I really love San Francisco with the cable cars, Lombard Street, Golden gate, Victorian houses. If you think that I experienced all these things… Wrong! I joined the JavaOne conference…
Some weeks before, I booked my sessions etc. The choice was simple, focus on technology for the financial market.
My schedule got full of sessions with Real-time Java, Garbage Collection, Concurrency, Throughput & Latency, and the new GC type G1. Yes, I am into Java…
When I reached SF I felt like being in a movie, everything were new but yet so familiar…
Well, 15,000 Java developers joined the conference at Moscone Center. When I reached the conference area I first reached the north building where the large session was held.
But all people were stopped at the entrance by a conference guard, we were not allowed to just go the stairs down to the session hall, but we saw people being downstairs, weird! Why?
“You have to go to the other side of the street, to the south building, there is a way to the session hall under the street”. It was no idea arguing, because I heard several now irritated Java developers arguing the same way I intended…
I walked across the Folsom street to the south building, but I was confused, a lot of people stood in front of some other guards saying things like what I had just heard. – “You have to go to the other side, go to the north building”…
After a while I decided to give it another try, I walked across the street again, together with hundreds of people. I heard the same arguing again from Java developers but now new people, perhaps newly arrived, I saw them turn around and walk across the street, I smiled for myself and thought good luck…Anyway, I came to the large session hall just in time.
Some highlights from JavaOne, theme JAVA + YOU:
- JavaFX, has been more developed. A demo gave an overall cool impression; dragging a running application from a browser onto the desktop, closing the browser and the app continues running just like that.
- Rock’n‘Roll; Neil Young showed up on the first keynote giving credit to Java and Blue Ray.
- G1, Sun develops a future replacement of GC type CMS. The new G1 will focus on low latency but still good throughput.
- Real-time Java. There exist RTJVM from Sun, IBM and JRockit today. The JSR work is still ongoing. Soon new updated VMs will be released.
- Java1.7. Some news are: Multi-catch, enhancements of Annotations, closures, fork/join framework and a transfer queue.
- JMARS; NASA has produced a very impressive tool for mapping Mars and handling various geological data. The amazing application showing Mars’ elevation, potential landing sites, and a large amount of surface detail shots.
The sessions were held on a rather high level. I had to talk to the speakers, join the BOFs to get answers to the specific questions our company had. I visited some company booth and some companies presented performance analysis tools for production, that should not slow latency at all, maybe some milliseconds, they told me. When I said that decrease of latency for only 1 ms in our system is bad, they looked like they had got something stuck in their throat…and it was time for me to walk on.
The computer revolution is here, we already did the 0->1 CPU transition. Concurrent programming is now “the norm”, many companies are doing the 1->2 CPU transition. Scalable concurrent programming is even harder. It is time to think about the 2->N CPU transition. There is one interesting query we could try to answer: What is the limit of parallelism of our trading system?
In the future I believe Cinnober have to adopt to the new memory models, immortal memory and scoped memory using Real-time Java using NHRT and Javolution to decrease the latency.
One conclusion of all my inputs I got from JavaOne is very satisfying:
Cinnober already have relationship with a number of the speakers and we cover the new technology. We either have ongoing research or we already know the new technology well. I feel that we are well-equipped for future competition.
And, there is no doubt about it, I will for sure go back to experience the amazing Bay area again.
“I believe in an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out.”
Arthur Hays Sulzberger
But at least I have one photo of SF with me back home, I took a shot on a postcard…
Photo of a postcard
Comments
Post new comment