JavaOne 2008, Day 3

"Using FindBugs in Anger", with the great Bill Pugh -- nice summary of a great tool.  I liked the slide listing some common (but incorrect) wisdom about bugs and static analysis: programmers are smart, and smart programmers don't make dumb mistakes.  We all make dumb mistakes.  I really like FindBugs, and use it on my open-source projects.  Interesting to learn that there is commercial support for it via Fortify Software.  Pugh described how large organizations such as Google use FindBugs on large code bases, strategies for prioritizing resolutions to issues FindBugs detects, tracking issues historically over time and adding issues to bug databases, etc.

This is the second time this conference I've seen or heard "Q & A" and QA (as in quality assurance) confused.  Hm.

"Writing Your Own JSR-Compliant Scripting Language" was a good overview of the new Java 6 API for launching scripts that can interact with the calling Java program.

"Pimp My Build" offered some very Ant-specific hints for maintaining build scripts -- it all pretty much boiled down to refactoring out common bits and treating your build scripting with the same refactoring and coding care you would afford your production code.

"The Future of Guice" from "Crazy Bob" Lee and a couple of other Googlers -- "Types are the currency of Java" -- nice mantra, and it clearly informs the decisions the Guice crew made regarding how to indicated injections, etc.  Came with a promo code for an ebook version of the aPress title on Guice.  Bonus!

Written on May 11, 2008