BadPopcorn » Java

JavaOne – Day Three

Corey — Fri, 19 May 2006 21:41:45 +0000

Ok, so by now any session that has AJAX in the title has more people that you can shake a stick at trying to get in. One line was down the hall, down stairs, out a door, and then around a corner. That’s right outside as in not indoors. I decided I wasn’t that interested in that one after all.Going to various session you start to pick up on the whole session process as it relates to the presenters and their slides. Apparently Sun goes through each presenters slides and make sure that everything is nice an legal. Thus they add in words like ’software’, ‘technology’, and trademark simbols. There were several occations when a presenter stop and pointed out how his slide was change. One group noted that Sun made them remove the dash after ‘JSR’ on everone of their slides.

The day ended with an ‘After Dark Bash’ that was pretty cool, except that there where about 10,000 people there as well. Everyone was waiting in line for either food or drinks so basiclly it was just a big standing around party. The highlight was that ‘Fatal1ty’ crushed everyone in Quake4.

I also was able to go to a session involving ‘Processing’ that can help create really neat art but being a bit more artistic lot the presenters had a hard time presenting a focused presentation. I personally thought it was a nice change of pace.

JavaOne – Day Two

Corey — Thu, 18 May 2006 22:08:56 +0000

Well the day started on a bit of a bad note. See there’s this new Java language feature named Generics that I have been avoiding. Well today Joshua Bloch shoved them in my face and sort of spread it all around. Let’s just say that Java Generics make the baby Jesus cry. I think that a part of me died during Bloch’s talk. Personally I don’t really see why everybody thinks that super duper strong type checking helps write better software. Do you really want the Java compiler to do your software testing for you? For somethings (like is this class name the same as that class name) but others (like is this a collection of coins) it is not so helpful. At one point there was a method signature something like this:

void someMethod(Collection collection);

“? extends T” are you kidding me? I mean really what-the-fuck.

Well today wasn’t a complete loss, I was able to rebound with a nice Session all about Groovy. There was a really neat demo using some behide the sences magic to dynamically interact with Excel and a simple Swing app. And the presenter didn’t declare any types while doing it. To round out the day I sat in on two different sessions present by none other than Rod Johnson who has a really terrific accent and even better things to say with it. I can’t want unit Spring 2.0 is released sometime next month.

I’ve notice that when presented with rows of seating most people first sit on the aisle making people after then squeeze by them on there way to the middle. For some reason this really bugs me, why don’t they move to the middle to start with? They are also the folks that stay until the last question has been answered.

Almost forgot the most exciting part of JavaOne the game area. My coworker and I dialed up some favorites (Mr. Do!, Joust, Guantlet) and I totally kicked in Rampart. They also have something called Xbox 360 but I don’t think that it has any real titles.

So you might notice that today’s post is really about yesterday hey all day conferences take a toll and I like sleeping.

JavaOne – Day One

Corey — Wed, 17 May 2006 04:18:16 +0000

That’s right I’m at JaveOne this year and it is super duper. No really it is. Today I was in two different session that delt with REST. One was all about the Atom Protocol and the other was how you can use all of the new standard Java API’s to implement both the client and server for a RESTful web service. One item about REST that my coworker pointed out was how each presenter started out mapping HTTP methods GET, PUT, POST, and DELETE to the good old Create, Read, Update, and Delete operations. He also noticed that each mapped PUT and POST differently. Having recently read RFC 2616 I can see why that happened.

I also sat in on a session highlighting a upcoming software product named Terracotta for Spring. Basiclly it sits between the JVM and Spring and provides for all your custering needs. Seems super cool because it handles all the nasty stuff, leaving your Spring App just a Spring App.
Ok enought of the boring stuff time for todays overservations/impressions. First up, the event staff here at the Moscone Center know how to heard people about. Before we where even inside there were people directly us JavaOne goers which entrance to go to for breakfast. It continued throughout the day as lines for sessions formed with the aid of our friend event staff. “This is the line for 304″. Second the attendies have no fear about getting up and leaving in large numbers before the speaker has even gotten close to finishing his presentation. By the time Q&A comes around most of the crowd has moved on to new lines. Lastly, just about everyone has a laptop and a good number of those are Macs, makes me wish I had one.

Pictures will follow …. soon …

Geronimo!!!

Ben — Fri, 06 Jan 2006 20:38:34 +0000

The Apache Geronimo project has hit the 1.0 Milestone! Yay, congrats, etc etc. I’ll have to now evaluate it to see if it’s usable for my Java projects. This is very cool stuff.