David Keen

Joe Darcy and Maurizio Cimadamore gave a preview of the changes coming up in Project Coin. These are small changes to the Java language that will be added to Java 7. They all look pretty useful and include: Strings in switch Collection literals <> (generic type inference) Multicatch catch (ClassNotFoundException | NoSuchMethodException e) { // Do something throw(e); } Bill Pugh’s session was as popular as expected for his talk about defective code and how […]

This talk by Costin Leau was about the new caching features in Spring 3.1. After going over some problems you can face when caching (stale data, thrashing, distributed caches) and different caching patterns he introduced the declarative caching of Spring 3.1. It uses AOP and can be declared on methods by adding the @Cacheable annotation. This annotation caches a method’s return value using it’s parameters as the key although this can be customised. Eg: @Cacheable […]

I doubt Joshua Bloch suffers from performance anxiety but it was slightly ironic that there were some technical problems before he started his talk, titled Performance Anxiety, to an absolutely packed room at Devoxx today. I knew it would be a popular session so I got there early and so managed to find a seat, unlike the others who sat on the steps or crowded the doorway. His talk was about microbenchmarking – measuring the […]

Stephen Colebourne gave an entertaining talk to a packed room called The Next Big JVM Language. He went over the features of such new JVM languages as Groovy, Clojure, Scala and Fantom (which I’d never heard of). He seemed to be leaning toward Fantom as the language of choice before delivering the punchline that the best candidate for the Next Big Language might be a backwards incompatible version of Java itself. I think I agree. […]

A couple of pretty heavy-going sessions at Devoxx today. First up was Cassandra by Example with Jonathan Ellis one of the founders of Cassandra support company Riptano. I have already had some experience with Cassandra at both my previous and current jobs but it was good to go over the principals of Cassandra as well as seeing an example application deconstructed. Cassandra’s strengths are: Scalability Reliability No single point of failure Multiple data centre support […]

Today was the first day of Devoxx, the European Java conference held in Antwerp. The first two days are actually the ‘University’ sessions. These are longer, more in depth talks and the first one I went to was the ‘Productive Programmer’ by Neal Ford from Thoughtworks. This was an interesting talk split into two sections, the first dealing with the mechanics of productivity and the second consisting of a number of tips putting these principals […]