[Event] First Day of JAOO 2006

Welcome to the First Review of the JAOO 2006. Monday was the first Conference day and there have been several interesting talks the whole day.

First of course we visited the Key Note from Werner Vogel the CTO of Amazon. His talk was about the business model from Amazon and how the infrastructure they have build the last years fit into it. The Infrastructure is totally service oriented and it was realy interesting to see that they don’t only use services but also invent abstraction layers for Services.

After the Key note there have been several Tracks available to choose talks from:

• Abstractions for Concurrency
• Emerging Web Technologies
• Modeling and Designing Enterprise Applications
• Relational Databases
• SOA - What's Left to Say?
• Solution Track I

The first talk we heard was in the “Abstraction for Concurrency” Track from Erik Meijer (Microsoft). It was realy interesting to see that just one Track of the whole Conference was dedicated to Concurrency. As soon as even simple PC’s or Laptops are equipped with multi cores or processors we see a much higher possibility to adapt our programs to use more threads depending on the architecture of our system running the software. Everybody that has developed Multi Threaded Applications knows that it is not that easy with our current tools and languages. The Monitor concept that is used in the common languages like Java and C# is not that powerful to deal with requirements that rise as soon as we want to use the possibilities described above. For this reason Comega supports new Features for Concurrency. As Comega is still a research project they came out wit a little useful Library for C# called Joins library that gives you a interesting possibility to capsulate all the locking stuff. Check it out at http://research.microsoft.com/research/downloads/.

The Second Track we where really interested was SOA. We visited the talk from Gregor Hophe (CTO from Amazon) who was talking about several Patterns for Communication in Loosely Coupled Systems. If you are interesting in try out this webpage.

Fore those of you who are doing Web development or are interested in Web frameworks I advise to take a look to Seaside. The Framework is not new but interrestingly much more interesting is that it is build in Smalltalk J. The main advantage of Seaside is that it supports Continuations and is really easy to write (at least if you know Smalltalk).

The Party Keynote was given by Alistair Cockburn which was the highlight of the whole day. I can just say if you have ever the Chance to hear him live even if it is 1000km away it is worth it.

So this was it from the first day of JAOO 2006 of course there have been much much more.