Tag: devoxx

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We don’t attend Devoxx for eating, do we?

In 2013 I attended the Devoxx Conference, the last 3 days. Going to both the university and conference causes topic redundancy that, in my case, would result in brainfreeze and lack of attention after 3 days.

The overall Devoxx experience is usually one where I drink coffee from dawn till dusk, pick up some tools, books, jsr’s . Old or new architectural ideas I somehow missed out on during the year and will put to good use in the next year, drink beers in the evening and eat bad food during the day (except for the fruit, that’s good).

Yes it must be said: Devoxx usually great Java and Java related content but no one probably knows a conference where there is that much complaining about the food. Some lone ranger dares to claim it’s good, I pity that rangers and wonder how bad his or her food is at home. Then again, organizing lunch for 3500 people probably isn’t that easy. But enough about the food!

We don’t attend Devoxx for eating do we? We go there for Java!

Continue reading “We don’t attend Devoxx for eating, do we?”

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Akka

Something else I picked up at Devoxx is Akka. I had heard of it before. Following a session about it renewed my interest.

Akka is a framework created to address problems in creating highly scalable and concurrent software. It is also the name of a mountain in Sweden and a Goddess.
Akka’s Keywords are: concurrency, scalability, fault-tolerance
Akka tries to address system overloads and is currently used in finance, telecom simulation, e-commerce and betting system. All applications that need a lot of event driven actions.
If you have heard of the Play framework, it will be using Akka internally from 2.0 on.

An Akka application uses Actors. What’s an actor: an object that encapsulates state and behaviour. Actors talk to each other as like they send mail. They don’t wait for each other. ( e.g. an actor could be every user in a mmorpg)

Some actor features: Continue reading “Akka”

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Stop sleeping, start awaiting

On Devoxx there was a quicky session named ‘Stop sleeping, start awaiting’

The speaker presented Awaitility. A test-framework for helping you out waiting on objects. Mainly usable for testing asynchronous code in unit testing. A unit test does not wait for code to be executed, developers tend to use Object.sleep(xxx) but this will not always work. On some systems the xxx needs more milliseconds then on others. In the end you’ll be waiting ( rather sleeping) while all the tests that have sleep() run. The whole testsuite will go very slow.

Awaitility is a framework to help you wait for code to be executed,
It goes like:

await().untilCall(wrappedCallMethod).statusOf(xxx).is(OKAY);

It’s like a mocking framework. Personally I do the same with mockito and java.util.concurrency waiting and locking classes. But perhaps Awaitility will make you create the tests faster.

This is certainly one framework I will try out!