Bill Venners, Artima

Bill Venners is president of Artima, Inc., publisher of Artima Developer (www.artima.com). He is author of the book, Inside the Java Virtual Machine, a programmer-oriented survey of the Java platform's architecture and internals.

His popular columns in JavaWorld magazine covered Java internals, object-oriented design, and Jini. Active in the Jini Community since its inception, Bill led the Jini Community's ServiceUI project, whose ServiceUI API became the de facto standard way to associate user interfaces to Jini services.

Bill is also the lead developer and designer of ScalaTest, an open source testing tool for Scala and Java developers, and coauthor with Martin Odersky and Lex Spoon of the book, Programming in Scala.

Presentation: "Open Standards Development: Opportunity or Constraint?"

Track: Solutions Track - Wednesday

Time: Wednesday 14:15 - 15:15

Location: Concordia

Abstract:

Is the open standards movement as significant a development as open source? Does it translate in opportunities for you, or is standards work a barrier to free software development? Are standards-development bodies the right places to engage in software development? Should you get involved, or are standards forums a waste of time, slow and bureaucratic, and a distraction from open source development opportunities?

The participants on this panel will share with you their diverse practical experience with open standards and open source development, and they will welcome an animated exchange of opinions. Bring your questions and comments, engage with the experts, and judge for yourself how open standards can help to move technology forward.

Training: "The Scala Experience - Programming with Functional Objects"

Track: Tutorial

Time: Monday 13:00 - 16:00

Location: City Room

Abstract:

Scala is a new general-purpose programming language that is fully interoperable with Java. It smoothly integrates features of object-oriented and functional languages. Scala allows a terseness of style comparable to scripting languages but has at the same time a strong and static type system. In this way, it can express common programming patterns in a concise, elegant, and type-safe way.

Scala also allows for creation of Domain-Specific Languages that hide much of the complexity of traditional APIs from users. Combined with its ability to plug into existing Java environments, this makes it possible to construct higher-level interfaces to existing Java libraries (servlets, Spring beans, EJB, Swing, and more).

Its Actors-based threading approach, combined with its functional preference for immutable values makes concurrent programming far simpler than what's present in Java. And its built-in XML support makes Scala natural for XML processing tasks, including Web Services. This tutorial will give an introduction to the Scala programming language, highlighting its main innovative features: closures, pattern matching, type abstraction, and mixins.