The keynotes today weren’t quite as crunchy. A open source guy from Microsoft did give me hope that MS has some people with a clue there. Steve Yegge from Google gave an interesting talk about the importance of branding, especially how it relates to open source projects and software. There was also a crazy Swedish guy who create the Pirate Party: a political party who’s main mission is massive copyright reform, in the sense of basically removing copyright. Another interesting talk was by an academic who was pointing out how biased we can be in our interactions with others. This was especially poignant with the open source crowd, which often tends to be opinionated, vocal, and active yet often assume that their neigh sayers are idiots, corporate stooges, or just plain evil.
My first session of the day was on managing and locating memory leaks in Java. It was stuff that I mostly knew from some of our recent applications but it was interesting to see what the open source tools have to offer versus the commercial tools I was more familiar with. Then I sat in a good demo about modifying an EJB+JSF application to use Seam to bind the two together through convention and annotations. It wasn’t very advanced, but the presenter did it all right in front of us in real-time, including a few errors along with on-the-fly troubleshooting. Seam is something I’ve had my eye on for us for a while, if we do decide to go the JSF route (I’m unconvinced).
The session I attended about Domain Specific Languages in Groovy turned out to not really be about DSLs at all, just Groovy syntax and concepts, so that was a bit disappointing. But following that the Security 2.0 talk was really good though. I was fairly aware of many of the common attack vectors that Chris Shifflet covered, such as XSS and CSRF techniques, but it was interesting to see how he started to use the two in concert (which is really fricking scary). During the break I talked with a few vendors, including Jive Software who I think are really cool and I want to use their collaboration software suite(s).
Advanced Spring with Rod Johnson (the author) picked up after the break, although it was very dry and mostly about AOP which I’ve done. The cool stuff to see was how they’ve fully embraced XML-Schema (XDS) over the old DTD. This means additions to the built-in functionalities are fairly easily accomplished, so I think we’re going to see really cool and easily invoked extensions to the core of Spring. Then Howard Lewis-Ship demoed the new features of the upcoming Tapestry 5. He’s taken a bunch of cues from the convention over configuration crowd which I think was a very smart move. Now T5 has a lot of intelligent default settings and most of the XML from previous versions seemed to have disappeared. Tapestry is probably the best Java webapp framework out there, but I’m not convinced that the difficult use cases aren’t made harder.
I was very disappointed to discover that the Expo hall closed at 5pm, while I was still in a session. I would have liked to talk with more vendors (especially to get more t-shirts). {Andrew} and I went to BeerForge, an event thrown by Jive, where we had a few drinks with various people. I met Jay Pipes who is a really cool guy, and more technical than I would have expected for a community liaison type.
