Offsite Seminary Report

As usually, we had offsite seminary. It is an initiative that in root has self-education. I was personally involved in preparation for this event. With Marcin Racino we choose place, and we prepared everything. If you want prepare something similar in your company fill free to asking me for tips. And if your company don’t support such events, you should consider join mine :). Let’s the report begin.

We started our trip in Warsaw, we were going to Ostróda by train. During the trip we were talking about Polish Railways and way in 21st century our trip must take almost 5 hours. This link shows our trip.

Next day presentations were started. First presentation was about ANTLR and TinyBasic, this was very good introduction to compiler theory with examples based on TinyBasic, the language imagined by Piotr.

Next one was about concurrency in java version five and six. Karwer showed us how to build concurrent cache and what pitfalls can we spot during this simple task

Next one was about JBPM and JPDL the business processes definition and execution engine. Presenter is lead in my current project, so I know examples very well because they came from my project. Even thought that business processes are boring topic, Łukasz made his presentation interesting and worth to hear.

Another one was about code metrics and improvement with additional tools such as findbugs, pmd, jdepend. We learned that we can improve code quality but also improve our knowledge.

Next was about protein folding it was very interesting, and Paweł showed us this through game about folding so no one was confused :).

The last one before dinner was seminary about new features in JVM. This features were introduce especially for another languages. And I must admit that this presentation was materialization of my dreams. My first presentation in Roche was about languages on JVM with conclusion to make diabolic jsr 666 to join every language and run it on JVM. A year later “Da Vinci Machine Project” was create, and now features which Michał was described for us might be introduce in Java version seven (invoke dynamic). I want to count this languages but now it is hard to do, see this list.

After dinner everyone felt asleep, and Pawełs topic about java date api didn’t look good. Fortunately Paweł had many stories about time and why java api is useless. He presented us joda time project, and he told us about many interesting things such as leap seconds. So you shouldn’t be surprised if sometime when you get second value from your time you see 61 or 60 (counts form 0).

Next iBatis come on the scene and what I didn’t know iBatis has some features where Hibernate has no chance, so it came back to my developer toolbar.

Next was Flex, as flex for me is rather boring Marcin made such a show that it was one man show, and unfortunately I was next, in addition the football game had just started so I was trying be brief as possible, I made short introduction about Python and after it shows Django framework and Jython. I finished with deploy Django application on JBoss Application Server. When I said “I’m finished”, nearly everyone went out for the second half of football match.

The rest of the day we were watching football match, and we had event with Poseidon. We had some task to do, but it was worth to do it (there was awards). After that we had “wine party” with tasting very good vines.

Next day was also interesting, we were started with HTML 5 presented by Kszysztof, he is experienced presenter, so session was very interesting. And I must admit that new features introduced to html 5 is very impressive.

Next was very scary project called jaxer, and another try of server side JavaScript (JS application server), which can be also installed as apache module.

Than Brush was talking about closures in Java this was solid presentation about three closures specifications, with examples and cons and pros about every spec. During this presentation there was some information about the football match. (pzpn, pzpn, pzpn).

Next Grzesiek told us about Microformats. Microformats are simple html extension to provide additional semantic information. I will make promise to myself that I will use some of them on my blog. And some of them I have already been using (rel-nofollow).

Than Luiza talk was about Graphene which is one atomic layer of Graphite, and can be used instead of Silicon. And maybe someday we will have somewhere Graphene Valley ;).

After diner we started with Janek talk about Silverlight and very quickly this talk was Silverlight vs Flex comparison.

Next Maciek was talking about ATG with comparison to our java stack technology. Maciek showed us some ATG features which was there for years, and some of them are very young in ‘normal’ today java stacks.

Marcin started with Wicket, he showed many code examples on project he actually working.

Next Piotr had talk about oracle, Piotr had talks on PLOUG so his talk was very solid.

And the final talk was provided by Krzysiek and Marcin, they were talking about Real Time Java. They have special real time ubuntu and showed us a lot of code samples with time measurements. After it Krzysiek showed us Phun. Phun is the 2D physics simulator, it works on windows, linux and mac. It’s very nice and may be used to teach children physics on real examples.

In the evening we had Open Session Meeting and we discussed many topics such as (OSGi, Spring Source future, Mobile market and many many more) It was very interesting and I was enjoy it very much.

And this is the end, we went back to Warsaw by train and during this trip we watch “Testostron” movie. It was great time, and I wait for next Offsite seminary which will be held in May. See you soon.