QCon London 2008 – Part 1 (Conference Overview)

The QCon is without doubt top ranked conference and first one which I visited thanks to my employer. I was very anxious to see what such conference is like and I have to admit it did not disappoint me at all even I have been part of it only during Wednesday.
QCon was jointly done with JAOO therefore I was expected there will be large portion of presentations dedicated to Java. What surprised me a lot there was how overwhelming majority Java has got among companies in exhibition hall and more importantly in “Banking/Financial Complex high volume/low latency architectures” track. “Banking” track I’m mentioning here because it was exact fit with my professional interest and also where I have been primarily subscribe to. Actually none of the presented application on “banking” track did even touch Windows and/or .NET based system to my surprise! According to John Davies presentation 80-85 percent applications are actually written in Java in this domain. Rest of “market” share is then predominantly occupied by C/C++ due its performance/memory capabilities and predictability of execution (i.e. all “standard” GC based environments are fighting with unpredictable time of execution on near real time application with low latency here).
As second observation which astonished me quite greatly was how many people (there was accredited 600 people according organization’s info) used MacBook machine variants (well given that JAVA was predominant on conference I should probably expected that) carried in sleek “MB” covers. Even more people (I would say majority at least according to my impression) owned iPhone. I was so shamed of my old Siemens mobile “gizmo”.
Real conference program started with keynote from Erich Gamma. His presentation was dedicated to Eclipse development. It was pretty OK from my point of view but nothing which I would be excited about. First half of speech was actually quite interesting as Erich dedicated it to project planning and management. The biggest take out was that program release shall stick with firm release date. The best date working form Eclipse point of view is June as this creates the smallest disruptions due holidays and other events. They are developing in 6 week dev. “sprints” periods (1 week planning, 4 development and 1 integration and code finalization/testing) during year to add new features for yearly release. One month before release they fully dedicate all dev. resources to final code polishing and testing.
What was also quite interesting on Erich’s presentation was describing how fast formed strong Eclipse community was. Community fully covered support of newly joined developers/users, writing manuals, etc. which actually freed original IBM dev. resources to again do what they know the best – full speed development. This is definitely very interesting model to consider for similarly typed projects.
Banking track was naturally the high interest for me given that I’m working in exactly same domain problem field. Because of many interesting thinks were presented there I decided to put it into separated post.
Day was finished with great entertaining keynote given by Martin Fowler and Jim Webber on theme ESB use in SOA based applications. In many aspects it remained me presentations from Don Box.
Even thought presentation was essentially same information value as I have already seen recorded on internet for example here never less it was big fun time. They make so much show and great marketing value to convince all attending people to prefer internet based message integration via standard HTTP protocol for SOA compare to ISV specific solution. I would say everyone must get this message clearly presented and seriously start to think how to use it in own solutions.
The end of Wednesday was finished in “Revolution Bar” of London Soho. Get there was surprisingly challenging task for our guides. From conference center has QCon organizations prepared buses which took us close to Piccadilly Circus. Bar was just several corners around as later we have discovered but our guide got lost there. It was funny how group of roughly 150 people walked “pointlessly” through narrow streets there and tried to find bar place on GPS maps in mobile phones. It took good 20 minutes till we got to right place.
In the bar I have finally take a chance to talk personally to high profile people like Steve Vinoski and Jim Webber which bolgs I read regularly already long time. I was mainly interested in getting their personal opinion on use of REST/ATOM in high performance systems as they are not usually addressing that in their write-ups/presentations.
Jim Webber was quite open and admitted that his recommendations are mainly applicable to systems where latency is generally 1second and more. This seems fair to me. Actually vast majority of enterprise applications can fit into this category where prime examples are ERP systems and like.
Steve Vinoski suggested that for such case one shall probably follow REST model conceptually if not directly via common HTTP version due performance constrains. That is certainly possible but I have quite strong doubt is practical here.  Does anyone know such successful application in this field to confirm Steve’s suggestions?
All in all I have to say conference was well worth it to attend!
 

-Libor