Clap your hands say yeah right

Just descided to give up on the Verso thing. I realize that the next step would be to implement some modern form av global-illumination (such as Bidirectional Metropolis Light Transport or Energy Redistribution Path Tracing). That requires more time, careful analysis and deeper insights than I currently have. I might get back to the Verso efforts again some day … in another 15 years or so.

BTW. If you’re interested in a snapshot of the current state-of-the art when it comes to unbiased-renderers, just have a look at these:

Commercial: http://www.maxwellrender.com/
Free: http://www.indigorenderer.com/

The Amazon.com Technology Platform – Werner Vogels, Amazon.com
Werner said he would put a historical perspective on the evolution of the Amazon.com-platform in the light of scaling. In practice it was not so much on the technical aspects of scaling, as it was a promotion for the platform itself (for anyone wanting to start a business). Interesting nevertheless.

Patterns in Service-Oriented Architectures – Gregor Hohpe, Google Inc.
Gregor Hohpe sets the stage for the SOA-track for the day. Reminded me … that this is: 1) hard, 2) important, 3) quite boring (the subject itself that is, Gregor himself seemed to be a good speaker).

A Business Case for Ajax with GWT – Bruce Johnson, Google
Bruce points in the inevitable direction of to richer clients (as in AJAX-clients). He claims “AJAX is here to stay for several years to come. Every stakeholder loves Ajax. Everyone … except the developers that is”. Then he discusses the reasons to why it is not really popular among programmers: Poor Tool support, Browsers compatibility, Javascript is a dynamically typed language which means that type errors can only be found at runtime by QA etc etc. This discussion of course leads to why GWT is the way to go here. GWT will allow you to stay in your favorite IDE, write your client layer as java, and then cross-compile into Javascript. Looks solid and as a worked-through product. It also handles history correctly (as most AJAX-toolkits has a problem with), and bookmarks. Also polymorphic RPC is supported … and lots of other cool stuff. This was a really inspiring talk/demo. I will look into it as soon as I have time.

Architecture Archaeology and Virtual Reengineering – Walter Bischofberger, Software-Tomography GmbH
Walter demoed a product called Sotograph. As I understand it, Sotograph is a tool for discovering architectural problems and then providing good help for refactoring them. These refactorings were all conducted on a very high level, i.e. breaking out subsystems, adding layers, break-up cyclic dependencies etc. Moreover it provided means for monitoring the architectural quality over time. During the entire demo Walter worked with several version Spring Framework and showed which areas had been improved over time, and which areas have become worse. He also corrected some of the architectural mistakes with just some clicks through a rather complex wizard.

The tool looked very competent and very much focusing on high-level-issues and big sweeping changes. On the other hand the tool also seemed to be rather complex, i.e. learning the tool might take some time. Best thing would probably be that a company known for its brilliance when it come to usability, JetBrains, buy the Sotograph-tool, brush-up on the usability and then integrates it.

Seaside: A Radical Web Framework – Glenn Vanderburg
Wandered into this presentation with somewhat mixed emotions. Can’t really say I think the market needs another web framework. On the other hand I yet haven’t seen anything that is oh-my-god-this-is-the-web-framework-to-use-period. Glenn started of by making this claim: Rails (and most other current web frameworks) will be replaced in one year or two by Seaside or something else using the same ideas as Seaside does. With such a bold statement he of course got me and the rest of the audience listening.

The Seaside framework itself is built with smalltalk. During the demo Glenn uses a very simple web application to show that sessions in Seaside is very tolerant to back-, forward-buttons and launching of new-windows. The framework itself can pick up the correct session no matter how much you mess with it (it seems). This is accomplished by using continuations. Moreover the framework really seems to relieve the programmer of most plumbing and gluing you are forced to do when creating complex web applications.

My verdict: I get a bit of mixed emotions about Seaside. The features and elegance that Seaside seems to provide I would love to have. My biggest problem is that I really have a hard time seeing that any corporation would be interested another language to their growing pile of legacy.

Panel: Abstractions for Concurrency
Stuck my head into to the panel about concurrency for some 30 minutes. They were discussing whether the current popular computer languages are strong enough for the need of concurrency and scale-outs. Didn’t really stay long enough to see what they landed in … but I did stay long enough to yet another time hear “continuation” being discussed. Could that be the buzzword of this years’ JAOO?

Don’t miss this funny and angry guy: http://signalfel.blogspot.com/.

Read it all and then try to think something postive about SJ. Try hard.

Currently on the train down to Arlanda where I within some hours will lift off for another week at the JAOO conference. I look forward too it, it is a great conference.

I will report my impressions here. Day-by-day.