Presentation (Brown bag) ideas for a J2EE team

Question

I need to give a brownbag to my dev co-workers. The team is a typical Java/J2EE team, mostly using the current technologies (Grails, Spring, Hibernate, EJB, Caching, Webservices, Messaging).

I want to talk about something that we aren't using yet. Part of my reason for giving the presentation is to learn it myself too. And I don't care if its not directly useful at work, but is something worth knowing about.

Things I am looking into are: Performance Tuning a J2EE app, Scala, Erlang, XMPP, RabbitMQ, Couchdb, Git.

In other words, name a technology that you desperately want to learn or that you have learnt recently and you find yourself telling others about it?

Any preference or advice?

Answer 1

A vote for scala here, I'm having great fun with it.

Answer 2

Continuous Integration with Hudson - it's something you and your team can benefit from, as well as something new to learn.

Answer 3

It depends heavily on what your team doesn't know. Using that mix of technology, concurrency issues are mostly abstracted away from you, so doing something on concurrency might be useful.

Scala is certainly a good choice.

Cloud computing is all the rage these days, so something about Memcache, Terracotta or similar technologies are certainly worth knowing about, as is Google's App Engine.

But it is a very wide open question, because it depends on what your team doesn't know directly but is interesting to them.

Answer 4

• Domain Driven Design
• DI and IoC

Stating these topics since it hasnt been mentioned before in the discussion.

There are some technologies in the same area that your team is working with, that cropped up.

• EclipseLink is one of them.
• It wouldn't hurt to introduce OSGi
• And there's JEE 6.

Answer 5

If you want to pay attention to performance tuning you could start by taking a look at jvmstat and jstat. These tools can give you a lot of insight into what your application actually does, as opposed to what you think it does.