Warsjawa 2010. Impressions.

My impressions after this year's Warsjawa are very positive. Well, in fact I could expect this :) Presentations were interesting, meeting other IT people is always good too. I met Bartek Zdanowski, who wanted to meet me. It's quite strange feeling when you meet somebody who knows you, but didn't meet you before. Strange but nice :)

First presentation was about Play framework by Wojciech Erbetowski. I was a little late, but I've seen enough to notice that Play is framework different than all the others.

I was a bit disappointed that Sławek Sobótka didn't make it there (he fell ill). He's topic was the most interesting for me. However, Paweł Lipiński worthily replaced him. Paweł was talking about what in programming he was taught by... his own children, kindergarten, Roomba etc. I never noticed that when there are 2-3 people in a project, it is much cleaner, but it's becoming a mess when there are more than 5 people. I never noticed it, but now it's very clear to me. It seems Paweł is a man who can learn and get knowledge from anything. Ah, and he mentioned me :)

This year on Warsjawa there was also something from our Szczecin JUG. Darek "Lock" Łuksza presented Git version control system and it's Eclipse plugin EGit. Darek did great job, and even found one bug during presentation :) It seemed a bit embarassing for him, but the rest was very good. He knows the topic very well (he's EGit commiter) and he showed many things coding live. Overall presentation was very good.

After Darek's presentation pizza arrived. It disappeared quite quickly, maybe there was a bit too few. We run out of beverages too. Anyway I didn't hear somebody died of hunger or thirst, so it wasn't that bad :)

Next interesting presentation was about Clojure. This time there were two presenters. First Marcin Rzewucki showed us some theory, then Jan Rychter told about practical use of Clojure in Fablo. He showed few interesting features of this language, like STM. Thanks to STM in Fablo they are able to replace customer's database without stopping the service. Pretty impressive.

Did you know that in Java you can have two methods with the same name and arguments, differing only by return type? Compiler can't compile this, but if you write it in bytecode it is perfectly valid! This and others interesting things about bytecode were shown by Adam Michalik. I wonder if any company needs "bytecode programmer"? I like such low-level stuff. At the university I always liked assembler.

The last presentation by Rafał Rusin was about Apache HISE. I have to admit I was too tired and the topic was not very interesting for me, so I didn't remember much from this one.

Generally I think this was very nice conference. Meeting new people, and some older friends, is always nice. Listening to interesting people talking about interesting things is also nice. It seems one hour for presentation is very good duration. All the presenters could do all they wanted/needed (at least it seemed so). I remember on GeeCON there was only 45 minutes and it was too little. If only there was more pizza (or maybe something better?) and beverages it would be perfect.

Convert JME application to Android

Here is the story:

I bought Android phone. Earlier I was using Windows Mobile phone, and I had one j2me application on it that was very important to me. It was "TokenGSM", application which serves the same purpose as RSA tokens, but installed on my phone. Very good decision of my bank that they created it so users don't have to carry additional device with them (users have choice, you can also get RSA token if you prefer it). So this application is necessary if I want to log in to my bank account. Pretty vital.

But, as you probably know, there is no Java ME on Android :( Here is what I did (this forum was useful):

1. Call the bank and ask for new GSM token. Token is somehow bound to the phone, so if you change phone, you need new token.
2. Write down URL from WAP Push SMS. Do it before opening it. On my phone (Android 2.2, HTC Desire) if you don't do it but just try to open URL, it's lost. Browser can't open it, but you don't even have chance to see it. Browser just blinks and returns to home screen :| It's not in history, nor in downloads.
3. Go to http://www.netmite.com/android/ and download App Runner. I went there from my phone and downloaded directly to it. I'm not sure if this point is really necessary, but some say it is.
4. Click "Convert existing j2mes into apk & upload to Android Market." I don't think it really uploads to Market.
5. Enter your written down URL and click "Get Apk". You have your Android TokenGSM :)
6. Transfer the file to your phone and install it.
7. Now you have to activate the token with code you received from the bank.