My new gig

I have a new gig and have been sent to San Francisco for training. It's been a busy week so went to see some sights this weekend starting with Golden gate park. Caught a bus on the way back where the driver had an unintentionally hilarious sign:


"Information will be gladly given. However your safety requires avoiding unnecessary conversation."

Love it.

Grails IDE

I am currently moving development machines. No only a new machine but a new O.S. This has been a process I have been dreading as when ever you move and download the new installers there is almost always some weird error message or behavior that wasn't previously present. Sometimes useful features are removed. Precious time can be lost to the black hole named on setup & configure.

I am moving from a windows laptop running grails 0.6 Intelli-J 7.0 to macbook with grails 1.0 and Intelli-J 7.03. Some impressions:

• Since 7.0 Intelli-J seems to have made the static controller the auto generated default rather then the magic box dynamic one. This is good for me.
• I moved each of my projects folders across using www.dropsend.com (equivalent of FTP but via web with very clean U.I and 1/2 GB free space. Highly recommend.)
  
• I placed these into the same Intelli-J project folder. The folder layout seems very similar to the windows install.
• I opened the project inside Intelli-J. It recognized that I had created the project in grails 0.6 and offered to upgrade to grails 1.0 (using the grails scripts behind the scenes). Upgrade seems to have been bug free. Very cool.
• When I attemted to run the project Intelli-J complained that my module did not have a valid JDK assigned. Uh oh. A little poking around I found the module settings (ctrl click project name > module settings). Inside here it was complaining that it could not find jdk 6 (which is still only developer preview on mac at the time of writing). I set this to use JDK 5 and was able to successfully run the project .
  
• I have tested both the bundled in-memory database and got a native my sql install up and running. Both running perfectly.
  

Kudos to Sean Wall for a little (read LOTS OF) help with JDK and My SQL settings on the mac.

Conference Overview

As you can tell I didn't get to blog about the conference as much as I planned due to the unreliable wireless (1000 geeks with laptops).

Some highlights which have stuck with me a week after the event:

• The SOA vs REST comparison. This was a very entertaining, informative and at times hilariously frank look at the technologies and the politics behind them
• The eBay case study. With 2 petabytes of data (1024 terrabytes in a petabyte - if you have to ask you can't afford to store it).
• GRAILS, Groovy and pretty much any talk by Scott Davis. He even gave me a free copy of his book on GIS.
  

Day One

O.K I am half way through day one of the conference. The key note was good: a nice mixture of practical examples and theory. But I have to agree with this fellow Server Side participant Sean Wall who is little tired on hearing so much criticism of XML. It works where it works.

My favorite session so far is Advanced Unit Testing. Also the Jax-RS (still in development) looks promising as a alternative, not a replacement, of the established web service stack.

Keynote

Just realized a familar face from the No Fluff Just Stuff conference tour Neal Ford is giving this morning's keynote: "LANGUAGE-ORIENTED PROGRAMMING: Shifting Paradigms". Nice.

Good to go

Arrived safely yesterday and registered with the conference. Received a free book called Building Spring 2 by the folks at Interface 21. Judging by the size of the rooms they are expecting a lot of people although disappointingly I didn't see many power outlets. Hopefully they just havn't set them up yet...

Vegas

Next week I am attending the Server Sides Java Symposium in Las Vegas. The agenda is up online.

One the sessions which really caught my eye is self scaling java based architectures in the cloud by Jinesh Varia

Heres a taste:

"One new way to architect your applications is to build it "in-the-cloud" - Keeping your components loosely coupled and independent to each other, and therefore able to scale well. For building architectures in-the-cloud, many developers use multiple Amazon Web Services, for example an array of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances tied together with a bunch of Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) message queues, reading and writing data to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)."