Submitted two proposals to the Agile2007 conference, an Experience Report based on my last contract and a Hands On Session based on OCaml and Agile.

Wish me luck.

Edit: Looks like people who aren’t me and aren’t the review board can’t look at it, so I pulled out the links.

Popularity: 2% [?]

After much frustration and time setting up a reasonable Java development environment, I decided to give Ruby on Rails another chance. I’m glad I did. In a quarter of the time it took me to get Tomcat not-quite working with a remote build script, I was able to get an actual website up and running with the first part.

And all it took was feeling dirty the whole time I did it.

See, my problem with Ruby (which is exacerbated with Rails) is that you can’t write really good code. You can write code very productively, but there’s a lot of hand-waving and very little enforcement of actual business model rules. Everything’s mutable (even class definitions), and that instability scares the crap out of me. The fact that some stuff just “magically works” isn’t much better. And it grates on me to relegate my database down to an optimistically locked object store.

But, assuming you’re willing to accept that kind of hand-waving “Seems to work” (which I used to), it’s a really nice framework for development. And it certainly got me up and running a whole Hell of a lot faster than Java/Tomcat.

And the fact that I run it all at my web host (which won’t run a Servlet app server for some reason) makes it all that much nicer. I love not having to think about infrastructure.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Unity08, which I found out about via The Atlantic (my hands-down favorite political magazine).

Popularity: 3% [?]

http://robertantonwilson.blogspot.com/2007/01/raw-essence.html
http://www.reason.com/blog/show/117840.html

Y’know, for some reason, I’m actually disappointed in him for dying. I never realized it, but I guess I expected RAW to…well, if not live forever, at least vanish into the wilderness.

Whatever he’s become, I hope he’s having fun.

Popularity: 2% [?]

IBM on Java’s Object Allocation and Garbage Collection.

The upshot of the article is that allocation hasn’t been particularly slow in Java since the 1.2 JVM. Since the business-standard JVM seems to be 1.4.2, that means practically all business applications have this enhancement already in play.

One of the major things that will kill your performance, though, is overbroad scoping. So all the people who wrote code looking like this:

     String msg = null;
     for(int i = 0; i < 10; i++) {
         msg = "We are at position " + i;
         System.out.println(msg);
     }
     msg = null;

Just shot themselves in the foot. Not, however, that if you were to follow the pattern of aggressively using finalize (like the suggestion in Chapter 2 of Hardcore Java), you would write this code in exactly the way that is best optimized by the compiler.

Which, of course, is kind of what we would expect, because compilers 1) are better at optimizing than people, and 2) can make more sense of code that is structured reflecting the actual requirements, not backflips as hypothetical optimizations.

Popularity: 5% [?]