Danny’s Blog

Five days after my nightly arrival in beautiful Antwerpen, I drove back over those same dreary roads to Holland, to my home. Five days that have flown by. I’ve been completely submerged in mixture of Java and a little Ruby. Everything I heard about, everything I spoke about, even dreamt about, was Java. I’ve got [...]

Late Thursday afternoon, in a packed room 8 of the JavaPolis venue, Neal Gafter presented his plans for adding closures to Java. He had a very well built up argumentation for why we need closures in Java. Not the usual story about the visitor pattern and putting responsibility in the object where it belongs (e.g. [...]

In the afternoon I attended a session about Phobos. Phobos is a web application framework that uses server-side scripting–JavaScript at first, but they’re already working on support for other languages like JRuby. Phobos’ programming model is less prescriptive than that of Rails, but familiar concepts can be recognized, like a fixed directory structure and a [...]

Okay, okay, I’ll humbly admit I was wrong. A little bit. About ehm… that Groovy thing. An inspiring session by … about the Grails framework made me see things from a different perspective. There’s actually some quite nice features in Grails that could well be of use in Rails (or in some cases, Rails on [...]

On Thursday, Marc Fleury finally delivers his keynote on the open source business. I get distracted by circumstantial details like Fleury’s ridiculous “Public Enemy #1″ costume (reminds me of Steve Ballmer’s stupid monkey dance) and An running around him with her camera like a groupie, trying to catch Marc’s best angle (what lens is she [...]

Wednesday afternoon, JavaPolis really got into gear for me. I saw short ‘quicky’ sessions on Unitils (don’t like the name but some of the features (assertion through reflection!) could be very useful to me, as I’m writing tests on a daily basis) and Strecks (Struts extensions that can easily be used in an existing Struts [...]

Another unexpected program change at JavaPolis brought us Oracle’s Omar Tazi (director of SOA evangelism and Chief open source evangelist) instead of Marc Fleury in Wednesday’s keynote session.
Unfortunately, a school example of how not to do a presentation. We got an hour-long talk of Omar clicking away on his laptop, showing All-New Oracle product after [...]

I’m being urged to choose sides. Colleagues say I should specialize in either frontend or backend development. I’ve never liked to commit to any specialization. Partly because I’ve always admired the renaissance ideal of the uomo universale who knows and does it all. But also because, when I started out my career, 20 years ago, [...]

When expectations are high, you’re invariably up for some disappointment. Charles and Tom were unable to demo Rails-in-a-war-on-Glassfish; but at least they gave a warning in advance. But I definitely expected something more–or rather something else–from Eric Evans’ university session on domain-driven design (ddd).
The afternoon session on scripting languages went well enough anyway–or at least, [...]

Just arrived in Antwerp, Belgium, for the JavaPolis 2006 conference which starts tomorrow morning. Same venue (Metropolis, where I stopped on the way to pick up this year’s goodies bag), same hotel (Astrid–yeah I know it has a tacky name but it’s really not that cheap). Fortunately, the state of Antwerp’s wireless networking has advanced [...]