Sitting here in the Chillout Area at Sankt Augustin, I just reflected a little bit about the Talks I visited here. As it's currenlty my focus of interest I visited mainly the Java track yesterday. The talks where pretty interesting, but unfortunately missed some (IMO) important facts about performance in a production environment.
One was about Grails which is a kind of port of Ruby on Rails to Java, using the "scripting language" Groovy which resides on top of Java. As translating into bytecode at runtime, so my guess is it's slightly slower than plain java, but streches the startup a little as the scripts are compiled there. It might be worth a look, but I doubt I can use it in my upcomming projects simply for performance reasons.
Another talk I went to was about Spring OSGi. This is simply a continuation of the concepts both Spring and OSGi offer, as it simplifies the configuration of OSGi and offers a more comfortable way of Dependency Injection into OSGi Services, whereas Spring gets the possibility to change the configuration AND Implementation of modules in the container at runtime. This might lead to a completly new approach to module-based deployment in server environments, when all the JEE-Container compatibility issues get fixed. We'll see...
The last talk named Tomcat, Tapestry, Hibernate, Solr und Co. was kind of a mess. Marcus just jumped from one topic to then next and reverse, But nontheless had some interesting insights on Tapestry and ehCache. EhCache is definitly a pretty cool "general purpose object cache", as it can simply store stuff in memory, but also on disc or to a database, has different stategies (LRU,LFU,FIFO), and, best of all, can be distributed over several JVMs, which has of course a non-trivial overhead, but might solve some of my current problems. Load tests planned. A little disappointed I was as there was only one slide for Tomcat, which mainly stated "Well, it works."!
The first day ended with a Socializing event at the courtyard, which was named "Kölsch 0,2 statt Web 2.0". The beer was sponsored by O'Reilly, the Sausages by Google, also if they were not branded likewise, what we all were expecting (really! ;-P ).