The title for this blog entry is actually dual in purpose. I will talk about the two last days of JavaOne, the Thursday and the Friday this week. But one of the big rumors from the news room this year was that it is likely that this JavaOne will be the last one ever. I can’t really comment on that, but this JavaOne did feel a bit less enthusiastic than it used to. Anyway. The last two days were less hectic than the first ones, so this entry won’t be very long.
My first session of the day was Neal Fords talk about design patterns in Groovy and JRuby. I’ve seen this talk before, and it is pretty good - Neal talks about how some of the classic Gang of Four patterns disappear in languages that support more advanced features. So Neal showed some of these. After that he went through some new patterns he has seen in dynamic languages, such as his Type Transmogrification pattern.
After that Tobias Ivarsson talked about how to explot concurrency in dynamic languages. I was a bit surprised to see Scala in this talk, but it did make sense. The content was very good, although Tobias ran out of material quite quickly. It was interesting to see how different the concurrency performance of JRuby and Jython was - but of course this is something the Jython guys easily can fix, once they’re done with the more pressing issue of getting 2.5 compatibility. In fact, they are making rapid progress on this, and this week saw a new release candidate released. Good stuff.
After that Charles and Tom did a talk about scripting Java with JRuby. This was a new version of the classic JRuby talk, and I think it worked really well. Most of the talk concentrated on a larger example instead of looking at small tidbits.
After that me and Charles spent a few hours in the ThoughtWorks Studios, taking a look at how the JIT compiler works with Mingle.
The first and only BOF for the evening was the JSR 292 Cookbook BOF. This session went into some more details on how it works, showed some code that uses MethodHandles and also had Charles talk about his experience with using invoke-dynamic in JRuby.
The Friday started with Gosling’s toy show. Sadly, I missed most of that. My first session was an introduction to the internals of IBM’s Java Virtual Machine. A very interesting presentation that looked at the kind of optimizations their VM does - including showing how the assembly generated will be different depending on how hot the code in question is.
After that Brian Goetz and two other HotSpot engineers talked about the kind of things HotSpot do to make Java code fast. Together, those two talks gave a pretty thorough understanding of how JVMs can be made fast.
This year at JavaOne was pretty good. Lots of fun stuff going on and many interesting sessions.
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