Podcasts

Jay Zimmerman is the founder and director of No Fluff Just Stuff symposium series. In this interview Jay talks about the reason for creating No Fluff Just Stuff and the community that has developed around this popular series.

In part 2, Jay talks about NFJS, the Magazine.

As creator and director of the No Fluff Just Stuff Software Symposium Series, Jay Zimmerman is uniquely positioned to stay ahead of the curve in Java application development. In this year-end discussion with Andrew Glover, Jay addressed a wide range of questions about what Java developers were doing to manage software complexity in 2007, and which languages, frameworks, tools, and techniques could help you make Java application development fun again in 2008.

Pete Behrens speaks with Lisa Haneberg, author of Focus Like a Laser Beam and Two Weeks to a Breakthrough about agile methods and how they apply in a management and organizational development context.

The first time Google maps allowed you to click and drag a web page, everything changed. NFJS speaker Nathaniel Schutta talks to us about AJAX: the technology that has changed the look and feel of web pages in the last few years. He couldn't say it any more plainly. If Schutta visits a web site that is not Ajaxified, he questions whether he should be doing business with that company.

How done are you? No Fluff Just Stuff speaker Neal Ford says that Agile developers need to be able to create accurate metrics which allow you track your progress. He insists on brutal honesty. Stories are short measurable components of a project that are marked as either done or not done. You can't fool yourself into thinking you're almost done with your project because you're almost done with all of the stories.

Think about places you've worked. Aren't there people there that you're pretty sure could be let go and not be missed? Maybe they could be let go and productivity would go up. In this podcast, NFJS speaker Bruce Tate talks about hiring and building effective small teams. He talks about how to manage teams that are geographically separated and what it takes to get the most out of these teams.

If you scale an agile process to work with a large team, is it agile anymore? That's what NFJS speaker Pete Behrens considers in this podcast. Unfortunately, some of the tools and ways in which people communicate and track progress will probably have to change. Is this new process still in the spirit of the original to be considered Agile 2.0 or is it something completely different?

NFJS speaker David Geary says that the GWT (Google Web Toolkit) is the third generation in web application frameworks. He's worked with the predecessors including Struts and JavaServer Faces and is now enjoying the third wave which includes Ruby on Rails and GWT. As a Java developer, the choice for him is clear: GWT. In this podcast he talks about some of the features and advantages of working in the GWT including some of the other JavaScript libraries you can easily hook into.

State management has always been a complex and tricky part of web application development. Continuations simplify this and automatically allow you to create a one-to-one conversation between users and a web application. State preservation and flow control no longer need to be handled manually, bringing you back to the simplicity of single user console applications. Remember 'scanf()'?

This presentation will introduce continuations from general principles, followed by practical examples that explain how they benefit web application development and their frequent usage patterns. Finally, automatic fail-over and scalability will be demonstrated through the integration with Open Terracotta.

Slides and demo source for this presentation are available from the RIFE project.

The original post on java.net can be found here.

When you have a lot of workflow in your system, when you see a lot of XML messaging, or when you are connecting to a lot of other systems, these are times when NFJS speaker Tom Marrs says that you need an ESB. In this podcast Marrs explains that he likes to keep his focus on the business needs as he builds a SOA application. He discusses governance models, architectural decisions, behavior and cultural shifts involved in getting different groups working together, and metrics.

NFJS speaker Venkat Subramaniam is aware that agile developers are supposed to value people over tools but he also wants to make sure you know about the high quality open source tools available to you. He talks about JUnit 4, mock objects, coverage tools, and tools for measuring the quality of design.

What if the developers and the business people spoke the same language? No Fluff Just Stuff speaker Neal Ford says that Domain Specific Languages can bridge this gap. A DSL allows developers to communicate and focus on what a piece of software is intended to do while hiding some of the mechanisms for doing so under an abstraction layer. Neal also explains the difference between external and internal DSLs.

To be an effective architect you have to have a wealth of technical knowledge as well as a great deal of business knowledge. No Fluff Just Stuff speaker Mark Richards thinks it's easier to model sending someone to the moon than a simple insurance application. He lays out a list of challenges for architects and provides techniques for leveraging agility to meet these challenges.

Jay Zimmerman launched the No Fluff Just Stuff tour five years ago. The shows could have been delivered over the web or just once a year like traditional conferences. Neither of these was ever an option for Jay. In this podcast he explains the thinking behind the shows and what you'll experience in one of the weekend shows. He also looks ahead to some important milestones coming in 2007.

You may want to write your Java applications in a different programming language. NFJS speaker Scott Davis says that now that the time is right for Groovy. In this podcast Scott talks about why Java programmers should consider Groovy and when is the best time for doing so. He points out that Groovy's RC 1 was scheduled for late in 2006 and that the language is certainly stable enough to support mission critical development.

You may know the Java programming language and may be fairly familiar with many of the libraries, but how well do you know the JVM? NFJS speaker Brian Goetz spends much of his time looking inside the virtual machine at how actual code runs. Goetz explains why it doesn't help you very much to look at the byte code generated by the compiler and why tricks such as reversing your for-loops aren't useful in improving your performance.

Brian Sletten talks about two of his current NFJS presentation
topics: NetKernel and the Semantic Web. NetKernel is "a way of developing software: part application server, part framework, part vision for how to compose different technologies together." It's a resource oriented micro-kernel bringing together the best of REST and unix pipes. Listen as Brian describes how this modular and flexible platform is used.

According to Wikipedia, "The Semantic Web is a project that intends to create a universal medium for information exchange by putting documents with computer-processable meaning (semantics) on the World Wide Web." It helps us manage data that we already have by creating more standards for expressing and sharing information. Thanks again to Bob Payne of Agile Toolkit for conducting this interview.

Bob Payne talks to Venkat Subramaniam during the NFJS Tour 2006 in Reston VA. Venkat has been a frequent and popular NFJS speaker since 2002. Listen as Venkat talks about his experience with NFJS and his new book "Practices of an Agile Developer". According to Venkat, "Agile development means different things for different people ... but whatever we do, has to be continuous and not episodic. Anytime, we accumulate things and try to do it all in one shot, it becomes expensive, it becomes risky, and the quality of what we produce goes down."

In this edition, Bob Payne of Agile Toolkit talks with No Fluff Just Stuff founder Jay Zimmerman. Launched in Denver in 2001, NFJS has hosted over 80 events with 13,000 participants. Unlike larger conferences, NFJS events are held on the weekend, attendance is capped at 250 participants, the speakers are great, and marketing is forbidden. This has proven to be a successful model serving development teams, independent consultants, and practicing speakers... those on the frontlines of the Java Community. Listen as Jay tells the NFJS story.

Bob Payne of Agile Toolkit talks with
Dave Thomas at the
Northern Virginia Software Symposium.
In Bob's words, "Every year or so I find nuggets of information that change the way I work and
think about my work. We speek briefly about one such nugget that I got from a course
I took with Dave... The Dreyfus Model of Learning. Listen and enjoy."

Performance myths about the Java platform abound, from the general "Java is slow", to the more specific "reflection is slow", "allocation is slow", "synchronization is slow", "garbage collection is slow", etc. Many of these myths have their root in fact (in JDK 1.0, everything was slow); today, not only are many of these statements not true, but Java performance has surpassed that of C in many areas, such as memory management. Listen as Glenn Vandeburg talks about Java Performance Myths.

In this first edition of No Fluff Just Stuff Podcasts, we bring you the expert panel discussion from the March 10th-12, 2006 New England Software Symposium. Listen as the NFJS speakers field questions from the Symposium participants.




Our Expert Panel Includes:
Jared Richardson,
Ian Roughley,
David Hussman,
Scott Davis,
Howard Lewis Ship,
Ramnivas Laddad,and
Mark Richards

Questions from Symposium Participants

• Q1: We have all a lot of new frameworks and all of them are complex. How much am I getting for what I am paying?
  A lot of the time it just seems simpler to write a little code to make the thing work, rather than use a framework.



• Q2: At least 3 of the speakers I heard this weekend bashed checked exceptions. Is that a general
  consensus on the commitee here or a personal aproach?



• Q3: What productivity tools have been handy for you over the last 12-18 months?


• Q4: Are there a lot of products using ESB?


• Q5: What is the prognosis or relative market share / possible tiping point between J2EE frameworks and .NET?


• Q6: If I'm starting a new project now, should I use a framework with XML configuration or a beta version with Annotaions?

Fully formatted shownotes can always be found at href="http://javaposse.com">http://javaposse.com -

• RIFE project site - onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)"
  href="http://rifers.org/" target="_blank">http://rifers.org


• RIFE/Jumpstart - href="http://rifers.org/downloads#rifejumpstart" target="_blank">http://rifers.org/downloads#rifejumpstart


• Introduction with Simon Brown's read-only dynamic
  blog:  href="http://rifers.org/blogs/gbevin/2006/3/16/comparing_web_frameworks_rife"
  target="_blank">
  
  http://rifers.org/blogs/gbevin/2006/3/16/comparing_web_frameworks_rife


• User's guide - href="http://rifers.org/wiki/display/RIFE/LiveGuide"
  target="_blank">http://rifers.org/wiki/display/RIFE/LiveGuide


• Cookbook - href="http://rifers.org/wiki/display/RIFE/Cook+Book"
  target="_blank">http://rifers.org/wiki/display/RIFE/Cook+Book


• IRC channel - target="_blank">http://rifers.org/irc


• Pastebin example application with sources - href="http://rifers.org/paste" target="_blank">http://rifers.org/paste


• RIFE course at Skills Matter - href="http://skillsmatter.com/menu/60/course/121" target="_blank">http://skillsmatter.com/menu/60/course/121
  
  


• X-develop IDE - target="_blank">http://omnicore.com

• The Java Posse would like to thank




• Libsyn.com - http://www.libsyn.com
  - for hosting and bandwidth


• The Podsafe Music Network - href="http://music.podshow.com">http://music.podshow.com


• Brice Ruth and Webprojkt.com - href="http://webprojkt.com/">http://webprojkt.com
  -
  for our archives site - http://archives.javaposse.com


• Feedburner.com - http://www.feedburner.com
  - for feed redirect


• Kirsty Doherty for Java Posse artwork




• To contact us:




• Visit our homepage - http://javaposse.com


• Or send us email - href="mailto:javaposse@gmail.com">javaposse@gmail.com




• Theme Music:




• Opening - "Java" the parody song Copyright 1997
  Broken Records and
  Marjorie Music Publ. (BMI), written and performed by Loose Bruce Kerr
  of the Dr. Demento Show and Sun Microsystems attorney. Based on the WWI
  popular song, "Ja-da." Ukelele style on the recording taught to Bruce
  by his dad. Re-produced with kind permission from "Loose" Bruce Kerr
  - http://www.loosebrucekerr.com






• Closing - Garageband track
  
  

Hosts

Geert Bevin
JR Boyens
Stéphane Meslin-Weber

Shownotes

• Java hosting discounts
  http://rifers.org/hosting


• Fluent interfaces
  http://rifers.org/blogs/gbevin/2006/1/11/fluent_interface


• Model-driven visual RIFE plugin for Eclipse
  http://rifers.org/blogs/gbevin/2006/1/13/visual_rife_eclipse_plugin


• Uwyn commercial support and services
  http://uwyn.com/products


• Drone Information Bot v1.4 released
  http://rifers.org/blogs/gbevin/2006/1/20/drone_1_4_released


• Music
  Bandage Broken by G.Bevin - http://gbevin.com