Danny’s Blog

Last March 10-12, I visited the QCon London 2009 conference. Besides feeling very much at home in London (been away too long), I had an excellent time listening to many great speakers and thought-provoking talks. This is an account of my visit and the best sessions I attended.
Mutable Stateful Objects Are The New Spaghetti Code
According [...]

This year’s JavaPolis (no, someone thought, “we have a great name for our conference but we have to change it, so let’s choose the worst name we can come up with,” and renamed it to Devoxx) for me started off with a university session on JavaFX. I was hoping to get an introductory overview–and that’s [...]

One of the great features in frameworks like Ruby on Rails is that they enable you to focus on implementing business logic. No need to set up anything (other than a database connection). No need to be concerned with technical stuff: if you need to persist or query things, or mail something for example, the [...]

Twenty years ago, my first job was to assist visitors of the Computerette–something of an Internet café without the Internet. This small company had been started by someone who did freelance jobs coding some very obscure Cobol dialect. While he kept doing his well-paid job, he hired me to take care of the shop. Besides [...]

How about those annotations? Haven’t they made the once simple and elegant Java language into a unintelligible mixed-up mess of code and metadata? These are just two outcries of despair about annotations that I found on the Internet, both written by able and experienced Java developers:
“We have been seeing this for awhile via XDoclet, and [...]

Thursday’s JavaPolis keynote starts with Bruce Eckel doing basically a partner slot — a 45 minute promotion speech for Flex (what else). What’s this doing at a Java conference? How much did Adobe pay for….. — Oh. Okay. I just saw the first demo. I want to use this! Show me more! And it works [...]

Bob Lee’s session on Guice got mixed reviews. Having already seen his introduction to Guice, I had an pretty good idea of what Guice is, so I enjoyed hearing about his 50 or so best practices and previews of things to come. However, I spoke with another visitor afterwards who was less impressed; he had [...]

This plan was doomed from the start: leave from work at 4PM and try to reach Antwerp within two hours, so I could collect my badge and goody bag tonight instead of tomorrow morning (together with 2000 fellow JavaPolis visitors). It was worth a try, but I should have known you can’t beat the Dutch [...]

Just when I was about to drive off to Antwerp for this year’s JavaPolis, I learned that a fire has started in Antwerp’s nuclear plant ‘Doel’. Apparently the fire is located in a side building and there’s no immediate danger to the public. Which is exactly what I would say to prevent complete chaos from [...]