Danny’s Blog

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 [...]

BEA’s Bill Roth (vp of the BEA Workshop Business Unit) hinted at JavaPolis and later in his blog and a LogicCMG blog at the possibility of WebLogic server supporting other languages than Java, like PHP or Ruby. I think this is an interesting idea. If, for instance, Ruby or Rails applications could be deployed to [...]

In Thursday’s keynote, JavaPolis founder Stephan Janssen asked whether JavaPolis should grow even bigger, and because of that, move to a bigger location. According to the official site this year over 2100 people attended the conference. I don’t think there’s a clear answer to Stephan’s question. JavaPolis had a very friendly, cosy atmosphere; I never [...]

Not being able to blog live during JavaPolis 2005 leaves me with several pages filled with scribbled notes on the various presentations. I’m glad that JavaPolis 2006 is said to feature free on-site WiFi access (you read it here first!). But even so, I’m not sure how easy it is to blog live on the [...]

Back from JavaPolis, and seeing the Rails book lying where I’ve left it last Tuesday, made me pick it up and continue reading — instead of looking into GlassFish, the new persistency API, JSF and all the other new stuff I’ve seen in Antwerpen. It’s all alpha, beta, preview releases; and even if it isn’t [...]