Tracking change and innovation in the enterprise software development community
In this presentation recorded at QCon London 2009, after a short introduction to DSLs, Scott Davis plays with the keyboard showing how to approach the creation of a DSL by typing working snippets of Groovy code that get executed in front of the audience.
Evan Weaver, Lead Engineer in the Services Team at Twitter, who’s primarily job is optimization and scalability, talked about Twitter’s architecture and especially the optimizations performed over the last year to improve the web site during QCon London 2009.
JRuby 1.3 is now available, bringing performance improvements and compatibility with Google AppEngine. Work on other improvements is continuing and a first version of the ruby2java compiler is now available. Also: InvokeDynamic support is making it's way into the builds for the next Java version.
One of the most exciting things in the Java world right now is the work being done to get other programming languages to run on the virtual machine. There is a lot of buzz around JRuby, Groovy, Scala, and the JavaScript engine Rhino. But why stop there? If you really want to take a step outside the mainstream and dive into something completely different from Java, Lisp is a great option.
Features like biased locking, lock coarsening, lock elision by escape analysis and adaptive spin locking are all designed to increase concurrency by allowing more effective sharing amongst application threads. But do they actually work? In this two part article, Jeroen Borgers explores these features and attempt to answer the performance question with the aid of a single threaded benchmark.
In this presentation recorded at QCon London 2008, Ola Bini talks about the current status of the JVM regarding languages running on top of it and the need to evolve in order to support dynamic languages.
In this presentation from the JVM Languages Summit 2008, Neal Gafter discusses closures on the JVM. Topics covered include the JVM libraries, the challenges of running other languages on the JVM, language-specific wrapper/shim libraries, ways of making the JVM more language-friendly, whether lambda expressions are too hard, the history of closures, and forking the JVM to support closures.
David Pollak talks about using Scala to write the Lift web development framework and his desire to write a productive framework that allows the developer to write concise code on top of a very strongly typed language.
Neal Ford talks about the tendency of having multiple languages running on one of the two major platforms existing today: Java and .NET. He also presents the advantages offered by Ruby compared to static languages like Java or C#.
