Devoxx 2011 - meet us in paradise

Once again I found the time and money to go the excellent Java conference Devoxx 2011. The conference is a yearly sell-out: 3200 tickets are sold way in advance of the conference. The value for money is astounding, for a mere 450 euros you get two and a half days packed with great talks from the technical leaders in the industry. This year was no exception to previous years, my head is still buzzing with all the new ideas and technologies I encountered. I just have to make the time to try them all out.

The main themes of the conference were HTML5, android and dynamic languages. In itself these topics have little to do with the main topic Java. This may seem strange but it’s representative of the real life of a java (enterprise) developer - you just can’t code in java in isolation and must be aware of HTML, javascript, CSS and other technologies to keep up. My personal interest was mainly in Android given that I’ve worked on a few Android apps in the past years and wanted to know what was new and coming up. My main eye-opener was the product called PhoneGap, which allows you to write a mobile application in HTML5 + javascript and distribute it to all main mobile devices such as iPhone, Android and Blackberry. The PhoneGap environment contains javascript libraries enabling you to use the native phone devices such as telephony, the camera, contacts. This premise sounds almost too good to be true, especially in combination with their PhonegapBuild environment.

My personal high/lowlights of Devoxx’11 were, in no particular order:

Most different talk
The Diabolical Developer by Martijn Verburg
Never before did I see a speaker wear a ski hat and sunglasses during a talk. The talk was a humurous attempt to ridicule all best practices in java software development. It left the attendees puzzled by what Martijn really had to say. It turns out he’s working on a book, in which he preaches the same subjects he bashed in the talk. Or does the book also contain the advice to look yourself in the mirror after you wake up and tell yourself: “I’m awesome!”? First time I heard the expression “mortgage driven development”.

Most impressive talk
Matt Raible's attempt to glue several new technologies together (Play, Scala, Less, PhoneGap, CoffeeScript, Scalate) was a success and he proved it in a terrific video. This worked very well in the Metropolis setting on the giant screen with thunderous music. Very well done.

Most promising new technology
The talk about Android and Google TV by Christian Kurzke got me thinking about all possibilities to write cool software which would have your phone connect to your tv to do all kinds of things. Sony seems to be the first manufacturer to sell Google TV’s - sounds like I need to get me one of these

Best keynote
There were not many contenders in this category :-( although Henrik Stahl got a few laughters when he purposely inserted 3 typos in the slide with the legal babble he’s forced to always show. The best keynote however was the one by Tim Bray on Android. Especially his down to earth analysis on best ways to make money as a developer, if any, by developing on Android: go for the subscription model, combined with in-app purchases. The game industry lead by example here.
Tim Bray also had the guts to be the first to address the extremely low percentage of female java developers at Devoxx. His comparison with The elephant in the room was probably not to be taken literally.

Most promising come-back
JavaFX 2.0 seems to be a big step forward from the previous version. Question: is it still too little and too late? Didn’t see any compelling reasons to investigate JavaFX some more, especially since it doesn’t even officially run on Mac.

Most attendees in one room
Of course everybody tried to get in room 8 on Friday morning to see Josh Bloch do his Past, Present and Future talk. Those who managed to get in, myself included, were not disappointed and were treated to a sort of retrospective on past changes to the java language and their merits. Josh is an outstanding speaker and he made it clear that there still is a shiny future for the java language.

Overall conclusion
Devoxx’11 was a great treat for me, to get away from the everyday business and sit back comfortably in the soft movie chairs and get informed on the latest and greatest in java development. I heard a lot of new interesting things I otherwise wouldn’t have picked up on. The conference goodies were OK, I’m sure to draw envious attention to my HTML5 coffee mug tomorrow in the office. It’s great how the Devoxx organising committee knows how to attract the best speakers to this conference and make it a very valuable experience. Thanks a lot to them and keep up the good work!

Character encoding gotchas - what I needed to do to handle orders from China

Just when you think you've got your spring web application nicely under control your first customer from a Scandinavian country tries to place an order. And then you are hit by the evil character encoding monster. Your customer doesn't live in København but in K�benhavn and their last name is now MÃ¥rtensson instead of Mårtensson. Chances are your customers from China will be treated even worse by your web app.
No problem, you think, "Just need to set tomcat default encoding to UTF-8 and we're in worldwide business". Well if life were that easy us programmers would be out of jobs really quickly. Here's the list of tricks I needed to perform to make sure our expansion to Scandinavia and China could begin:

1. set tomcat default encoding
In conf/server.xml set the attribute URIEncoding="UTF-8" on the Context entries

2. in web.xml add a characterencoding filter

<filter>
 <filter-name>characterEncodingFilter</filter-name>
 <filter-class>org.springframework.web.filter.CharacterEncodingFilter</filter-class>
 <init-param>
  <param-name>encoding</param-name>
  <param-value>UTF-8</param-value>
 </init-param>
 <init-param>
  <param-name>forceEncoding</param-name>
  <param-value>true</param-value>
 </init-param>
</filter>

and map it to the requests that you need to be treated as UTF-8:

<filter-mapping>
 <filter-name>characterEncodingFilter</filter-name>
 <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
</filter-mapping>

3. make sure your database is in utf-8
Especially when using MySQL you need to be aware that by default it creates databases in latin1 format. If, by accident, you didn't pay attention to this small detail when you first created your database, here's what you can do to change it afterwards:
alter database my_database default charset utf8 collate utf8_general_ci;
followed, just to be sure, by the following statement for all your tables:
alter table my_table convert to character set utf8 collate utf8_general_ci;

4. make sure your DB connection also uses UTF-8, all the time
We're using the DBCP connection pool, configured like this:

<bean id="dataSource" class="org.apache.commons.dbcp.BasicDataSource" p:connectionProperties="characterEncoding=UTF-8;useUnicode=true;"
 ...other properties...
</bean>

5. instruct freemarker to use UTF-8 when processing its templates

<bean id="freemarkerConfiguration" class="org.springframework.ui.freemarker.FreeMarkerConfigurationFactoryBean">
 <property name="templateLoaderPath" value="classpath:/mailTemplates" />
 <property name="freemarkerSettings">
  <props>
   <prop key="default_encoding">UTF-8</prop>
   <prop key="output_encoding">UTF-8</prop>
  </props>
 </property>
</bean>

6. when using the Spring restTemplate, make it use UTF-8
We were using restTemplate to POST from one web app to another. By default, it uses ISO-8859-1 for its request parameters. This must be overridden like so:

<bean id="restTemplate" class="org.springframework.web.client.RestTemplate">
 <property name="messageConverters">
  <list>
   <bean class="org.springframework.http.converter.StringHttpMessageConverter" />
   <bean class="org.springframework.http.converter.FormHttpMessageConverter" >
    <property name="charset" value="UTF-8" />
   </bean>
  </list>
 </property>
</bean>

That was all it took!