutorial on JRuby on Rails.

The next planned event will be QCon in London where I will present about some of the more exciting upcoming features in the JVM. That’s going to be great fun.

The last week in February I’ll be in San Francisco, possibly helping out with some really cool ThoughtWorks events. I’ll post more about that when I have the information.

I will also present at Developer Summit in April, in Stockholm.

Finally, expect me to do one presentation and one BoF at JavaOne. I might also do a talk at CommunityOne.

It’s going to be a busy spring time.

No Comments | By Ola Bini | In: Uncategorized | tags: conferences, javaone, upcoming. | #

Earlier today I attended the last sessions for this years JavaPolis. This was the first time I attended, and I’ve been incredibly impressed by it. The whole conference have been very good.

I arrived on Monday, sneaking in on Brian Leonard and Charlies JRuby tutorial. I didn’t see much of it though, and after that me and Charles had to prepare our session a bit, so no BOFs.

Tuesday I slept late (being sick and all), and then saw Jim Weavers JavaFX tutorial, which was very adept. I feel I have a fairly good grasp of the capabilities of Java FX Script now, at least. There were a few BOFs I wanted to go to that evening, but since the speaker dinner/open bar was that night, I obviously choose that. Cue getting to bed at 3am, after getting home to the hotel from… uhm. somewhere in or around Antwerpen.

On Wednesday, the real conference started. My first session was the Groovy Update. I always enjoy seeing presentations of other language implementations, partly because I’m a language geek, but also because everyone has a very different presentation style that I like to contrast with each other. One thing I noticed about the Groovy presentation was that much of it was spent comparing Groovy to “other” languages.

Right, after that I saw two quickies – the first one about IntelliJ’s new support for JRuby. And yes, this is support for JRuby, not just Ruby. You can use IntelliJ to navigate from Ruby code to Java code, where you have used that Java code in your Ruby. It looks really promising actually, and I spent some time showing the presenter a few things more that could be included. I don’t know of any IDE that supports JRuby specific things like that, actually.

After that I saw Dick Wall’s presentation on GWT. Since I have actually managed to avoid any knowledge about GWT, it was kinda interesting.

The next sessions didn’t seem too interesting, so I worked a bit more on my presentation, and walked around talking to people.

Charles and my presentation went quite well, even though I managed to tank all the demonstrations quite heavily. For some reason I actually locked JIRB in comment mode, and couldn’t get out of it, and then I fell upon the block coercion bug that happens when you call a Java method that is overloaded so that one takes no arguments and another overload takes the interface you want to coerce into. Charles didn’t stop me until afterwards… =)

But yes, it went well. Lots of people in the audience, and lots of interest.

The final session of the day was the future of computing panel, with Gosling, Bloch, Gafter and Odersky. To be honest, I found it boring – Quinn was moderator, but didn’t really manage to get the panel as enthused about anything.

After that, it was BOF time, I sat in on the Adobe one to pass the time, but didn’t learn anything spectacular. The Groovy BOF was nice – it’s always fun to see lots of code.

I started Thursday with the Scala presentation. Now, I didn’t learn anything I didn’t know here, but it was still a very good presentation. And oh, I found out that there is a Scala book on the way. (It’s actually available as a Rough Cut from Artima. Very nice.)

The next session was supposed to be Blochs Effective Java, but he used to spot to rant about the BGGA closures proposal instead. Of course, Joshua Bloch always rants in a very entertaining way, and he had chosen insidiously good examples for his point of view – but I’m still not convinced.

The Java Posse live show was good fun. After that I managed to see Bob Lee’s Web Beans presentation, and then the one on JAX-RS. Doesn’t really have much to say about those two. Except… am I the only one who starts getting bored by annotations all over the place?

The day was nearly over, and then it was time for BOF’s. The main difference being that it was time for the JRuby BOF. All went well, except that Charles didn’t show up, I didn’t have a projector the first half of the BOF, Tom introduced a bug on Wednesday that made all my examples fail, and so on. A huge thanks to Damian Steer who saved me by keeping the audience entertained while I fixed the bug in front of everyone.

I sat through Chet Haase’s talk about Update N, but didn’t pay that much attention since I was hacking on JRuby.

Finally, it was time for the BOF on other new language features in Java, with Gafter and Bloch. This was actually very interesting stuff. It ended up being almost 2 hours. But I think most people got their fill of new language syntax in it. The question is, which parts are good? I particularly didn’t like method extensions. All the proposals seems to lose the runtime component of it, and in that case it just stops being interesting. I would much rather see the language add real categories or something like that.

Friday was a lazy day. I sat in on the OGIi presentation and the TDD one, but nothing really exciting there either.

So that’s my JavaPolis week. It’s been a good time. And now I think it’s time to have some more beers with JRuby people before moving out from here.

2 Comments | By Ola Bini | In: Uncategorized | tags: conferences, javapolis, jruby. | #

Next week I’ll be at OSCON in Portland. I won’t be speaking, which means I’ll probably be able to enjoy other peoples presentations instead. Hopefully I’ll get to meet lots of people too. Say hi if you see me!

I’ll be presenting at RailsConfEU in September too, and that is gearing up to be a really interesting conference. RailsConf in Portland was awesome, and if the EU version can match a 10th of that energy, it’s going to be wonderful.

1 Comment | By Ola Bini | In: Uncategorized | tags: conferences, oscon, portland, railsconf. | #