Danny’s Blog

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 […]

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 […]