Friday 10 June 2011

Ruby Pack/Unpack

Having a party in ZeroTurnaround new office in Tartu. There is a mat on the floor near the entrance door that says:

01010111011001010110110001100011011011110110110101100101

Using ruby, we can quickly figure out, what that actually means:

["01010111011001010110110001100011011011110110110101100101"].pack('B*') #==> Welcome

Ruby string pack unpack detailed usage.

Thursday 9 June 2011

GeekOut: The First Java Conference In Estonia

Today I have attended the first Java conference in Estonia: GeekOut. That is also my first conference at all, as I have never participated earlier in such an event. Nipping on ahead I could say, that the activity was a success. It was good organized, informative, interesting, with great food and beer (although I do not drink alcohol :) ).

The day started with small introduction from Jevgeni Kabanov, the founder and CTO of ZeroTurnaround, the organizers of the GeekOut. After that the main part began.

The first talk was about Java 7 by Martijn Verburg. It was about the new features that are coming in JDK 7. Project Coin announced:

  • Strings in switch
  • Automatic Resource Management (such as c# using construction)
  • Numeric literals with underscores. (Like in ruby: 3_456_789)
  • Improved Type Inference for Generic Instance Creation
    We can skip generics on the right side:
    Map<String, List<String>> anagrams = new HashMap<>();
  • New file handling mechanism, which "is finally done right, I hope" (M.V.)
  • Nonblocking I/O for sockets and files, new Files and Paths classes that provide some util functions to work with filelike objects, that are quicker than in JDK 6, multicatch and some others...

Next speech was about "Riding the data tsunami and coming out on top" by Alex Snaps. He introduced Terracotta - an open source solution for application scalability, availability and performance.

After a coffee break Joonas Lehtinen told us about Vaadin}> - the web framework for java, that allows creating rich internet applications fast and without a line in javascript. Interesting fact is that Vaadin is actually "10 years old, but 21 months young" - as the framework exists already for a long time, but only recently it became popular. You can write everything in java, no javascript debugging, no html, and if you are writing in some other jvm language, then you don't need java too! Scala, Groovy, Jruby ... are all good. Also a nice coding session, where Joonas wrote a nice web application in 15 minutes! I liked it, very impressive.

John Davies talked about integration of applications. Banking realities: FpML, 100-100000 messages/sec, latency critical - 10ms, xml is evil - no time for <>, network cards process the messages, not cpu - how the time is critical, 30PB of cache?! We also learned, why common message mapping is bad, when you have huge amount of data. That is converting to common message format and from it, when we can actually convert straight. What we need actually is to know how to convert each field of the message between POJO and particular format. XPath using in objects... and so on.

After the lunch noSql databases, particularly GraphDB called Neo4j was covered by Peter Neubauer. It was a kind of introductory presentation, showing the concepts of the database, with examples of searching and storing the data and also conditions in which GraphDBs can and should be used instead of Sql databases.

Jevgeni Kabanov showed problems that one may face doing the update of web application. For instance, the out of memory error problem arises because of previous version of application not being garbage collected, if there is a not matter how small leak, because it has the link to the classloader and it has the link to the previous version of application.

The last talk, presented once again by Martijn Verburg, was a relaxing one. Very funny, but at the same time serious. Have to figure out yourself, what qualities of a Diabolic Programmer are good, what not, and what good to some extent.

The closing of the GeekOut conference was in cafe in the same building. Free pizza and some drinks - nice ending of the good day. Next time I definitely will attend GeekOut again!

The Slides:

PS. I will list all the slides of the presentations here as soon as they appear.