My QCon recap
Now that I’m back in Düsseldorf, I have finally some time to write some notes about QCon.
All in all, it was a really good conference. The level of the presentations was very high, and I particularly enjoyed the fact that there were a lot of speeches not strictly related to Java… obviously nothing against this programming language ;-), but I think a conference should be also a good opportunity to learn something different from the usual tools and languages.
The exhibition, though, was a little poor. There were of course the usual stands with brochures and (a few) gadgets, but nothing able to really attract the interest of people. I definitely think companies should try to interact more with attendants, organizing small tutorials, courses, demos.
Finally, a thumb up to the catering service. Cooking for hundreds of people is a tremendous challenge, and honestly, most part of catering services fail miserably when providing food at conferences. QCon has been a pleasant exception to this rule!
Now back to the contents.
Wednesday - The Cloud as the New Middleware Platform
That’s the most interesting track I attended at QCon. Still, the idea of Cloud Computing seems to be a bit vague to me; that’s what Wikipedia says
Cloud computing is a new (circa late 2007) label for the subset of grid computing that includes utility computing and other approaches to the use of shared computing resources. Cloud computing is an alternative to having local servers or personal devices handling users’ applications.
In general, the label suggests that function comes from “the cloud” — often understood to mean a public network, usually assumed to be the Internet — rather than from a specific identifiable device…
Cloud computing can be seen in two different ways:
- from developer/architect perspective, it is an architectural style that relies on the idea of having a “cloud” of (unlocalized, dynamic, distributed, unreliable but redundant) services that can be discovered and used by applications
- from a “user” perspective, it can be seen as a way of creating new services with no (or just a few line of) code, simply wiring together different services and content providers freely available on the cloud (internet)
This track featured some interesting speeches about Amazon Web Services, Yahoo Pipes and Google GData API.
Thursday - Solution Track - Performance and Scalability
Honestly, this track was a bit disappointing. The main reason is that speakers used way too much time trying to “sell” their products, rather than explaining the technological challenges to achieve performance and scalability. Lesson learnt: stay away from “Solution Tracks”.
The most interesting presentation in this track was “Pimp My Data Grid” by Brian Oliver, who tried to explain how to build data grids using Tangosol (Oracle) Coherence.
Friday - Architectures You’ve Always Wondered About
Another great track. People from eBay, BBC, MySpace explaining the inner bits of their architectures, their failures and their successes; that’s a kind of presentation that should never miss in a conference. Btw, did you know that MySpaces is running on a .Net stack?
That’s it for my QCon. Don’t forget to download the slide of the presentations here.
the lunch is already gone…. starving..
