Glenn Vanderburg
Great Lakes Software Symposium
Chicago · September 16 - 18, 2005
Chief Scientist, Relevance Inc.
Glenn Vanderburg is a principal at Relevance, where he is focused on cutting-edge software development technologies and techniques. He brings more than 20 years of experience developing software across a wide range of domains, and using a variety of tools and technologies. Glenn is always searching for ways to improve the state of software development, and was an early adopter and proponent of Ruby, Rails, and agile practices.
Presentations
Java Collections Power Techniques
The Java Collections framework is a cornerstone of Java development. It's been a part of J2SE for six years now. Every Java developer knows it—how to create Lists, Maps, and Sets, how to put things into them and take things out, and how to iterate over the contents. But there's a lot more to the collections framework than that – and very few programmers really know how to exploit the power that's just under the surface.
Under the Hood of Java Memory Management
Most of the time, Java's automatic memory management works really well—it's one of the things that makes programming in Java a pleasant and productive experience, and it's nice that we don't have to worry about managing memory manually. However, although it's usually nice to ignore memory management, occasionally we have to pay close attention. Sometimes we need to take control of certain aspects of memory management. Sometimes Java programs do exhibit memory leaks, or unacceptably long garbage collection pauses, or very poor overall performance. But because Java's memory management is supposed to be “fully automatic,” it can be difficult to find out what's really going on inside the VM.
Runtime Code Generation for Java and Beyond
Every now and then, it's really helpful to be able to generate a new Java class at runtime. Some problems just can't be solved any other way. It's one of those troublesome tasks: it's fairly tricky to do, and you only need to do it occasionally—but when you need it, you really need it (and usually you need it yesterday). So you have to start essentially from scratch, learning about how to do it on the fly, under pressure.
JavaScript Exposed: There's a Real Programming Language in There! (Part 1)
With the sudden importance of Ajax, it's time to take JavaScript seriously. That means learning it the right way: looking at the fundamentals of the language and surveying its strengths and weaknesses, instead of just copying other people's poorly written examples.
Seaside: A Radical Web Framework
We've been writing web applications now for 10 years, and they're still no fun. They're awkward and clumsy to write. Internally, they're overly complicated (which almost invariably means that they're buggy). Meanwhile, they're usually too primitive externally. To put it another way: the web programming model is so cumbersome for programmers that the users pay—through reduced features, clumsy interaction, bugs, and poor performance. There's a better way. I know – who needs another web framework? But Seaside makes even Rails look primitive.