Another interesting day today. There were less participants than yesterday, although the talks are actually at least as interesting as yesterday.
Hibernate OGM by Emmanuel Bernard
We might wonder (well, I'm still wondering even after the talk) why we need JPA for NoSQL. Even worse, a JPQL for NoSQL, quite contradictory isn't it?
That was actually Emmanuel Bernard's presentation I attended this morning (in French). At the beginning, the goal of OGM is to use JPA for Infinispan. But, the Hibernate team found out that the JPA could be generalized to NoSQL in general. That's why they start to implement Hibernate OGM to No SQL databases.
Emmanuel explained four types of NoSQL databases: key value, big table (e.g. HBase), graph database (Neo4J), or document based (MongoDB) one. At the moment, OGM supports Neo4J and MongoDB that are apparently keen to participate in OGM development.
All in all, I find the presentation not that interesting and not that convincing. A good presentation to start the morning though.
Scala by Fredrik Ekholdt
Fredrik explained a lot of things on Scala in this talk. Too many, in my opinion. For some, that might be interesting, because we can see a lot of things in once, but for some others that might be too hard to follow, hence not interesting.
The presentation started with quick introduction to Scala, before going into detail to trait and loan pattern, higher order function, duck typing, functional programming and data structure, parallel collection, implicit, and pimp my library. All in 50 minutes presentation !
I couldn't really judge the content, since nothing really new in his presentation today, after all it's a Scala introduction talk. I think it should have been better if Fredrik focused on some important features and not to go to many things.
Play! by Nicolas Leroux and Nicolas Martignoles (A little GQuery)
Well, I'm sorry not to be able to say a lot for this presentation. I had to leave the session doing some buffet lunch preparation after the first 20 minutes.
But, from the part that I saw, I really think that Play! is a good idea and helpful. I would love to see the framework more detail. Even better, Play! 2.0 core will become Scala, what can be better than that ?
Oh, yes. I could also spend some 5 minutes or so in Manolo's presentation on GQuery. It looks like to be an interesting thing to see. Also, at the end of the talk, he announced the release of GQuery 1.1 today ! Thanks to choose RivieraDev to make the announce.
Ceylon by Stephane Epardaud and Cucumber by Frederick Ros
To be honest, the presentation on three JVM languages are not that impressive: Scala, Kotlin, and Ceylon. The presenters went too detail into the detail of languages, but less in philosophical choices (if any). But, that was not the reason I left the session after 30 minutes: it was planned that I would see the two presentations.
Ceylon as a language is quite boring, actually. Nothing specially mind-blowing in Ceylon (Scala: well, it's mind-blowing, reified generic in Kotlin is actually interesting) I have an impression Ceylon is there to reduce a little bit the frustration ones have with Java, but still keep all the rest, especially the possibility to work with famous java frameworks (yeah, yeah: hibernate). Oh, I have to say nevertheless that Union Class is insteresting.
I missed the beginning of Cucumber presentation. When I arrived in the room, Frederick was doing some demos. Then, he presented some interesting use cases of Cucumber, including the BDD, or even the use of Cucumber to monitor production (not sure to understand what this meant though). There were only around twenty people in the room, but the discussion that followed the presentation was quite excellent (that might be the benefit of small public). One question I love much was "Is there really helpful for somebody without computer science all this specification written in natural language, but still expressed at the end in programming language? " That's exactly my doubt on BDD though. I still feel the "jump to solution, without real requirements analysis" is in the BDD approach. Is it really the best way to make "life specification?" . BDD is still programmer oriented from my point of view.
Coffee Script by Bodil Stokke
This talk is the best talk of the day. It actually saved the day that at the end relatively less interesting than Thursday.
Bodil Stokke presented the Coffee Script excellently. She showed really the essence of the coffee script: make clean solution, a lot of use of spaces, nice syntaxes, and all those things. Nothing really mind-blowing in coffee script though, it's just a better syntax than java script. There's no, for example, the concept of isolate, that quite interesting in dart.
It was not the content who made Bodil's presentation interesting though. It was the way she presented the subject. The jokes about the programming language creator were very funny. From Bodil's presentation we can see however that Coffee Script is a serious attempt to improve java script. The syntaxes are indeed very nice, like destructuring [sum, diff] = (a,b) -> [a + b, a -b].
All in all, the presentation was excellent, she succeded to show how nice coffee script was. But honestly, if you stick to use Java Script in a discipline way (see eloquent java script book), I don't think we really need Coffee Script. Dart is clearly something else -- unfortunately, it does not have nice syntaxes of Coffee Script though.
OPA by Louis Gesbert
For me, the mind-blowing approach of web development is incarnated by OPA. They really attack the fundamental problem of web development: heterogeneity of the system, starting from client, server, and the database. They are really heterogen, for example, the programming languages are different, the presentation of the data is different. For example relational database is yet another form of representation of data in the system that uses object oriented and java script in the client.
Those heterogeneity is indeed the problem that every body seems to try to solve, starting from Dart that wants to be a language that can be used in big application as well as a client one, node js, or even GWT.
So, OPA tries to provide a comprehensive solution that unifies the way to develop web application. Not surprisingly, functional programming language is used for this purpose. Indeed, with functional programming, you can define what the system is, and not how the system should be architected. For example, the automatic slicing client/server applications provided in OPA is a very cool idea.
In his presentation, however, Louis was not really able to show the concrete solution that OPA tried to propose. I did not really get how the problem of heterogeneity could really be solved by OPA. Maybe I should check OPA more to know better the product.
Oh, yes. It was quite ashamed to see very few attendees were in this session. Maybe it was too hard to stay in a conference on Friday evening.
Epilog
Finally, I really think that RivieraDev was a good conference, with nice programs. The programs can still be improved , but the important things might be the number of attendees , especially on the second day. But, small number of participants could also be positive as I saw in Cucumber session that I found to have really interesting discussions.
I'm quite disappointed with Ceylon, Scala, and Kotlin presentations. Not on the content, but how they were presented. I don't really care about the exact syntaxes or features, because in one hour, I could not do anything. In one hour presentation, one should attack more on philosophical point of view of the language, instead of syntax things.
Surprisingly, all Java scripts related sessions were quite interesting. I love Dart and CoffeeScript sessions, and heard a lot of nice things on JQuery. I had also a good impression on GQuery presentation. I would have been happier however if a real Java Script supporter to defend the languages. I still believe that it is possible to write Java Script cleanly (like it is the case in Eloquent Java Script book). Maybe, next year, the supporter of "clean" and plain Java Script should be invited.
See you next year.
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