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Pfew…just crawled back into my hotel room after a crazy day. It’s now about 1.30 AM and unfortunatelly there is no wireless signal in my room. This is mainly because its situated at the very end of the hallway, way too far from the elevator, so no wifi signal can be picked up here. You will probably not see this post until tomorrow. Anyway, lets do this day backwards…its what I remember best…
Allright, so I just returned from the hotel bar where we had some fierce discussions going on regarding subjects from the sessions that we attended today. As usual with discussions we started talking about one thing and ended up on something totally different. From Eclipse plugins, to Oracle, from possible Dolphin features to Aspect Oriented Programming, and then all the way to debating the usefullness of rebel frameworks like Spring. Ofcourse the JavaPolis movie we saw this evening was also a large part of the discussion. We saw King Kong earlier this evening and in my opinion it is a great movie! The story kind of sucks, but the action scenes are so over-the-top that you will definitely like this movie. Picture this: you know the story, add a large amount of Jurassic Park, and visualize some Lord of the Rings sceneries with that. There you have it: King Kong! The JavaPolis theatre is THX certified and features a huge screen which all adds to the excitement.
Before all of that I attended the following sessions:
Maven 2.0 – An update talk by Vincent Massol on the current status of Maven. He explained the concepts behind Maven 2 and demonstrated some of the new features. I think there is some cool ideas in it, but I do doubt whether it is currently ready to deploy in a project.
EJB 3 – Persistence API – A talk by EJB 3 spec leads Linda DeMichiel and Mike Keith. Spotlight was on the new persistence model and they explained all of the concepts behind it. It was a very good talk with lots of new insights.
Bitter JavaServer Faces – This sessions was quite a dissapointment. Instead of what the title implies, it was more like a ‘Basic JavaServer Faces’ session as the speaker spent most of his time explaining the very basics of JSF. He did mention some tricky things, but then again he spent so mucht time taking us step-by-step through the side effects of things that it actually was very boring. Too bad. Looking back on the session I missed the most important pittfall of JSF, which is the lack of tool support for JSF itself, or any of the frameworks on top of it. I am aware there are some good tools, but definitely not much. If you’re talking ease of development, than hand-coding JSF is not an option in my view.
Extreme Swing – Romain Guy showed some nice demos that can be done with Swing in combination with Java2D, OpenGL, JoGL, and Java3D.
JDBC for MS SQL Server 2005 – This session was presented by Microsoft. They talked about their JDBC strategy for Yukon, and stressed that its for real! They did some heavy investments in their new driver and from what I saw it looked very promising. Expect a v1.0 in the beginning of next year.
Before the break-out sessions was another keynote, that consisted of three parts: announcements by Stephan Janssen, a JavaPolis RAD Race report, and a keynote talk by Graham Hamilton on Tiger, Mustang and Dolphin. I already saw Graham’s talk as part of the JavaOne keynote, so no real news here, except maybe that Java EE 5 is expected to go final during JavaOne 2006, in may. Afterwards I asked Graham about the Google toolbar bundled with update 6 of Java SE 5 that I’ve been blogging about, and what other spyware we could expect in the near future. Graham replied that the Google toolbar install was part of the Google deal announced a little while ago and that there were no intentions to put other stuff in the Java distribution. He also stressed that the Google toolbar install was only added to update 6, and not to the JDK binary.
And with that I would like to end another interesting day of JavaPolis…now just a few hours of sleep, and then off to the final day of the conference.