Java One 2008, San Francisco, CA

Adrien Wiesebron — Mon, 19 May 2008 18:37:35 GMT

Day One (Tuesday, May 6, 2008)

The Duke and the Elephant: PHP Meets Java™ Technology--the Best of Both Worlds

Ray Nicholson from IBM presented a session at JavaOne primarily focussing on PHP support. He demoed Project Zero and WebSphere. This session turned out to be a commercial for an IBM Product called WebSphere Smash. It has a PHP interpreter on a Java Application server (PHP5 language elements represented as Java objects). They came up with some neat ways to have PHP call Java and vice versa. He said that there is no PHP specifications to follow, and no real set of tests to check that the PHP code is behaving properly.

Why use PHP (fairly obvious)
Why use PHP+Java+Groovy: leverage the power and communities of all platforms
WebSphere sMash: Agile application web development using dynamic scripting and RESTful Web Services, RIA, Ajax/Dojo
They seemed to have implemented some kind of PHP 5 runtime over Java SE. It sounds very interesting and I’ll have to look into the licensing information.

JAX-RS: The Java API for RESTful Web Services

Marc Hadley and Paul Sandoz went over the basics of REST and then demoed examples using JERSEY. It’s great to see how annotations are easy to use. Apparently, Jersey can run as Java app without a web container.

Developing (J)Ruby on Rails Applications with the NetBeans™ IDE

1100 people attended that session!

http://weblogs.java.net/blog/jfarcand/

Grails in depth

Grails is great for agile dev and quick proof of concept projects

Day Two (Wednesday, May 7, 2008)

Asynchronous Ajax for Revolutionary Web Applications

JRuby on Rails: Web Development Evolved

One of the best sessions. Ola Bini from Thoughtworks did a nice presentation (basics of Ruby, RoR, JRuby and JRoR) and demo of JRoR.

1. Ruby

Pure OO with dynamic typing; blocks are anonymous methods you can pass around and invoke and modules are like interfaces (namespaces)

2. JRuby: Java platform implementation of the Ruby language

Faster than Ruby, real native threads, full compilation (ahead-of-time and just-in-time), Java into Ruby and vice versa

3. RoR: MVC framework, single-threaded and shared-nothing design, DRY

Day Four (Friday, May 9, 2008)

Detecting and Defending Against Security Vulnerabilities for Web 2.0 Applications

Web 2.0 easier to hack than web 1.0: Google finds 2 millions of malicious sites.

Use tools to detect. No one tool will catch all; need to use them all.

Use defensive coding and testing tools.