JavaZone 2008
This week I’ve been at JavaZone 2008 (pix), the largest software development conference in Scandinavia. Two days of mostly good talks, and even some social interaction.
I was manning our booth most of the time, but I did catch a couple of talks - one about Usemon, a monitoring and analysis system for software with demands for response time and high availability, and one about making enterprise software without relational databases.
Usemon looks interesting, I will definetly check out that for debugging and troubleshooting things at work. Most performance and analysis tools analyze everything, making it fairly expensive to use in terms of processing power and it can also be difficult to find what you’re looking for. Usemon tries only to instrument the interesting classes (i.e. not java.lang.String), and also has mechanisms to drop information if the server is overloaded. It has a client running on the system that needs to be analyzed, and sends data via UDP to a central server.
The talk about enterprise software without relational databases was by a guy who works doing software for large financial institutions, where they struggle with huge XML schemas and documents, and where ORMs work poorly because the models are so huge and interconnected. His newly founded company is making a common API for storing hierarchical data - which will be a part of Spring - and a proprietary store implementing this API. Fascinating to get some insight into some of the challenges in making software for financial institutions, where even milliseconds can be the difference between a few million dollars won or lost.
Look forward to going next year, it’s a great event.