Java

Amazing. That’s the one word summary for this unconference. It wasn’t my first time in an unconference, although the previous ones were slightly smaller and my experience then wasn’t that satisfactory as the one I’ve had in JCrete. And I have just discovered the key ingredient for a successful unconference: the people. Because is not only about the technical content of the sessions (which was quite high, don’t get me wrong), but about those interactions during and after the sessions, happening without any planification, as natural as a conversation can be. Probably the most interesting ones are, in fact, those unexpected gatherings happening at random places, like at the beach, or during breakfast, or while trekking to Balos beach, or while snokerkeling in a beautiful location of the island.

Packages in Java is a quite simple and straightforward concept of the language. It’s there from the beginning and it’s commonly used by every Java programmer. In a few words, these are the rules you have to follow to create a class inside a package (spoiler: which are not completely true, as we’ll see later): Package statement must be the first one specified in a java class file A package namespace must match the physical path of the file, i.e a class defined with a package a.b.c must be placed in a path a/b/c/ Easy right? Let’s check…

During last year, I had the chance to work as CTO of a startup, working mainly within MEAN stack. I was happy, the technology I was working with was in a great hype and its community grew bigger and bigger with lots of projects popping up everywhere. But life is continuously changing, and I started to work in a new company within Java/JEE technologies. I was back to my first days as a professional computer engineer. Java ecosystem is huge, and there are some well established tools that you must control if you want to progress as Java developer. But Java -the language- is getting older, and newer languages are more expressive and require less boiler plate code (don’t get me wrong, JVM is a great platform, and probably the best one for enterprise applications). Even with the recent release of Java 8, which introduced Lambdas and some functional style capabilities, I still feel like writing too much, or at least much more than with other languages.

¿Mezclar la versatilidad de JSF con la definición de flujos de negocio de SWF, todo ello con una estética semejante gracias a Tiles? Pues es posible, aunque resulta realmente tedioso y complicado para aquel que es relativamente nuevo a algunas (más bien todas) de estas tecnologías del mundo Java JEE. A esto es a lo que me he dedicado la última semana de trabajo, a intentar comprender el funcionamiento y buscar por Internet la forma de poder conjugar estas tres tecnologías. He conseguido hacerme una idea del complejo funcionamiento de JSF, SWF me ha sorprendido gratamente por la gran potencia que se consigue con tan pocas líneas de código, y Tiles, aunque ni tan avanzado tecnológicamente ni tan sorprendente, ofrece unas posibilidades de diseño visual que unifica toda la aplicación web con tan solo unos poco ficheros.

Desde hace cosa de unas semanas, el mundo Java está cambiando notablemente. Por un lado, Sun publicó Java EE 5.0, junto con Sun Application Server 9.0, primera versión estable del proyecto Glassfish, que pretende implementar un Application Server libre para la especificación de JEE 5. En esta nueva versión se ha incluido, a parte de un cambio de la nomeclatura para las versiones, la especificación de EJB 3.0, Java Persistence API, una mejora en el desarrollo de webservices o JSF entre otras características.