javanicus

London java.meetup - sep 2003 review

Posted on 15 Sep 2003

Back from my holiday straight into another London java.meetup, a good showing with eight geeks in one London nightspot. (It was so good I even braved using the laptop in a public drinking establishment)

We had an academic with us discussing the intriguing Iceni project, which is a "level 2 grid computing" thingmy. All written in java. Seems to be like the distributed model you get with projects such as Seti@Home, but with authentication from the ground up. The eventual aim being to reduce number crunching tasks from years to hours, given enough hardware to throw at it.
Sounds like it's worth taking around the block, but I'm sure the heavy clustering from various J2EE vendors is doing equivalent stuff.
The current uses appeared to be the usual physics problems from Fourier transforms through to Meteorological studies.
It is often funny to see the parallels between academic research, and real world (commercial) development problems, I can't quite figure from the description given whether grid computing is the next big thing, or something that has been done by another name for years before in clustering stuff.
Oh well another download, play around, and file in my bitblog. (Also wonder if true Seda based nodes + Grid computing topology = top whack performance possible? [never a thread/node idle])
Asked around about the eternal Struts vs WebWork vs Tapestry vs JavaServerFaces vs RollYourOwn debate, and this time the view was Struts:2, RollYourOwn:1, JSF:-1, which was intriguing. As maintenance is an issue, the lure of Struts being a 'hirable skill' is very tempting, but we also have RollYourOwn solutions in house already (FrontController/Actions/ValueObjects/JSPs), I keep thinking that this is the promise of WebWork, but I must be missing something, as RollYourOwn still got the +1 over WebWork from one attendee...
Dare I download Struts and be lured into the 'it only takes three days for something useable, and there is a book about it' siren song, or follow my heart (purity, simplicity, webwork1), or ditch frameworks altogether, and write my own seedwork using the wonderful megg [end shameless plug [jira]]
Xindice was discarded as no good for last months XML problem, due to the lack of transactional capability. Anyone know a database with performant XPath query language and full transactional aspects?.
Met bloke who likes to program in Scheme, but he seems a jolly nice chap. We'll do lunch soon Steve, yeah...
Worst of all I saw Sam Dalton, and didn't get the chance to have a proper chat, which we must address next time Sam... [p.s. Sam: upgrade your Pebble instance to the latest, greatest, or better yet try out the wonderful blogmento [shameless plug pt2], which will allow you to write blog entries on your laptop on your way home...]
And it looks like a wonderful new edition of the JSP 2.0 book is going to be released next week, from (formerly a Wrox title) Apress, cool.

Another fun java.meetup, lets hope we can get the numbers up to double figures (0x10) for next month...

15 Sep 2003 |