Day 1

The first day started with a talk about the Eclipse Modeling Project (EMP), a top eclipse project that facilitates model driven software engineering. It contains lots of interesting tools for code generation, validation, model querying, database mapping, concurrent access to models etc. Also the EMFT, a project in its incubation stage that aims to extend/complement EMF (the main component of EMP) provides additional functionality such as a query tool more UI oriented, support for the .NET platform, a tool model’s comparisons and a plug-in that enhances eclipse for working with code generation.

Later that day I attended two very fun talks from Ted Neward: Busy developers guide to Scala and the same for ECMAscript. Both talks seemed suitable for developers of none or some knowledge about the particular languages. Scala was definitely one of the hot topics of this conference.

That same afternoon the keynote was ‘Architecting your way through recession: an open source survival kit’. The talk was about recession and open source. As long as I was there, it was mainly about common knowledge stuff with a touch of marketing (the speaker was from one of the conference’s gold sponsors Liferay).

The next talk I visited was called ‘Fresh Ideas for UI – Interaction design in Eclipse’. I went there with a colleague of mine that is really interested in new ideas about UI design, but none of us found them really fresh. We definitely saw some very pretty applications but were mainly comprised of old ideas put nicely together. The presenter was a psychologist that seemed very experienced on user-computer interaction. Even though he gave some good generic tips about UI design, his lack of technical knowledge didn’t help people like my colleague that were interested in eclipse specific information.

During the evening break they were offering beers. When I attended the following talk I found out why.

It was a great keynote by Neal Ford with the strange name ‘Ancient Philosophers & Blowhard Jamborees’. After the talk two phrases got stuck in my mind, the first of which is accidental complexity. It is the tendency of introducing extra complexity on projects and then later having to deal with it. And some of the reasons that he stated sound a bit too familiar: Manager Boards that comprise of people with none or little technical knowledge, meetings that end with the conclusion to reschedule a meeting and software/hardware that has to be used because the company just purchased it at some point, even though it introduces additional complexity. And what he thinks this will lead to if we do not become more aware and active about it? The transfer of most software development to Asia and in particular Chindia. And there is exactly where my second favorite phrase fits shift happens.

Now you understand about the beers…

Day 2

The second day started with a morning talk about ‘what s new in BIRT 2.3‘. Some of the new stuff is the introduction of a JavaScript debugger and improvements on charts and reports. Also two new nice aspects are that each report can now return multiple results sets and that preferences can defer among BIRT projects and not only among workspaces.

Next talk that I was interested in was ‘BIRT within Java Enterprise’. To my disappointment the speaker announced that the presentation was in German because he only found out that it should have been in English the day before… I rushed to a talk about Xtext, a framework to develop external DSLs. The main idea behind it is that one can define a language grammar and then Xtext is responsible generating the parser, the editor etc.

The key note was unfortunately in German. You can find more details about it at my x-colleagues review who happens to be a German speaker. So for me it was time for a break. But what can you do during a break when there is no coffee (they served coffee few times a day, which was disappearing quite fast) and more importantly no Internet? (the coverage was so bad that you could rarely connect…) Oh well at least I could queue early for the lunch which by the way was good and in general the whole conference was very well catered.

Another talk that I attended on that day was ‘Domain-Specific Languages in Groovy’. Also very interesting, DSLs seem to be quite in at the moment. After yet another keynote in German there was an interesting talk by Wayne Beaton where he presented a simple application that runs on a desktop using Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP), on a server using Rich Ajax Platform (RAP), and as an embedded application using embedded Rich Client Platform eRCP (see EBERT). Quite tricky actually, since not all platforms have all libraries available, so especially for eRCP the options are quite limited.

Day 3

Thursday started with a talk about user friendly Eclipse applications. They gave some useful tips about what the user wants and they showed that it is pretty straightforward to create cheat sheets, help, info bubbles etc. Following to that, Wayne Beaton presented Eclipse support on top down development with some nice examples. The bottom line would be ‘treat your tests as first class citizens‘.

This afternoon did not differ much from the previous one: a keynote in German, no Internet and me together with few more none German speakers queuing early for lunch.

After lunch I attended a talk by Martin Lipper about general tips on OSGI. A point he made there was that in order to reduce coupling it is preferable to import bundles rather than require them. Also another good point was about extension points; one should not misuse them. For instance if we are not sure who wants to use some particular functionality we should better expose it as a service. Next talk was about the use of OSGI for dynamic application. A demo and discussion can be found at Kai’s blog

Finally the day and conference closed for me with a talk about Equinox p2, the latest provisioning mechanism. Really cool stuff!

The slides from Monday and Friday workshops can be found at:

o www.jax.de/ccm_agile_mon

o www.jax.de/ccm_jsf_fr

o www.jax.de/ccm_osgi_fr

o www.jax.de/ccm_soa_mon

o www.jax.de/ccm_pws_mon

o www.jax.de/ccm_pws_fr

The other slides will not be online but will be posted to attendee’s house individually (which I haven’t received yet). Hmm…

In case you are interested in more information about one of the talks please let me know. I have some notes and I was there with few more colleagues/friends that attended different ones.

This 4rd Duchess newsletter is to announce our upcoming events, general announcements and recap our past events.

Table of Contents

• Event: Duchess dinner after J-Fall – November 12, 2008
• Event: Duchess Talk at Devoxx – December 10, 2008
• Announcement: One free Devoxx pass (university + conference) – December 8-12, 2008
• Event: Introduction to Agile by Michael Franken (AgileHolland) – January 20, 2008
• Announcement: Participation Fee
• Announcement: One Male Guest
• Recap: Spring event by Arjen Poutsma (SpringSource)
• Recap: Groovy & Grails event by Maarten Hoppen (VX Company)
• Announcement: Photos on Flickr

Event: Duchess dinner after J-Fall – November 12, 2008

This is already becoming a tradition. After J-Fall we will have dinner together at restaurant Chaco, Brinklaan 92-94, Bussum

Meeting point is in the lobby at 18:30. We can go together to the restaurant in the center of Bussum. This dinner is not sponsored, so please bring enough money. Let us know if you want to join us by replying to this email. Please let us know ASAP (before end of the day Tuesday 11/11) so we can finalize our reservation.

Event: Duchess Talk at Devoxx – December 10, 2008 at 20:00

Clara and Linda will give a presentation at Devoxx in Antwerp about Duchess and the issues involving women in IT. Last time we did this at the Benelux jBoss meeting, it turned into a nice discussion. So if you’re going to Devoxx, please drop by. More info on the Devoxx site at http://devoxx.com/display/JV08/BOF+Day+3.

Announcement: One free Devoxx pass (university + conference) – December 8-12, 2008

One free Devoxx pass for both university and conference – the whole 5 days. First come first serve by replying to this email. The only requirement is that you write a recap for us about your experience at Devoxx.

Event: Introduction to Agile by Michael Franken – January 20, 2008

We are proud to announce our next event – Introduction to Agile – by Michael Franken, agile coach in the Netherlands and founder of AgileHolland.

Agile is a way of working that focuses on communication, teamwork, and delivering business value with quality software in a cost effective and timely manner. The work is done by self-organizing teams with a leadership focused on facilitating and inspiring.

The date for this event is set on Tuesday, January 20, 2008, at 18:00.

We are still looking for a location. If one of your companies is willing to sponsor us with space for this event, please let us know!

Please sign up on our website at http://jduchess.org/events/duchess-agile-event.
The fee is 15 euro per person for attending this event. See below.
Announcement: Participation Fee

As we organize more events, we have been running into the problem of finding money for our operating costs. While we are looking for general financial sponsorship, we have decided to ask for a small participation fee at each event. The cost for attending an event is 15 euro per person per event. The fee includes dinner since most are our events take place in the evening. We have decided on a fee per event instead of membership fees because most of our members are in other countries. This will also help us minimize no-shows. Please note that we will still need sponsoring for location, food, as well as general financial support. So please help get the word out to your companies to support women in Java.

There will be a participation fee starting from our next event.

Announcement: One Male Guest

We have often been asked by our male colleagues and other guys that we come across at conferences if they can come to our events. So, taking the idea from GirlGeekDinner, we have decided on that each member may bring one male guest per event. Hopefully, this will lead to a atmosphere of collaboration between the sexes at our events.
Recap: Spring Event by Arjen Poutsma (SpringSource)

On September 5th we had our first event: Introduction to Spring. The evening started a bit late due to heavy traffic, so most people were late. But we welcomed 9 ladies and had a wonderful Spanish buffet with several warm dishes, some bread and salad, sponsored by SpringSource.

After everybody had enough food, Arjen Poutsma gave a very interesting presentation about what he thought were the main reasons to use Spring. The attendees gave a lot of feedback. We discussed various uses of Spring in enterprise application. All in all it was a very inspiring evening. In the end all attendees received a SpringSource shirt and a DZone refcard for Spring configuration, which incidentally, you can download at the DZone website. You can also download the refcard Spring Annotations, which is the more current way of configuring Spring applications.

To see photos from the event, go to our website for the online recap at http://jduchess.org/recap-spring-event.

Recap: Groovy & Grails Workshop by Maarten Hoppen (VX Company).

On October 9th we had our second event: a workshop on Groovy and Grails. After a pizza and sandwiches sponsored by VX Company, Maarten Hoppen gave an introduction to Groovy, the language that is behind grails. In a nutshell, Groovy is a dynamic language influenced by similar languages such as Ruby and Python. Groovy, however, has a strong integration with Java, and therefore allows to easily adoptation by Java developers and easily integration of Java backend and Groovy frontend. Grails = Groovy + Spring + Hibernate. The dynamic nature of Groovy, without the need to compile into bytecode like Java, allows for fast development. Groovy and Grails bridges the enterprise Java world and the scripting world, which is up-and-coming as machines become faster.

After a short introduction, we got in pairs to work on the exercises. After a quick glance at the basics we have played with more advanced features: closures, how groovy handles with collections, with regular expressions. The evening was too short to complete the exercises so we all took that home with us. VX Company provided us with the course material, including hands-on exercises, and a CD with the necessary software, and in the end every one also received the book “Beginning Groovy and Grails“.

To see photos from the event, go to our website for the online recap at http://jduchess.org/recap-groovy-workshop.
Announcement: Photos on Flickr

From now on, photos for Duchess events will be uploaded to Flickr at http://flickr.com/photos/jduchess. Link to us and help us take more photos from Duchess events or send us photos from Java events that you have attend.

Regards,

Duchess

After a short introduction, we got in pairs to work on the exercises. After a quick glance at the basics we have played with more advanced features: closures, how groovy handles with collections, with regular expressions. The evening was too short to complete the exercises so we all took that home with us. VX Company provided us with the course material, including hands-on exercises, and a CD with the necessary software, and in the end every one also received the book “Beginning Groovy and Grails“.

This 3rd Duchess newsletter is to announce and remind you about our upcoming events in the Netherlands.

Contents:

• Reminder: Spring Framework Event (September 5, 2008, Van Nelle Fabriek, Rotterdam)
• Groovy & Grails Workshop (October 9, 2008, VXCompany, Baarn)
• Seeking Donations

Reminder: Spring Framework Event (September 5, 2008, Van Nelle Fabriek, Rotterdam)

It’s not too late to sign up for our Spring Framework Event.

For those of you who have signed up already, please reply to this email to let us know if you intend to come for dinner which will be served between 6-7pm.
When you arrive at Van Nelle Fabriek, tell the concierge you are coming for Ijsberg and give him your name. He will have a list of participants for the event.

Groovy & Grails Workshop (October 9, 2008, VXCompany, Baarn)

We are proud to announce our second technical event – Groovy & Grails organized by VXCompany.

It will be at the VXCompany office in Baarn (near Utrecht). If necessary, we will organize pick-up/drop-off at Baarn train station.

This is a free event for Duchess members. To receive a free book on Groovy & Grails, register before September 25:

Register for the Groovy & Grails Workshop

This workshop consists of a presentation and a hands-on session given by Maarten Hoppen of VXCompany.

Date: October 9, 2008
Time: 17:00-22:00
Location:
VXCompany office
Baarnsche Dijk 8
3741 LR Baarn

The following is the schedule for the evening:

17:00 Dinner
18:00 1st Workshop – presentation and examples
19:30 Break
20:00 2nd Workshop – hands-on session with Groovy & Grails
21:00 Drinks and book hand-out
22:00 End

Directions to VXCompany.

Seeking Donations

We are currently seeking donations to cover our operations costs. Would you or your company like to contribute? Any company or individual who donate will appear on our sponsors page. Please consider supporting our efforts. To donate, please reply to this email to get in touch.

Hope to see you at our upcoming events soon!

Cheers,

Duchess

http://www.jduchess.org

This is a free event for Duchess members. To receive a free book on Groovy & Grails, register on this page before September 25.

When you have signed up but are not able to come, please cancel your registration!

Here is an introduction to the workshop from Maarten:

Groovy en Grails: Dynamisch en Agile

Statisch getypeerde talen (zoals Java) kennen hun grenzen op het gebied van productiviteit en expressiviteit. Met de opkomst van dynamische talen en innovatieve Webframeworks gebaseerd op deze talen, is het mogelijk om op een krachtige en efficiënte manier bedrijfsapplicaties te ontwikkelen.
Groovy is een dynamische taal voor de Java Virtual Machine. Groovy biedt een flexibele Java-achtige syntax die Java-ontwikkelaars kunnen leren in een kwestie van uren, en biedt mogelijkheden die ook zijn terug te vinden in andere dynamische talen zoals Ruby, Python of Smalltalk. Met Groovy behoud je de investeringen die je hebt gedaan in je kennis en vaardigheden, tooling en server software, terwijl het toch mogelijk is om innovatieve software te ontwikkelen en gebruik te maken van bijvoorbeeld DSL’s (Domain Specific Languages).
Grails is een geavanceerd en innovatief web-applicatie framework op basis van Groovy, en gebaseerd op bewezen Open Source producten zoals Spring, Hibernate, SiteMesh, Quartz en Ajax libraries. Grails maakt het mogelijk om met teams volgens Agile methodieken te werken en zodoende kwalitatief hoogwaardige applicaties te ontwikkelen in een korter tijdsbestek. Door gebruik te maken van principes als ‘Convention over Configuration’ vereenvoudigt Grails het ontwikkel proces om zodoende de focus te leggen op de zaken die er daadwerkelijk toe doen, namelijk het opleveren van ‘Bussiness Value’ voor de gebruiker en gebruiksvriendelijke (web)applicaties.

Directions to VXCompany