JAOO Conference Brisbane – First Day Wrap-up

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Well the first day of JAOO was quite good, maybe not what everyone was after (looking at the twitter traffic). Personally enjoyed the sessions and the conceptual nature of the talks I attended. Here is a quick wrap-up on the sessions I attended.

Opening Keynote – Composing all the way
Clemens Szyperski
Clemens’ talk focused on application composition and included some detail on Microsoft’s MEF platform. Impressed with the content of the talk and the direction Microsoft is taking in this area – MEF looks to be a good enabler of dynamic extensibility of applications which is something that I am really keen to see done well.

Building Web Apps for a LOT of Users
Jon Tirsen
The content of Jon’s talk focused on how to even a simple implementation of a hit counter on a site can cause quite a bit of grief for applications and scalability should an application or site go viral. One solution to even a simple problem like this one to enable scalability is commonly called “sharding” at Google or perhaps more widely data partitioning.

Google App Engine – Building an App the Google Way
Pamela Fox
Google App Engine is a really exciting piece of new kit that I’ve blogged about on more than one occassion at Conceptual Advantage. The content of Pamela’s talk was a good introduction to using AppEngine with Java and in general also. Amusing part of the talk was the code samples Pamela put together – a tribute to the 90′s web and in particular sites such as Geocities, Angelfire and Tripod.

1,001 Interations: Product Design, Illustrated
Avi Bryant
Avi’s talk was a good look at a new product his company (DabbleDb is their primary product) is working on, and how they have gotten to the place they are at today (almost ready to launch). Personally I look forward to the release of the new product, and the presentation was a great insight as to how a new innovative web application comes together.

Speeding Ducks
Avi Bryant
Another talk from Avi, this time looking at some of the performance bottlenecks in Ruby (that is if Ruby were implemented in Ruby from top to bottom – “Ducks all the way down”). Some very interesting history about the performance improvements that were made to Smalltalk to improve performance some 20 odd years ago. Raised a bit of controversy with some suggestions, but was definitely a good session. Interestingly in the dynamic language space, there is a lot of work going on with optimization around javascript engines so I guess I am wondering whether server-side javascript (Aptana Jaxer, Helma and Rhino are a few products that I’ve had a cursory glance at in the past), is going to become a real alternative to things like Ruby and Python.

Hey You! Get On To My Cloud! Application Development in the Clouds
Dave Thomas
The content of Dave Thomas’s talk looked at the palette of corporates for adopting technologies based on a SaaS type offering. This is already the case in some instances (take SalesForce.com as an example) but hasn’t been done on a large scale. In general, the appetite of non-IT areas of corporates to move to this kind of model is appealing as it removes some of the barriers to getting things done responsively (business agility was a term Dave used). My personal opinion is that whilst initial barriers might be removed, the technology world is still working through some of the finer points around SOA and how an application built on this technology platform will deliver enterprise scalability, reliability and software maintainability over time. Content of the talk was great though, and I wholeheartedly agree with a lot of his comments around elements of software development needing to be accessible to a broader audience than the development elite, per se.

Consistency, Storage and Reliability in the Cloud
Jonas S. Karlsson
Good talk on an internal database wrapper built on BigTable called Megastore (conjures up images of transformers in my head). Content was good and gave some more in depth information around consistency when dealing with application scaling. I’m just keen to see things like Megastore available in Google AppEngine – if the heavy lifting has been done already, then I’d really like to get the benefit of it without too much effort (sounds a little lazy, but I’m sure we all agree).

Closing Keynote – Atlassian: An Australian Success Story
Mike Cannon-Brookes
A great talk from an Australian entrepreneur who makes great software (if you haven’t heard of Atlassian then I suggest you check them out). Most interesting to me were the strategies Atlassian put in place to create both good solid development practices and driving innovation within the company. You can read more about their practice’s on Mike’s blog at Atlassian.

Summary
Overall, great first day, and I really need to get to sleep otherwise I’ll be sleeping through sessions tomorrow. I’d be keen to hear others opinions on the day, plus their experience on the sessions above plus other sessions that I didn’t manage to get to.