Posts Archive

Apart from the RAD race price thingy, Graham Hamilton of Sun presented Mustang and Dolphin, the upcoming Java releases. What cought my interest the most is that Mustang will include Rhino, and Dolphin will provide a completely new byte code format for dynamic languages. Could it be that this is also related to BEA’s future support of “languages that might take off”?

I’m a little disappointed with this one as I didn’t learn that much from it. As I managed to get one of the coveted seats next to a power outlet i am still here though :).

The room was packed when Javaland superstar Rod Johnson presented the new features in Spring 2.0. The new XML tags are quite nice as they reduce the amount of configuration code.

Rod mentioned that the JPA implementation in Glassfish will basically be TopLink out of the box, making this a truly usable reference implementation.

This talk had Jason Carreira presenting WebWork. It was good getting information regarding the WebWork/Struts merger straight from the source.

In the Q&A session, people asked a lot of questions about tool support. This surprises me - why do people find this a necessity? Are people actually like Bill Roth of BEA who said in his keynote that he can’t write XML manually? Of course, he sells tools.

Wicket provides a really excellent programming paradigm - plain HTML templates, really nice Java and no XML what so ever. My feelings are mixed though, as it is component based with weird URL’s. Also it uses the session by default. I really have to think about this one. I’m not that big a fan of component based web frameworks as I think that they are abtract away too much of the real world of stateless requests and responses.

XOM Design Principles with Eliotte Rusty Harold. Eliotte is a very good opionionated speaker. While I do not agree with his view on the topic on humane interfaces, he does present some really good ideas.

Quote to remember: “One out of three untested lines of code has bugs.”

As I am constantly on the outlook for power outlets, Pragmatic Andys post on Travelling with power was really funny.

Battery life: the new frontier.

So true

(Via /\ndy’s Blog.)

This is a short test to see if I can post at all :(

The wifi access here at Javapolis is really weird. Surfing the web works like a charm, so does receiving mail. Sending mail seems to be a hard thing to do, as it works half the time. However, when refreshing NetNewsWire, I get no updates. That combined with the fact that I can’t post with MarsEdit makes me suspect that Proximus has some really funky settings for their wireless network.

So I arrived yesterday to Antwerpen, and have just sat through the keynote. It was basically a shameless plug battle between Sun and BEA. The most interesting thing was Bill Roth talking about WebLogic “in the coming years” supporting “languages that might take off”. This is in line with what Jon wrote some time ago. Rails on WebLogic? Could be interesting, if not for no other reason but to gain a wider acceptance for Rails.