Alef Arendsen

It’s time for an informal gathering of Java developers in Holland! Several times I came across posts about the London Java Meetup and I wondered why we didn’t have something like that in the Netherlands. Just an informal gathering of developers with a possibility to talk about technology or about something else if you like.

So here it is: the first Amsterdam Java Meetup – Friday 11 November in the Wijnand Fockink.

To get the party going, I (or rather, we) will take care of buying people that arrive early (say around 6′ish) a couple of beers (or liquor, which they sell too).

The Wijnand is a rather small place, located in the Pijlsteeg near Dam Square, just behind the Krasnapolsky. The map points you in the right direction if you’re coming from Central Station.

Please leave a message if you’re planning to drop by (either post a comment or drop me mail).

If all goes well, we’ll be trying to organize this every quarter…

People attending:

• Arjen Poutsma (of Spring Web Services)
• Joost van de Wijgerd
• Bram Smeets (of DWR fame)
• Erik Wiersma
• Anthony Goubard
• Steven Devijver
• Jan Voskuil
• Peter Veentjer (aka Alarmnummer)
• Brian – the Irishman – Hunt
• Geert Schuuring
• Alef Arendsen (myself)
• Gijs de Vries
• And several more that have confirmed vie e-mail

p.s. The place closes up at 9pm, after which we might go to another place to continue if somebody likes to!

In a post I read today on building extensible web services someone is offering a solution for the inflexibility current web service solutions offer when it comes to transforming object graphs to XML.

To get to a more flexible web service interface, changing the Java service interface from

Car[] getCars()

to

Map[] getCars(String[] returnFields, Map searchCriteria)

does the trick the author says. It might be that he meant that the implementation of the second interface actually wraps the first service, hence not replacing it, but that doesn’t really matter. What does matter is the fact that we’re modifying Java code to allow for a more flexible web service interface.

A better solution in our opinion is to facilitate those kind of things in a more framework-oriented way, by allowing the developer to use a framework to customize the XML that is returned the browser. All this instead of having to adhere to stringent requirements of existing web services stacks that only allow for mapping Objects to XML using one, predefined approach.

Customization of the XML being generated, choosing the OXM (Object-XML Mapping) solution to use, it all helps keeping our Java service interface in place while maintaining that same level of flexbility we require to facilitate a service-oriented architecture.

I’m really happy (and this is the last I’m going to say this) that before we announced Spring Web Services, but also since the announcement I’m keep on seeing situations very frequently where our future approach to building web services will really help!

Web services here we come! Last Wednesday, Arjen Poutsma announced Spring Web Services at our bi-annual NL-JUG meeting in Ede. We’ve been carefully planning this effort and believe it’s going to help developers that need to create web services on top of their Java-based business tier a lot. A SOAP-based web service is not yet another RPC-style invocation mechanism and with the following key aspects of Spring WS, we’ll try to address this.

• Facilitating changing business requirements and service interfaces through creating a tiny MVC-like layer with
• support for pluggable Object-XML mappers like Castor, JAXB(2) and XMLBeans while still
• allowing both contract-first and contract-last development and
• reusing existing platform services and (WS-*) standards and implementations such as reliable messaging and security solutions

The good thing (and Arjen did a good job at explaining this) about Spring Web Services in my opinion is that it’s going to be more like a web services framework, rather than a web services container. Spring is already providing the lightweight container, so why create yet another container? Web services should be just another way to expose your services, nothing more nothing less.

More information on the web services effort will be posted shortly on www.springframework.org. First milestones are planned for early december, while the 1.0 release is scheduled to take place in Q2 2006.

We already got a lot of positive comments on the new initiative and interestingly enough, over the last two weeks, we got a couple of inquiries of people that didn’t know about Spring Web Service asking what we were planning to do in this area.

After two days of work in Oslo for a client of mine I spend one night and a day walking, eating, drinking and driving in Oslo (hmmm, I didn’t do the last two on the same day by the way, I know the Norwegian fines). The last time I actually visited Oslo was about ten years ago (I’m not counting times I visited the Gardemoen airport, about one hour from Oslo). I was actually positively surprised about it. I didn’t remember all of it and what amazed me was the fact that it’s a really hip and trendy city with lots of cool design building and other freaky design things.

A friend of mine from Sweden came over for a night and we had a good laugh, great food right next to the harbor in a a place called Food and Wine (can’t remember the Norwegian translation). After having finished our dinner we went to a couple of bars (Mr. John or something like that and a couple of other ones, of which I can’t remember the name).

The day after was really cool. With my friend’s car we drove through what he called the Beverly Hills of Oslo. I knew there were all kinds of little Islands in the Oslo Fjord, but I didn’t know they had built really nice summer houses there with excellent views. In between the islands, the sea is filled with lots of boats. Definitely a place I could spend some time later…

All-in-all, a really cool city to spend some time during a weekend!

Tomorrow, for a change, I’ll be sitting in the audience at the bi-annual meeting of the local Java User Group. It’s time for J-Fall again, the autumn get-together of the NL-JUG with I guess about 400 to 500 attendees. Klaas-Jan Tukker is doing a really good job with getting interesting speakers and getting more people to show up every event!

My Interface21 colleague Arjen Poutsma will be talking about web services, service-oriented architectures and the issues with current solutions. He’ll talk about how to facilitate the contract-first development, the Object-XML mismatch and more. There will also be some news from the Spring-front.

My other Interface21 colleague Steven DeVijver will talk about WebFlow earlier in the afternoon.

Last but not least, Erik Wiersma, of JTeam (a Dutch partner company) will talk about profiling the development process. Instead of focusing on using the coolest techniques to build a nice application, he’ll discuss tools and approaches to use to speed up the build-test cycle.

We’ll also have an Interface21 booth and yes they’re there: Interface21 mugs .

All-in-all, it’ll be an interesting day! Hope to see you there.