A programmer's blog

Another day at Confoo!

I’ve started the day with Designing HTTP Interfaces and RESTful Web Services. So far, it’s my favorite talk of the event. The guy is very knowledgeable about all things HTTP and REST and had a funny way to present. We learned about what it really takes to design clean and efficient HTTP and REST api. It was the first time I heard about the Richardson Maturity Model. I encourage you to take a look at the slides of this one, it was really good!

Then I went to Scalable Architecture 101. I think they were too much information into this one. We basically go through all the typical servers (web, database, mail, cache, DNS and others!) and talk about what it takes to make those scalable. One point that the presenter insists on, and that I agree with, is to never use a database to store web sessions. Use Memcached!

After a nice lunch with other attendees, I attended a Panel: Which NoSQL database should you use? Three panelists representing respectively CouchDB, Cassandra and MongoDB were there answering questions of a moderator and the audience. Basically, they talked about how those 3 products handle ACID. To me, CouchDB stood as the most interesting of the group, but I do not think the Cassandra representative did a good job at promoting this db.

I concluded the day with Linked Data: The new black. It was an introduction to RDF and the principles of the semantic web. I think I was a bit tired at this point because I had trouble keeping my focus. But the guy did a fairly good job at showing how this is useful and that we are only at the beginning! Web 3.0 looks promising!

Interesting day!

I’ve spent my first day at Confoo.ca here in Montréal.  I learned a lot in a single day! Here’s my thoughts about the conferences I attended.

I’ve started the day with Java EE 6 – how J2EE became popular again. We learned about the new Java EE 6 released a couple of months ago. We spent most of the time exploring the features of the web profile. It’s interesting to see how the standard Java technologies are now influenced by open source products like Spring, Guice and Hibernate.

Then, I went to a presentation on whether or not we still need Java web frameworks. The presenter’s main argument was that the traditional Java web frameworks like Struts, Tapestry or Wicket are not appropriate anymore. He even got as far to say that MVC is not valid anymore! Some attendees were skeptic. He advocates the approach of picking only the products that are needed to get the job done, not relying on a complete frameworks. He then presented us the solution that they built for a client using different products like Jersey, Socket.io and Reddis.

After lunch, I went to a somewhat related talk entitled Why MVC is not an application architecture. The presenter started by explaining us that, originally, the MVC pattern was nothing more than the Observer pattern for UI. According to him, it has nothing to do with the Web, especially not for today’s web application. He then got into different patterns to help PHP developers build more layered applications. To me, it was interesting to hear how the PHP community is applying patterns similar to the one described in the Core J2EE Patterns book.

After that, I got into a completely different subject, that is An Overview of Flash Storage for Databases. The talk was an overview of the current state of the technologies related to enterprise SSD hard drives. While still expansive, those drives are way more efficient in terms of IOPS. The presenter claimed that, to really take benefits of them, applications, especially RDMS, needs to change the algorithms they use to read and write data to disk.

The last talk I attended was Building servers with Node.js. We started by being introduced to the general principles of evented I/O. We then got a nice introduction to Node.js by seeing the traditional echo server example. While I really think that asynchronous is the way to go to have scalable web servers, I am not comfortable with the spaghetti code that results of the use of callbacks.  I like the approach taken by other evented I/O products like cool.io and async-http-client to make the code more readable. But nevertheless, I think this is a really nice software!

I really enjoyed that first day and I am looking forward to the next!

I started learning Clojure a couple of weeks ago. Tough my brain is hurting, I must say that I really enjoy it. It is so refreshing! Clojure has been on my radar for a year or two, but that video from Rich Hickey gives me the motivation to actually start learning it. I am currently using the labrepl to practice writing clojure code. Nice stuff!

Browsing through Github, you can find a couple of really high-quality projects written in Clojure, like Compojure and Leiningen. It always amazes me to see how fast the community can build around a promising new language.

Last week, Eugene Wallingford says that the time is right for functional design patterns.

Who knows?