It is difficult for me to summarize all the ideas that were discussed, but here are some nice quotes excerpted from this presentation (I hope to be precise, but all misunderstanding are my own responsibility):
* As a profession software development do a mess of words
* If you are using java.util.date, you must be tired of life
* Typing is not the bottleneck in software development
* Every time a mock returns a mock, a fairy dies
* Don’t confuse the ideas of the programming language with the essence of what you are trying to express.

Matthew McCullough made a very interesting presentation of the improvements that will be available with Maven 3, currently in its final beta testing period. The new version will be faster and have a smaller footprint, due to a codebase reduced by 30%. The software has been transformed in a code library that allows a better integration with third party tools. An important improvement is the possibility to define your configuration in different languages (ruby, groovy, scala, clojure) with polyglot maven. He also presented the last version of m2eclipse that he likes for its ability to visualize dependencies and to provide tools for an easier refactoring.

Slides of all the presentations of Jazoon are now available on the conference web site . Videos will be published late on the excellent Parleys web site.

He discussed the current evolution of Java towards its version 7. There has been a lot of work on the modularity side, removing as much as possible the dependencies between the Java modules. Parallelism has also been improved and will now for instance be used by most of the garbage collector activity. More than 100 languages are now running on the JVM. The Da Vinci project goal is to improve the efficiency of other languages on the JVM. Finally, some small additions are made to the syntax to simplify the language. JavaFX release 1.3 was also announced in May, the fourth release in the last 18 months. Performance has been improved and new UI components have been added. For those who want to see it in action, Danny pointed us towards the web site of the last Vancouver Winter Olympics, more precisely the geographical view of medals.

The next two sessions that I attended were both about Java and Flex. In the first presentation, Adobe Evangelist James Ward did first a small introduction to the Flex technology. Then he showed us how it was easy to connect a Flex front end with a Java back end using different protocols (http, web services) and benchmarked their relative speed. All his demos are available on http://www.jamesward.com/demos/. You can check the insurance one for a small taste of what a nice Flex interface can look like.

The second presenter, Florian Müller, put a different perspective on the marriage between these two technologies with his experience on a large project that was involving both of them. The development of the application can be very easy, but the maintenance is more difficult as functions can be performed either at the client (flex) or server (level). Architecture rules have to be defined very well and synchronization between the server and the client is not easy to maintain. Flex 4 solves part of these problems, but the proposed life cycle (Photoshop – Catalyst – Flex) does not work well when you have go backwards and redo some things. In the tools that you can use to link Java and Flex, he recommends Granite Data Services as an open source application that provides good power.

Read this report here

Nothing beats experience in software development and usually you learn the important things the hard way.  This presentation is based on an O’Reilly book with contribution from 73 different people and edited by Kevlin Henney. He presented for us 17 of them in his lively style.

1) Do a lot of deliberate practices
Kevlin added: “to make the task, not to complete the task”. He compared this with a cello player that will exercise for hours just to perform rarely on stage. The importance is not to realise things but to be confident when and how to use coding techniques.

2) Learn to estimate
This part deals with the difference between estimate, target and commitment. It is contributed by Giovanni Asproni, a Methods & Tools author. For a more detailed discussion, look at his article  “Fingers in the air: a Gentle Introduction to Software Estimation”

3) Know your next commit
It is a good thing to have a big picture of your current project, as in “I am working on this user story for my customer”, but developers should also be able to focus on the current task, as in “I am refactoring the CreateAccount code”.

4) Comment only what the code cannot say
If a program is incorrect, documentation matters little.

5) Code in the language of the domain
Use in your code names meaningful for domain, like AccountNumber or CreateAccount for a bank.

6) Prefer domain specific types to primitive types
DistanceInMeters is more meaningful than integer

7) Resist the temptation of the singleton pattern
You are never sure that there will always be only one instance of an object.

8) Don’t repeat yourself
Duplication is waste. Repetition in process calls for automation. Repetition in logic calls for abstraction.

9) Beware of the share
On contrast with the previous item, sharing code libraries creates dependencies for code that could evolve separately and that are just temporally coinciding.

10) The road to performance is littered with dirty code bones
Sometimes you just get better performance with less and cleaner code

11) The longevity of interim solutions
Try to avoid them… or take time to clean them after implementation.

12) The Boy Scout rule
You should leave the world just a little better than you find it and improve in little increments.

13) Two wrongs can make a right and are difficult to fix
Sometimes a bug is “corrected” by another bug further in the code. When you try to fix the second, the first one is revealed, but difficult to detect. It could be easier to leave things as they are.

14) Read code
We love to write code, but when it comes to reading it, we usually shy away. Reading code help us improve our writing abilities and increase our knowledge of programming styles.

15) Write test for people
Your tests are targeted at the person that is trying to understand your code. Tests are here to document the code and tell what it means to be right for the code.

16) Don’t be cute with your test data
because somebody else could see it ;o)

17) Ubuntu coding for your friends
This is not a reference to the Linux version, but means rather than your code might be used by your friends. If your code is bad, then their code will be bad.

The full list of 97 things is available on http://tr.im/97tepsk

* Jazoon, June 1-3 2010, Zurich, Switzerland

* Better Software Conference, June 6-11 2010, Las Vegas, USA

* Agile Development Practices West Conference, June 6-11 2010, Las Vegas, USA

* Domain Driven Design (DDD) exchange, June 11 2010, London, UK

* iqnite Geneva, June 15 2010, Geneva, Switzerland

* Flex on Java eXchange, June 18 2010, London, UK

* ShareConf, June 22-24 2010, Munich, Germany

Find more software development conferences on SoftDevConferences.com

* Scrum Day, May 4-5 2010, Munich, Germany

* TeamConf 2010, May 4-6 2010, Munich, Germany

* Progressive .NET Tutorials, May 12-14 2010, London, UK

* OpenAgile Romania, May 14-15 2010, Bucharest, Romania

* SPA Conference, May 16-19 2010, London, UK

* Spring in Finance eXchange, May 21 2010, London, UK

* Jazoon, June 1-3 2010, Zurich, Switzerland

Find more software development conferences on SoftDevConferences.com

* Agile Central Europe, April 8-9 2010, Krakow, Poland

* SharePoint Summit 2010, April 12-14 2010, Montreal – Quebec, Canada

* ACCU Conference 2010, April 14-17 2010, Oxford, UK

* Flex on Java eXchange, April 15 2010, London, UK

* Lean Software and Systems Conference 2010, April 21-23 2010, Atlanta, USA

* Cloud & Grid eXchange, April 22-23 2010, London, UK

* Mini XP Day, April 26 2010, Kapellerput, The Netherlands

* iPhone DevDay London, April 26 2010, London, UK

* Mobile Marketing & Branding Seminar, April 27 2010, Zurich, Switzerland

* DevDay for iPhone Geneva, April 28 2010, Geneva, Switzerland

* Iqnite Germany, April 27-30 2010, Düsseldorf, Germany

Find more software development conferences on SoftDevConferences.com

This year the conference will also mix French- and English-speaking sessions, an improvement that should please people working for the multinational corporations and international organizations in the Lake of Geneva area.

Attendance is limited to 100 people, so be quick to register on http://www.xpday.ch/

* Enterprise Software Development Conference, March 1-3 2010, San Mateo, USA

* CSM & Scrum in Depth ­ Training with Ken Schwaber, March 3-4, Stuttgart, Germany

* TheServerSide Java Symposium, March 17-19 2010, Las Vegas, USA

* Turku Agile Day, March 17-18 2010, Turku, Finland

* Spring In Finance eXchange, March 18 2010, London, UK

* REConf 2010, March 15-18 2010, Munich, Germany

* XP Day Suisse Edition Francophone, March 29 2010, Geneva, Switzerland

* Agile Central Europe, April 8-9 2010, Krakow, Poland

Find more conferences on SoftDevConferences.com

What they Don’t Teach You About Software at School: Be Smart!

This is a keynote given by Ivar Jacobson at Jazoon. One of the most popular buzzwords in software development is agile. Today everyone wants to be agile. That is good! However, being agile is not enough. You also need to be smart.

http://jazoon.com/

Challenges and Opportunities for Python

In this PyCon 2009 talk Ted Leung discusses some of the challenges and opportunities that he sees for Python.

http://us.pycon.org/

Just For Fun: Rediscovering Coding as a Hobby

In this RubyConf talk, Adam Keys talks about getting back when coding was more fun and less serious.

http://rubyconf.org/

Nano-Incremental Development, a.k.a. Elephant Carpaccio

During this Agile Roots workshop, Alistair Cockburn made people think about cutting features requests in small pieces.

http://www.agileroots.com/

Design Fundamentals for Developers

At the Microsoft’s Mix conference, Robby Ingebretsen presented the fundamentals of interface design for developers.

http://live.visitmix.com/

Reading the Flex Source Code

In this talk at 360Flex, Jonathan Branam gave an introduction to the Flex source code, explaining the class hierarchy, compositional classes and the importance of interfaces

http://www.360flex.com/

Patterns for Lovers of JavaScript

In this talk at JSConf 2009, Petter Higgins shows that Dojo teaches fundamentally sounds techniques for high performance JavaScript applications across the board. You will learn how these techniques provide a stable, professional-grade foundation for creating highly maintainable, scalable projects of any size

http://jsconf.us/

Kanban, Flow & Cadence

During this Lean Software & Systems Conference session, Karl Scotland introduced the three lean concepts of Kanban, Flow and Cadence, which combine to generate a more pipeline-based approach to software development, as opposed to the typical timebox-based approaches used by more traditional Agile methods.

http://www.leanssc.org/conferences/

GWT Can Do What?!?! A Preview of Google Web Toolkit 2.0

In this talk at the Google I/O 2009 conference, Bruce Johnson presents the new version of GWT.
GWT 2.0 contains huge improvements, including dynamic script loading, a new catalog of compiler optimizations, and a new approach to hosted mode debugging that promises to revolutionize your productivity.

http://code.google.com/events/io/2010/sessions.html

C++, Java and .NET: Lessons Learned from the Internet Age

Java’s appearance at the dawn of the Internet Age helped to propel it to near-instant prominence, and lodged cross-platform virtual machines and garbage-collection firmly into our mainstream consciousness. In Java’s wake, .NET introduced the concept of the “cross-language” virtual machine, and helped to foster a new discussion on the benefits of functional programming. Did Java and C# have an evolutionary advantage over C++, or were they simply “Cool” (the original code name for C# / .NET)?

http://www.oredev.org/

You Want More?

If you want to search for more videos, SoftDevTube.com has currently catalogued and classified more than 1600 software development videos, screencasts and tutorials. To prepare your conference schedule for this year or find more conferences archives, go to SoftDevConferences.com. If you want to read some in-depth articles on software development topics, visit the Methods & Tools magazine web site and download past PDF issues.

Language: English
Place: Technopark Zürich, Seminarraum Fortran
Date: 25 January 2010 at 7.30 pm
Price: Free
Max seats: 60 (First come – first served) sandwiches aand drinks will be served

Please note that due to limited seats, registration is required and could be made via sec @ trifork [dot] com.

Iteration 2010 of the XP Day Edition Suisse is your opportunity to express yourself on the following subjects:
- Project management,
- Tools,
- Practices,
- Customer contracts,
- Transitions toward agile methodologies,
And more!…

Compared to last year, we are planning to explore new directions:
- Workshops and interactive sessions will be privileged over other types of presentations;
- A open space room will be booked,
- English speakers will be welcome.

The conference shall be organized in parallel session tracks, each track taking place in a room for 50 participants. All sessions will last 1 hour and a strict synchronization of the sessions between each track will ensure that participants can chose at any time their favorite presentation. Each speaker will have a 1 minute time slot during a plenary session to entice participants to attend his/her presentation.

Proposals for a presentation can be made by filling the submission form http://xpday.agile-swiss.org/uploads/formulaire_xpday_switzerland_10.rtf and by sending the filling form to the organizing committee at contribution10 AT agile-swiss DOT org. Submissions must be received before or on January 17th, 2010 at the latest.

Because of the structure of the conference, sessions are limited to 1 hour, although one can envision a 2 hour workshop. Creativity and interactivity will be the top selection criteria. Speakers of selected presentations will have a free registration to the conference. Travel expenses, however, will not be reimbursed. A special speaker room with Internet access will be available. The selection committee shall communicate the selected presentations and final program by February 14th, 2010.

XP Day 2010 – Edition Suisse is supported by the association Agile Suisse.

More information on http://xpday.ch/

The clock is now running towards the submission deadline for the Jazoon’10 Call for Papers. Java and Open Source Experts from all over the world are called upon to actively participate in the steering of the program of Jazoon’10.

Proposals for short (20 minutes) and long talks (50 minutes) can be submitted within the scope of the technical sessions until 3 February 2010. Presentations can be held individually or together with a co-speaker. Speakers profit from preferential terms – details to be found here.

Proposals for Jazoon Rookie (20 minutes) can be submitted until 4 April 2010. Participating criteria and benefits can be found here.

* Lean & Kanban eXchange, December 1 2009, London, UK

* droidcon London, December 2 2009, London, UK

* Ruby on Rails eXchange, December 3 2009, London, UK

* Cloud & Grid eXchange, December 7-8 2009, London, UK

* Groovy & Grails eXchange, December 9-10 2009, London, UK

* Flex on Java eXchange, December 14 2009, London, UK

* Open Source in Finance eXchange, December 15 2009, London, UK

* Spring in Finance eXchange, December 16 2009, London, UK

* Domain Driven Design eXchange, December 18 2009, London, UK

Find more conferences on SoftDevConferences.com

Yves Hanoulle presented about the tips for creating a self-organizing team. In the part that I followed, Yves explained how to build trust, giving examples from his business and family experience. Here are the main points of his presentation:
- be straight: 60% of the people think that their bosses are lying to them
- respect: observe how people handle waiters in restaurant
- acknowledge your mistakes
- face reality: accept to be afraid
- perfection game (from the core protocols): analyze situation with an improvement view
- clarify expectations: using an hourglass for scrum meetings for instance
- listen first

Freddy Mallet and Rémy Sanlaville made a presentation about the technical debt. Technical debt is defined as the bad practices that make it more expensive to add a new functionality. These practices could be for instance code duplication, the lack of comments, standards or automated tests. These elements are not bad by themselves as we all have to make some trade-off during development. However, if the amount of such issues get to high, they could completely paralyzed the evolution of an application. Freddy showed how Sonar could help to deal with this by making visible automatically the amount of these issues on its dashboard. Then Rémy Sanlaville explained that the technical debt could be located outside the code. You can find them in the build process, in configuration management if you commit not often enough or in the management and prioritization of backlogs. The presenters insisted also that it is the teams that have to find solutions for technical debts problems, the tools exist only to make them more obvious to spot.

Finally, I assisted to the introduction of lean development in the webTVteam of Orange France presented by Régis Medina, Lean coach, and Antoine Cortal, scrummaster for Orange. The project team was already using Scrum with retrospectives but was getting the expected continuous improvement. The lean coach presented the Plan, Do, Check and Adjust process to the scrummaster. The goal was to increase velocity as it was considered the main problem by the customer. Lean encourages going the closer you can to the action, so the scrummaster had some sessions with his developers to find issues. Working on improvements could be difficult if a team is already under pressure to deliver. Negotiating an improvement time box could help to find solutions without disrupting project delivery. Lean also favors the creation of standards. Standards could be seen as “anti-agile”, but they can make things go faster and provide a basis for improvement. The team created its own standard for the daily meeting and the definition of done. After a first lean cycle, the measured velocity has not increased, but the team has adopted the lean principles to solve more problems. Lean doesn’t solve all your problems immediately, but it makes them visible and you have to deal with an increased level of lucidity.

* ApacheCon US 2009, November 2-6 2009, Oakland, USA

* IT Leadership Forum, November 2-4 2009, Phoenix, USA

* Agile Development Practices Conference, November 9-13, Orlando, USA

* Devoxx, November 16-20 2009, Antwerp, Belgium

* ProjectWorld & World Congress for Business Analysts, November 16-18 2009, Anaheim, USA

* Handcrafted Bulletproof CSS, November 23 2009, London, UK

* Agile Specifications, BDD and Testing eXchange, November 27 2009, London, UK

* Lean & Kanban eXchange, December 1 2009, London, UK

* droidcon London, December 2 2009, London, UK

* Ruby on Rails eXchange, December 3 2009, London, UK

Find more conferences on SoftDevConferences.com

The first talk ” iPhone Intelligence: Everything you need to know about launching an iPhone app” was given by Raven Zachary of Small Society. He made the iPhone application for the Obama campaign. He presented the iPhone software market. I liked his vision that iPhone was to the mobile phone market the equivalent of Google for the web search market: a late comer that changed the market.

The next presentation “SBB Mobile iPhone Application and Dynamic Dialog Language” was given by Jonas Schnelli of Include 7. He is famous for having developed in seven days the first iPhone timetable application for the Swiss Railways (SBB)… without their permission ;o) He has then worked with them to evolve the application that allows now to buy a ticket with a iPhone. He also started his presentation from a market perspective, saying that the gaming and productivity applications market was already crowded, but there are still things to do in the information domain. An idea was to develop an application that will make practical information available and then “sell” the concept to a sponsor. He shared with us five golden rules learned from his SBB experience:
* the importance of memory management
* avoid XIB files
* test on the devices
* importance of QA
* learn the software development frameworks
For the SBB application, Jonas is used a dynamic dialog language. He is trying to build an open source version of this tool. People interested can look a this project on http://www.include7.ch/idevzh/

The last talk of the morning “Phone Application Architecture: Forget the examples, how to architect a complex iPhone application ” was presented by Alex Cone of CodeFab. It is difficult to start developing large iPhone applications, because the examples in the documentation lack of this perspective. The main design challenges are to manage long running tasks, concurrency, variable connectivity, data, state and complexity. He made a very interesting remark that an iPhone application is like a software haiku: you have to aim at simplicity and elegance.

The afternoon started with Adrian Kosmaczewski with “Ten Commandments for iPhone development“. His ten commandments are:
1. Manage memory properly
2. Remove compiler warnings
3. Read the Human Interface Guidelines
4. Optimize for performance
5. Test in the device
6. Know your developer tools
7. Use PNG files
8. Use static analysis
9. Have project management hygiene
10. Have fun and be creative!

The next presentation was “Build an iPhone application in 45 minutes” by Patrick Linskey of 17th Street Software. His presentation discussed in details how Objective C works. Unfortunately for me, the presentation took more than one hour instead of the planned 45 minutes, even with a lot code that was “cut and pasted”. I could therefore not stay to watch the last presentation on continuous integration, as I had to get back to my place on the other side of Switzerland for the evening.

On overall, it was a very interesting day providing valuable knowledge on the specificity of developing for the iPhone platform from the market to the code perspective. Two tutorials were organized at the end of the day for beginners and advanced developers. The slides of the presentation are available here.

* Software & Systems Quality Conference, October 5, London, UK

* STARWEST 2009 Software Testing Analysis & Review Conference, October 5-9 2009, Anaheim, USA

* MedConf, October 13-15 2009, Munich, Germany

* Agile Business Conference 2009, October 13-14 2009, London, UK

* Scandinavian Agile Conference 2009, October 15-16 2009, Helsinki, Finland

* Software Test & Performance Conference, October 19-23 2009, Cambridge, USA

* Agile Tour 2009, October 20 2009, Toronto

* Practical Product Lines 2009, October 20-21 2009, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

* QA TEST, 21-23 October 2009, Bilbao, Spain

* SubConf, October 27-29 2009, Munich, Germany

* Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference, October 26-28 2009, Portland, USA

* TheServerSide Java Symposium Europe, October 27-28 2009, Prague, Czech Republic

* expo:QA International Software Testing and Quality Conference 2009, October 27-29, Madrid, Spain

* Software & Systems Quality Conference, October 28-29 2009, Melbourne, Australia

* ApacheCon US 2009, November 2-6 2009, Oakland, USA

* RiskConf, November 3-5 2009, Munich, Germany

Find more conferences on SoftDevConferences.com

* Software & Systems Quality Conference, September 14, Zurich, Switzerland

* The Ajax Experience 2009, September 14-16 2009, Boston, USA

* Conquest 2009, September 16-18, Nuremberg, Germany

* REConf CH, September 22-24 2009, Zurich, Switzerland

* Software & Systems Quality Conference Nordic, September 24-25 2009, Stockholm, Sweden

* Software & Systems Quality Conference, September 29 – October 1, London, UK

* STARWEST 2009 Software Testing Analysis & Review Conference, October 5-9 2009, Anaheim, USA

Find more conferences on SoftDevConferences.com

After James Gosling the previous day, the Wednesday keynote was given by Danny Coward, Chief Architect of Sun’s Client Software, which means Java SE, Java ME and JavaFX. The topic of his talk was the top five points of both JDK 7 and JavaFX 1.2.  For the upcoming JDK 7, the main improvement will be on modularity; multiple languages (Groovy, JRuby) performance support on the virtual machine; some language addition like multiple exception handling; more I/O API; a new garbage collector. For the new version 1.2 of JavaFX released in June, the top five points are: release on new platforms like Linux and some mobile phones; more UI components; layouts; improvement of performance; better ways to use data with RSS/atom feed support and a simple asynchronous framework. He announced that another release of JavaFX is scheduled for the end of the year. The keynote was completed with some nice demonstrations of the JavaFX capabilities.

Refactoring of Large Software Systems

My first choice in the technical session was ” Refactoring of Large Software Systems” by Sibylle Peter and Sven Ehrke of Canoo Engineering . The talk presented the refactoring of the architecture for an investment banking system. After four years, the system architecture had become decayed, the original developers were no longer around and there were only few automated functional tests available. Important evolutions were postponed, as modifications often created bad side effects. However the application was very important for the bank and they wanted to keep using it for some more years. The first activity was to analyze the 1800 Java classes and their dependencies. The strategy was then to restructure the class content to separate clearly the services and the presentation functions using a service oriented architecture. The project, that has already consumed 10 men/years and is still on going, is run on an agile mode. Pair programming was an essential tool to ensure that refactoring practices where consistent across the team. The main customer engineer served as a “product owner”. This was fundamental for the Canoo team, as they needed somebody able to take decisions and knowing also the impact of the existing application on other systems. Another important success factor was doing the refactoring without modifying the functionalities. This allowed running tests comparing the results of the refactored application with the original system. Trust is an essential component of the project, as the users have to let an external team restructure their critical system… without breaking it. However as refactoring progressed, a team of the bank was also able to start evolving the system again. When release dates were different between the two team, a “branch and merge” configuration management solution was adopted. Some other lessons learned during the first phase were to have a large investment in automated testing and continuous integration, have an increased communication between the external refactoring team and the bank developers to synchronize architecture vision and transfer knowledge. It is also important not to underestimate the time needed to learn the system functionalities (where do you functionally test your technical refactoring) and test the final results. After the presentation, I talked with Sibylle and Sven to transform their presentation in an article for Methods & Tools. They agree on the principle, so stay tuned to get a comprehensive written presentation of their experience.

The Power of Value – Domain Driven Design and Value Objects

The next presentation was ” The Power of Value – Domain Driven Design and Value Objects” by Dan Bergh Johnsson of Omegapoint. Although I was initially a little bit afraid that this presentation contains too much code, Dan truly achieved its goal: showing how to refactor code to make it more understandable, even for domain experts without programming knowledge…. and doing it in a lively and funny way, which is important when you get up early to assist to a conference and the caffeine effect starts to diminish. His definition of a value object is “an object with data and behavior that has conceptual value”. His conclusions are that value objects help to decrease complexity (and compound value objects are even better), that entities relieved complexity and value objects add extensibility, testability and evolution. In the second part of the talk, he took the example of a part of code dedicated to charging a credit card and completely refactored it according the principles presented previously.

JavaServer Faces

The last presentation I saw was ” A complete Tour of JSF 2.0″ by Ed Burns of Sun and Martin Marinschek of IRIAN Solutions. They presented of the new release of JavaServer Faces that had its specifications approved at the end of May. Ed Burns recognized the criticism of the first version of JSF and announced that they have adopted a lot of innovations created in the community to integrate them in version 2.0. The new release is not a revolution, but a strong evolution. Among the improvement, he cited composite components; AJAX support, either declarative or programmatic; partial state saving that will improve performance; more system events; better resources management: full “library” concept, support for versioning and internationalization; the replacement of JSP by Facelets; the possibility to have bookmarkable pages. For the presenters, JSF is a real open source project (that is not a “just Sun” project) with a lot of different contributors. The new version is more much easier to use and well worth a second look. To complete this presentation, I talked with Micha Kiener of mimmacom which distributes IceFaces in Europe. Micha is also a committer to JavaServer Faces and his point of view is interesting, even if he suggested that it could be biased due to his position ;o) He also thinks that the community around JSF is strong and that the technology would continue to evolve even in the case where Oracle, that just bought Sun, decided to withdraw its financial support. He doesn’t see JavaFX as a direct competitor to JSF. His view on the market is that some products (JavaFX, Flex, Silverlight) target more the mashup, media, gaming or mobile market. On the other hand, JSF, GWT and their Ajax frameworks competitors are more used to develop applications with a “traditional” user interface, like on-line banking for instance. That is how JSF is used by some major Swiss corporations. He made also interesting remarks on the open source market and the commercial companies that try to monetize these technologies. He sees some products, like user interface or programming frameworks, more as “contributors” to the software development infrastructure. You can make some money in training and support as companies adopt them, but this stops when the company has its own competencies. Other technologies, like databases or web servers, are applications that run the everyday software infrastructure. In this case it is easier to sign long term support contracts.

I also had the chance met some of the Jazoon organizers, Christian Frei and Andreas Knobel, of Keynode. They were very kind with me and happy with the fact that the conference audience was higher than last year. There registered this year 1000 participants, around 50% of them coming from outside Switzerland. Videos of some of the conference talks should be available in July on Parleys the excellent conferences video web site. You can also stay tuned on our Java videos and tutorial directory where the will be listed.