Final Thoughts on JavaPolis 2005, Part 1

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 spot. My laptop is rather big and heavy to carry around, it always finds a way to play the Windows welcome jingle when it boots up, no matter what settings I tweak, and it’s actually difficult to focus on the presentation and write a cohesive, intelligible blog entry.
So, about these notes. Thursday I saw…

  • Rod Johnson’s update on Spring 2.0. As I’m known to use BEA now and again, I’m pleased to see BEA and Spring cooperating well. I hope I will get the chance to use the combination myself at a client site. Rod talked a lot about Spring’s AspectJ integration. People are always saying that examples for using AOP only focus around logging, tracing, auditing functionality, and never beyond that. I wonder if you would want to go beyond that with AOP; would you really want functional behaviour outside your regular code, in aspects?
  • Romain Guy did a swinging (sorry) presentation on Extreme Swing. After seeing a demo of Looking Glass earlier this year, everything GUI I’ve seen since has been a bit disappointing. Romain made no mention of Looking Glass, and what he did show looked kind of nice. He told us to find inspiration for GUI design in video games, so I took his advise to heart and played a few rounds on the Xbox 360 in the Microsoft stand (yes, they were there, for whatever reason).
  • King Kong! Not a movie I would have gone to see in the cinema, but it was a great, somewhat gory way to spend the evening. Great idea to show a movie as part of the conference; but we were in a cinema complex after all. We sat behind Neal Gafter and Joshua Bloch, and I had to keep myself from asking them if they had a nice job opening for me at Google. Not that I stood much of a chance, after scoring only 4 out of 8 of their Java Puzzles that they did Wednesday morning…

(to be continued)

2005-12-19. No responses.

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