Doom and the $3000 suite

Doom and a $3000 suite. Two things that have nothing in common more than being the things that I remember most from the Oredev conference.

First Doom. Geert Bevin (founder of RIFE) did one of the most fun and hard-to-forget presentation openings I’ve seen. When I among the rest of the attendees, walked into the session room, Geert was right in the middle of a pretty violent first-person-shooter game (I think it was Doom) with monsters and blood all over the big movie screen behind him. He seemed very much into the game and continued to play while the audience filled the room. Eventually things got tougher and tougher, and just before he was about to die; he did ‘Save Game‘, switched to his slides, introduced himself and the topic for the day: Continuations.

One of the best illustrations of continuations I have seen, and one that noone will ever forget.

Second, the $3000 suite. When I arrived to my hotel to check in before going to the conference, it turned out that the Oredev staff had forgotten to reserve me a room. The hotel was fully booked apart from the top suite for $3000. So I sighed, took my stuff and went to the conference. I told the staff about my problem and asked them to solve it and after a little while they came up to me and told me they could get the suite. So I ended up sleeping in hotel room almost as big as our house. Any good? Well, I had to say that it only felt like a complete waste of money (luckily not my money), but now I at least know what people are paying for.

Other highlights.

Rickard Oberg did a very interesting talk about RDF, SPARQL and the Semantic Web. In which RDF can be used as a data model to index data from all kinds of data storages (RDBMS, OOBMDS, LDAP, flat file etc.) which can then be queried using SPARQL. It all felt both natural and very much like Tuple Spaces.

I did a talk about how Terracotta can be used as a generic distributed computing platform, that turns plain Java into a language with native and transparent distribution (something that you normally would need to use some narrow, academic and/or obscure languages to do — Erlang, Oz etc.). The talk was driven by the exercise of building a POJO-based Data Grid and how to scale it out using Locality of Reference and moving operations to the data (and not the contrary).