Optis community blog

A day at Devoxx

andy — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 21:32:24 +0000

Today I attended the first conference day at Devoxx, which is actually day 3 (first 2 days are university days).

The start of the day was in a way a disappointment since, as many developpers, I wanted to know more about the acquisition of Sun by Oracle and the future of Java. But since it is still an EU-issue, the keynote wasn’t really about that. Instead Sun and Oracle both had a seperate keynote. The last keynote was of Adobe which showed an overall view of some of the products they develop.

I was very interested too see Scott Ambler’s presentation. This presentation was about the agile vs the traditional vs the ad hoc development. Scott showed 20 myths about agile development and proved by statistics if they we’re right or wrong. Some examples:

Agile is just for small teams
Most agile temas are co-located
Agilists don’t write supporting documentation.

After showing the facts, all these myths proved to be incorrect. This presentation was great and Scott really is a wonderfull speaker, but what I missed in this presentation was his opinion about this mythes and how things could be better.

After lunch I stumbled upon the presentation about HTML5 Communications. I first attended James Gosling’s presentation, but since it seemed like a marketing presentation about the Java Store, so when the sound system broke down (for all rooms!) I switched rooms. The talk about Frank Greco was very good. Due to this HTML 5 event model, which will change a lot for all nextgen webapps. He even mention that the mashup-functionality of portals will become obsolete!

“Traditional Programming Models: Stone Knives and Bearskins in the Google Age” by Cameron Purdy used ‘Google’ in their name to get more attention, but it certainly was an interesting talk about distributed programming.

The most interesting talk of the day was without a doubt Doug Tidwell about Cloud computing. The presentation talked about solutions for the challenges cloud computing had, and Doug garanteed that Cloud Computing is the next big thing since the evolution of the web. And since we are all using cloud computing in our daily lives, he’s probably right.

The last presentation of the day I attended was about Lift, a framework for Scala. Timothy Perret started with an introduction to Scala, and after that went to Lift showing demo’s and code, which made it very straight-forward to follow.

A WebSphere PortalNOW seminar organized by Cronos

admin — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 05:35:03 +0000

An Intranet Up and Running in 16 days!

Does your organisation need a basic content rich web environment? Yet a lack of money, resources or skills is holding you back from getting started?

As businesses continue to change and adapt to gain market share, increase revenue, contain costs and remain competitive; their IT departments are challenged to be agile and responsive to adopt and implement these business changes. In about 16 days, cPeople can help you deploy a fully working portal and content solution by leveraging Portal NOW’s reusable software template and well-defined service processes.

During this workshop, cPeople will present you the benefits of Portal NOW:

Scalable solution that supports collaboration, feeds, and role-based access.
Low cost and fast implementation of a content rich Portal-based site.
Reduce process cycle time through faster access to targeted information.

This workshop is planned on the 25th of November. For more information and enrollment, please visit the following website: http://cpeople.fb.email.addemar.com/c1/hd0d21
For more information about WebSphere PortalNOW: http://www-01.ibm.com/software/lotus/services/portalnow.html

IBM Portal Excellence Conference

admin — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 12:20:48 +0000

A new name for the conference, a new attendee too.

Read more intresting stories about the conference at http://www.cpeople.be/blog

Defining portals

andy — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 05:34:10 +0000

Portal is all about bringing the right content and the right tools to the right set of people at the right point of time. It is a webplatform consisting of several pages and subpages, each containing several portlets. These portlets provide functionality like normal web applications would, but they all use one consistent view. This makes it a lot easier for users, because they only need to learn to work with only one system.

A portal brings the desktop-experience to the web. Much like the dashboard in your favourite car, you have all the information you need to know at hand. You don’t want to search these information while your driving. You need to know how the car is doing and some functionality so you enjoy your travel time. While driving yours, you are not interesting in the statistics of someone else’s car.

Using portals can be very powerfull for companies integration the applications they have. And adding new stuff should be quite simple. Remember, your company is only as strong as the ability it has to handle new business needs as quickly as possible.

More about portal development on andyvdh.optis.be

Connections 2.5 Portlets for IBM WebSphere Portal

admin — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 05:14:50 +0000

The IBM Lotus Connections 2.5 Portlets for WebSphere Portal delivers the Lotus Connections rich set of social software services for use within a WebSphere Portal environment. WebSphere Portal users can integrate the Activities, Blogs and Bookmarks services of Lotus Connections to:

Create and work with Lotus Connections Activities within WebSphere Portal. Users can easily set prioritization, Activity status and to do items for their Activities. Also, have the ability to manage the membership to add and leverage the expertise and experience of others in the organization by working together.
Within WebSphere Portal users can view and create Lotus Connections Blog postings and comments.
Easily create, edit and discover Bookmarks in Lotus Connections that have been qualified by others with similar interests and expertise.

IBM Lotus Gains in Global Collaboration Against Microsoft

admin — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 04:43:33 +0000

“IBM collaboration software is winning against Microsoft worldwide. We’ve expanded our customer and partner base significantly, and our footprint within companies with both environments,” said Bob Picciano, general manager, IBM Lotus Software. “Companies are looking at the aggregated value of IBM’s Web 2.0, collaboration, and social software for their own roadmap to the future.”

Read the full story here

Lotus Connections and SuccessFactors Webcast

admin — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 05:40:03 +0000

Luis Benitez posted an article about the joint forces of IBM and SuccesFactors.

Check exceptions vs unchecked exceptions

admin — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 05:32:51 +0000

Another interesting article about checked-exceptions. I know this is not new, but every time a new project starts, I’m having the same discussion about checked-exceptions.

Once upon a time Java created an experiment called checked-exceptions, you know you have to declare exceptions or catch them. Since that time no other language (I know of) has decided to copy this idea, but somehow the Java developers are in love with checked exceptions…