This year the number one Java conference in Germany, the JAX 09, is great as always. With nearly the same number of attendees it’s crowded in the positive sense – although you have to go to a session in time to get a good seat. I’ve seen a lot of highlights today – but first was my own presentation about JCR, OSGi, Scripting and REST – which presented the great Apache Sling web framework. Apache Sling uses Apache Felix as the OSGi framework and Apache Jackrabbit for the content repository. My session was very well attended, more than I expected, and while preparing the talk I noticed that I actually have more presentation material for JCR/Jackrabbit and OSGi/Felix than for Sling itself; although Sling is of course the topic of the session.
I think this shows that Sling is really a very clever framework, leveraging existing stuff and combining it in a productive way – this goes hand in hand with the great keynote tonight from Neal Ford – now, I can’t summarize it for you, but one of the key points was: don’t make things more complex than they should be (just because somethings that it makes sense or is cool). Look around and make use if available stuff – even if that doesn’t look cool for your developers. Most of the time is spent on accidental complexicy which in the end causes projects to fail.
I’m in the software world for over 20 years now and Neal is spot on with his message; i’ve seen a lot of projects fail because of this or because of one (or more) of the anti-patterns Neal mentioned.
Unfortunately I missed the sessions from Neal’s collegue Ted Neward which I enjoyed last year, but I saw an interesting session about the tools in Spring IDE for Spring, OSGi and Spring DM – now this looks pretty cool to me; I’m not in favour of using Spring as I think that there are more lightweight 🙂 solutions when it comes to OSGi – but on the other hand giving the fact that everyone and his dog knows Spring and given such good tooling with Spring IDE, it’s really hard to advocate something else. With the upcomming OSGi blueprint specification this will also have an impact on OSGi. And in the light of Neal’s talk, what could possible reasons be to not use this stuff? It would be great if the tooling would work with any OSGi framework and not just the Spring server.
But these are just excerpts from the day – and it’s just the first day; I’m looking forward to tomorrow when the OSGi day takes place!
During the breaks I’m trying to finish some stuff for the upcomming Sling release – we hope to get it out in the next weeks. So stay tuned.