«Learn or die». These are the words with which Codemotion Milan 2016 started on the 25th of November. Most of our development team attended this tech conference like the previous year. Moreover Facile.it was present at the event as a sponsor with his stand looking for new talent.
During the event we also officially announced the second #FacileHack hackathon, which is planned for march 2017.
This post would be a short recap of some talks in chronological order. The choice of the talks is based on the personal taste of the various members of the editorial staff of Facile.it Engineering blog. Enjoy!
Every year the GrUSP, in cooperation with one of the italian PHP user groups, organizes the italian Symfony conference. This year the event was organized in the Capital on 28th October with the help of PHP User Group Roma, and a part of Facile Dev Team was there for the occasion. In Facile we believe attending to events like this is a good way to learn new things, share practical experiences and improve our network.
When we talk about data interchange in web applications, JSON is the de-facto standard, especially in developing RESTful web services. JSON won against its antagonist XML (SOAP) without a battle, but it didn’t prevent the development of alternatives like Google’s Protocol Buffers, Apache Avro or MessagePack. In being thorough, we should also mention gzip JSON compression (sometimes called “JSONC”), and BSON, a binary-encoded serialization of JSON-like documents, both derived directly from JSON. In this article we’ll discuss MessagePack in depth.
Premise
Java is an old programming language. Version 1.0 was released in 1996 by Sun Microsystems and even though it has evolved and grown a lot over the past twenty years it is still carrying on some bad design choices such as null (ask Tony Hoare), primitive types or lack of a proper function type. With the last version of the language (Java 8) Java tried to address some of these problems introducing concepts such as Optional or lambda expression. Although these additions clearly represent a step forward for the language I still have the feeling that they are just patches applied to mitigate problems and not to solve them at their very source. For example Optional could be used to reduce NPE (Null Pointer Exception) but it is clearly not designed for this purpose and lambda expressions, implemented in Java 8 with SAM types, still force you to write an interface only to define a function.
If we think about computing in the Cloud Era, our mind is immediately drawn towards virtual machines and containers. Therefore, for example, when building a production environment with both approaches we think about the need of patching the operating system and/or upgrading the container. At the end of 2014 Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced a new service called “Lambda”, that allows us to focus on business logic and not on infrastructure.
