JavaZone06 & Catchup!

Posted on September 14th, 2006 by arnljot.
Categories: java, other.

Tuesday 12th

Tuesday was JavaUniversity where I attended a workshop with Maven2 creator Jason Van Zyl. I really like what I saw and learned, and can’t wait for Appfuse to come maven enabled. I’ll also start using it for my other projects.

Wednesday 13th

JavaZone: First I watched the presentation by Google(by Bryson Johnson) of the Google Web Tool kit. This is a really cool company that’s good at seducing you, so I’ll try the product when I’m a bit more cooled down ;)

Next presentation was a SDL methods speech by Rolv Brækk from NTNU. The speech started really slowly, but got really interesting towards the end when he touched on the code/deployment automation tools they’d created for eclipse.

Then there was a presentation was by Jonathan Purdy. It was a presentation of his top ten experiences on how to botch an aplication. The presentation was okay, but expecting him to use more humor and satire, I think he should have used more examples from the real world.

Gavin King spoke about JBoss Seam. Neat technology. Nice to know about. He’s a man with a reputation, so it was fun to see him speak and to demystify him ;-P

Scrum is something I’ve heard about, so to hear Ken Schwarber talk about ‘his baby’ was inspiring. But also having heard Borland talk about CMMI, it’s fun to compare and see how they really are talking about the same problems and really similar ways to solve it.

The next session was an embarresing deal for me. To my defence it was by now 6 hours later in the day, six hours packed with info in a by now fairly hot and stuffed confrence center. So for a while when Patric Linskey was talking on Good/Bad/Ugly sides of EJB3 I was nodding of. Sitting on the second row with no one in front of me it must have been anoying to him. It was purely me, and not his presentation because the presentation was really interesting.

Listening to Sun talking about Sun SPOTs was really inspirering. The presenters were (Angela Calcedo, Matt Thompson and Simon Ritter). The mp3 player and the Sun SPOT + looking glass integration blew the crowd away :)

The last presentation I got to attend was CubicTest. A fun thing there was how one developer from silenium hijacked the presentation towards the end. It was all spured by one of the two giving the talk (Christian Schwartz and Stein KÃ¥re Skyttern) mentioned that they prefered to integrate with Watir and not Selenium due to some “problematic aspects to Selenium”. :)

My overall impression with JavaZone this year is that it’s getting better year by year. But maybe it’s time for JavaBin to consider if SAS Radisson has become to small. They call it madness them self that they sold 400 extra tickets. And one could tell when trying to move between the talks early in the day when the common areas got very crowded.

Also the information during the first day was sparingly. Since some talks got cancelled or moved. And little information reached us, the participants. There are screens scattered out through the hotel showing info, but most of them are 13″ screens next to the door to one auditorium, and people just ignore them. A strategy next year could be that each speaker first gives a 2 minute program update.

Information was also a problem with JavaUniversity. Hadn’t it been for a collegue that sent an email to the JavaBin comittie, and that Jason sent out a survey ahead of his training session, I wouldn’t have had any way of knowing that I had sucessfully registered for the course.

All in all I’m so far really happy with JavaZone. And I’m writing this in the back of the room while Kristoffer Dyrkorn is giving a talk on Nutch.

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