Biography

Steve Poole has been a long time IBM Java developer, leader and evangelist, working on IBM Java SDKs and JVM's since Java was less than 1. In the years since he's had time to work on other things including representing IBM on various JSRs, being Spec Lead for JSR 326 and a committer on Apache Kato. Recently he's been participating in OpenJDK and earning his stripes. Contrary to popular belief IBM is not his only life. In his spare time he can be found cursing over an Xcode project or two.

Lectures

Discussion panel: "Freaks of the Freaks: Talking About Minorities in IT"

The session will start with short talks by two motivated women: Jessika Kerr and Kamila Sidor; but this year we will not limit ourselves solely to the issue of female empowerment. The invited panelists, together with the audience, will have a chance to discuss the gender/racial/cultural(im)balance of the IT community. Is the current sex ratio natural? Are opportunities equal? Why are those few people making so much fuss? Should diversity be fostered? Is there a gain somewhere? Or should we all just grow white beards? We hope to make the panel both inspiring and concrete. Come to listen, learn, and share your ideas.

JVM Support for Multitenant Applications

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Per-tenant resource management can help ensure that collocated tenants peacefully share computational resources based on individual quotas. This session begins with a comparison of deployment models (shared: hardware, OS, middleware, everything) to motivate the multitenant approach. The main topic is an exploration of experimental data isolation and resource management primitives in IBM’s JDK that combine to help make multitenant applications smaller and more predictable. Highlights include: A fine-grained tenant API; Per-tenant resource quotas based on the JSR 284 API; Tenant-aware JRE: run existing apps in a shared JVM without code changes; Challenges: handling misbehaved tenants, safe finalization, monitoring.

Compact Off-Heap Structures in the Java Language

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Whilst Java is a feature rich, there are still areas where it looks enviously at other languages. Native languages like C boast the ability to specify arrays of structures which has the benefit of being able to have compact representation of data and allow for the fast conversion of data into a stream of bytes (ie. serialization). It's possible to achieve the same things in Java by carrying out direct memory management yourself through the use of the Unsafe class, but as the name suggests this can be perilous. This session will introduce the concept of bringing C like structures to Java through a proposed Java Language change, and show the improvements possible for the memory footprint and performance of applications.