.Net 11 02 5 2007 6 3g 7 ADF 5 Agile 24 Ajax 33 apollo 4 Architect 17 architecture 7 article 4 Articles 22 awards 26 barcamp 13 barcampbelfast 5 Belfast 14 blog 63 blogging 39 bloglines 4 blogs 28 BPEL 4 BPM 8 Business 106 comment 12 Company 6 Consultant 11 Consulting 13 CRM 5 CV 9 Database 7 design 7 Development 29 Drogheda 16 Dublin 107 Dundalk 8 eclipse 8 EJB 10 Ejb3 8 enterprise 19 enterprise java 17 enterprise web 2.0 19 EnterpriseWeb2.0 19 Entrepreneur 8 ERP 4 event 12 Events 63 Excel 7 feedburner 4 Finance 14 firefox 7 flash 6 Google 15 Government 14 Health 6 hibernate 4 IBM 5 IE 6 Information Technology 8 Internet Explorer 7 Ireland 93 Irish 27 IrishBlogAwards 28 IT 21 j2ee 14 Java 55 java enterprise 11 Java Enterprise Edition 24 Java Enterprise Edition 22 Java Server Faces (JSF) 12 java5 8 JBoss 16 jobs 10 jruby 6 JSF 9 JUnit 12 jvm 8 Knowledge Management 31 Linux 7 Lucene 5 meetup 26 Microsoft 11 mobile 8 network 21 networking 11 Networks 20 NoUnit 11 Office 13 Open Source 18 Oracle 23 People 91 PHP 11 presentation 13 Process 18 Project 15 RedPiranha 15 Retail 5 rp 7 rss 6 rte 4 ruby 15 Rule Engine 16 rules 6 SAP 5 Security 16 SEO 4 SOA 5 Spring 11 Sql 7 struts 6 struts2 4 System Administration 5 Technology 46 Testing 9 Training 34 Travel 5 UK 9 Uncategorized 17 Unix 7 user interface 5 vodafone 4 VOIP 8 Web 48 Web 2.0 49 web2 23 Web2Ireland 21 website 15 wordpress 5 Workflow 17 Xml 14
Yesterday we presented the Irish Web 2.0 Event at the Morgan Hotel , Temple Bar , Dublin - the other half of ‘we’ being Fergal Breen of IrishDev. Being a Web 2.0 event, we made it a bit more interactive than your usual presentation, so I ended up learning a lot. Here are the top things that I didn’t know before yesterday:
1) In Ireland at least , awareness of Web 2.0 is highly concentrated in the tech , and not the business community. 90% of the audience described themselves as technical , despite the event being co-hosted by the Irish Internet Association (IIA), a business group. I expect this to change over the next 6 months following patterns elsewhere.
2) Walter (from Sxoop.com) described the recent Web 2.0 conference in London. One thing he said surprised me: He said that there was a feeling that developers in the area were doing it to ’scratch their own itch’ (a good thing) but were hostile to ‘Enterprise’ development (bad as somebody has to pay the bills!). A gap in the market for an ‘Enterprise Web 2.0′ conference perhaps?
3) 10% of the Audience were Johnny Cash fans. Johnny Cash is a perfect example of the ‘long tail’. 18 months ago (before his untimely demise and biopic starring Joaquin Phoenix) it was nearly impossible to get his records (in Ireland at least) - a classic case of ‘long tail’ demand. Now, he’s a blockbuster again, so mainstream shops are stocking his CD’s in high profile positions. In 18 months time , will be back on the long tail again?
4) Google has huge mindshare amoung Ajax developers and Web 2.0 people. Nearly every single person present had used Google maps (so much so that we didn’t need the demo video). Most were also aware of the awesome Ajax stuff coming out of the Googleplex such as the Ajax based XSLT transformation and image handling libraries.
5) People don’t want to do Javascript. While Ajax has rekindled their interest in this language, there was almost a relief that that frameworks such as DWR and Dojo do most of the work for you. To be fair, many people’s opinion are based on Javascirpt circa 1999, but there was a definate preference for using Atlas ,Ajax.net and Java Server Faces (JSF) / Oracle ADF.
6) There was a healthy representation of Microsoft people. Given that the consensus is that Web 2.0 and it’s Ajax capabilites are the most serious challenge to Redmond on the Desktop, it’s healthy to see such a strong interest. Healthy as in competition (from Firefox) has given us Internet Explorer 7 and will continue to drive innovation.
7) Nobody can agree what Web 2.0 is. This is not surprising considering that Web 2.0 is about individual experience. Big, shared, events like the Superbowl (or Champions League final , for us that prefer our football in other formats) are now the exeption rather than than norm. Even these events will be customised - choose your own camera angle, choose which sports blogs you read leading up to the game , choose the device (TV , PC, Mobile) that you want to watch on, and when you want to watch.
8) There is a healthy balance of Buzz and scepticism around Web 2.0. A lot of the companies (such as eats.ie) that are ‘doing’ Web 2.0 would not use the web 2.0 label. They’re doing the Ajax / online hosting / word of mouth marketing / self funding / continual updates thing , but they find that the label just gets in the way.
9) Some people were concerned about ‘how do you test Web 2.0 and Ajax apps?’. The answer - the same as before , only involve your users. While Ajax gives us incredible power (including the ability to ‘break’ the web browser), people have got used to certain conventions with Web and PC apps that will take time to evolve.
10) There was a lot of interest in using Agile techniques to deliver Web 2.0 apps (e.g. Flicker s update of code every half hour). Which is a nice lead in for the Agile event at the Irish .Net Developers Association.
Finally , if you are going to a joint presentation (with the two speakers stepping in and out as required), try to see the final version of the slides more than 10 minutes beforehand. You know who you are (Fergal!). Luckily , the feedback from the people so far has been good (e.g. Robert Burke. I think the word ’superb’ was used. Was Kieran at the same event ? !
If you’re looking for the slides / materials , they’re available at this blog post.
Notes from this Post on the Serverside
I recently wrote an O’Reilly article on one of the related JBoss projects the Drools / JBoss rules engine.
Just to get the difference between jBPM and Drools / JBoss Rules straight in my head:
- Workflow tends to be ‘wide’ where Rule Engines tend to be ‘deep’.
- Workflow is wide as the flow is spread over different people / actors and over time.
- Rule Engines are ‘deep’ as they apply simple rules to solve complex problems, but in general the rules are applied ‘all at once’.
Some of the confusion (in my head at least) comes from the fact:
- It is possible to implement workflow using a rules engine, much as it is possible to write your own workflow using Java. Of course , you don’t get the graphical designer that JBpm has.
- Both JBoss Rules (Drools) and JBoss Workflow (jBPM) see to
‘externalize’ part of the solution outside of Java. By stepping outside
of Java to use an XML / Graphical based approach, it makes the solution
easier to configure and understand.
And it’s not just blogs that waste time in your life. A colleague was good enough to pass on the handbook from a ‘more effective time management’ course he was on (and swears by). It was given by Priority Management , on Getting Smart with Outlook , but it’s applicable to whatever email client that you use.
Notes from the Handbook are here on the KnowledgeBase.
Before you yawn and click elsewhere , consider the remainder of your life as 1 page per day diary - no matter how long you have left , you have a finite amount of blank pages left. It’s up to you how you use them. The headlines are:
If you’re reading this, you’ve probably either been to (or missed) the Web 2.0 Presentation for Irish Dev / Irish Internet Association in Dublin. The Guys from the Java meetup (the Irish Java User Group - IJUG) will also be along.
Links, Slides and related material for the presentation are below.
Link to Enterprise Java Workshop, to be led by Dr. Bruce Martin in Dublin on the 6th - 9th March.
Is anybody going? Is it worth $1995 USD for 4 days? (and I’m not going to get sniffy about us using Euro over here 
) Who is this course aimed at? In some ways this course is like Corba: very relevant to the very small niche that use these technologies, but the broader line of ‘best practice’ has moved on.
An extract from the Agenda is below. It seem to broadly match what Sun looks for in it’s Enterprise Java Architect Certification. As such it shares the plus and minus of this approach : You get the Orthodox Entreprise Java Approach, or at least the approach being plugged by Sun about 3 years ago.
The trouble with this approach is that the Enterprise Java world has moved on. Hibernate has pushed aside Entity Beans , so much so that Enterprise Java Beans 3.0 is a complete turnaround it it’s direction. Spring has got a lot of traction as an EJB-Lite (and I mean that with the most positive connotations). Enterprise Java Patterns are much better understood (just search the IBM site), if not more widely understood.
Where’s the Ajax and the impact of multiple, small , web requests on application scalability? The JSON (as part of the Web Services)? Does it cover Java Server Faces and the emerging Ajax enabled Java Presentation Frameworks? What about workflow and rule engines and Java Messaging Services (JMS)? How about the tool integration to make your teams life easier when building the designs that you , as an Architect , have come up with? I don’t see Security in there , nor any of the other JSR (Java Specification Requests) that have come out of the broader Java community in the last 3 years.
And that’s before I go on about the only ‘technology alternative’ being offered is .Net - the PHP , Ruby and Oracle guys will have something to say about that! All have strong cases to make on a project by project basis. What about off the shelf products (both open source and commercial) that could , depending on the project, give you most of the functionality you need and you just have to customise the remaining 20%?
Maybe I’m being unfair, and the above is not the aim of the course.
For info, it’s on in the Gresham hotel on Dublin’s O’Connell Street from the 6th to the 9th of March. If you want a good solid foundation in Enterprise Java, and if somebody else is paying for it then it’s probably to be recommended. It might even help you get certified as a ‘Sun Enterprise Java Architect’. But unless you’re in an outstanding group, don’t expect it to be cutting edge.
Are you going - prove me wrong and leave a comment!
Project Module
Persistence Module
Scalability Module
Integration Module
Application Design Module
UCD (University College Dublin) have just confirmed that the next module in the MSC in Software in Software Engineering will be Agile Software development, with the module provided by Exoftware - them that are into Extreme Programming in a very big and very effective way.
Ironic then , that I’m meant to be presenting on Agile Software to the Irish .Net Developers Alliance (INDA) the week before -:-)
One rule of thumb : when the Economist Magazine (the one with the red square on the top right hand corner) writes about something, it is a sure sign that it is leaving the 10% of early adoptors and going mainstream. This has been true for Agile Projects , Java and even the rise of the Internet.
This weeks Economist has an article on Corporate Blogging. It gives a good explanation as to what blogging is about , for the 90% of the population that hasn’t heard about it yet. It also gives the case study of when Diebold bought Global Election Systems (GES). GES makes voting machines similar to those involved in the electronic voting debacle in Ireland. The GES machines have similar problems, but unfortunately Diebold only became aware of this after they bought they company. What is interesting is that these problems were well documented beforehand in the blogosphere - a good example of how the blogging community can save you a lot of money!
As part of this ‘Blogs going mainstream’ , the Irish Internet Assoication is hosting a Seminar on blogging. It’s at the Hilton hotel in Dublin on the 8th March. Worth checking out. Michele Neylon , who is giving the talk , is also looking for examples of Irish Business Blogs.
If your CV is like mine (viewable online), then the chances it is:
a) accurate but terse
b) full of technical details
c) covers years of your life in one sentence
but worst of all
d) doesn’t really give a good indication of whether you have the skills and experience needed to do the job.
In fact, do you suspect that some people you are working with may have ’stretched the truth’ a little too far on their CV?
Now imagine if your CV was in a Weblog (blog) format … a good example (picked at random via Google). So apart from being trendy, what are the advantages of doing your CV this way?
What do you think, are blogs the new CV? If you’re looking to use Blogging to land yourself a new job, then Jobster isn’t too bad a place to start.
