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 had the feeling there were 2100 people around. All the stands were well accessible, there was always a seat left even in the most popular sessions. Maybe 2100 is just right. On the other hand, if JavaPolis really wants to be ‘the European JavaOne’ (as I’ve heard people say more than once) I think it’s not nearly big enough. I would expect much more sessions, high-quality sessions even on Friday (see below), more big names in the speakers department and a bigger exposition room with more companies and bigger stands. I wouldn’t mind paying a little more either if it were that big.

Friday, the final day of JavaPolis, was a bit of a letdown. The exposition room was being cleared, the buzz and the excitement were gone, we were just a bunch of stray people in the three remaining conference rooms. I saw two interesting presentations:

• Web service architecture, highlighted some best practices in designing and maintaining web services, like:

  “Keep your XML schemas simple, because not all implementations implement all schema features the same way”;

  “Favour a coarse grained web service definition, because of the high cost per call”;

  “ESB allows you to use existing components (EJBs) as if you have a SOA; usefull for a transition to SOA but it won’t take you all the way”.

• Zero-calories J2EE: about a Danish company’s (Nordija) research into setting up a standard framework using Spring, Hibernate and Tapestry. I couldn’t agree with all their advise, like using domain classes containing business logic instead of data transfer objects to communicatie with the web tier; or identifying objects not by their database id field (because that’s empty until you’ve committed) but by some other identifying attribute or combination of attributes; by the way, Martin Fowler has an extensive discussion of this seemingly simple matter of identity fields which is worth reading. But I appreciated them showing that photo!

And finally we had a popup ad in the form of a presentation, not about ‘Managing Development Teams’ as the agenda said, but about the joys of using Enerjy software. I don’t mind people promoting their product; look at Rod Johnson, he does it all the time. This presentation however had no real content whatsoever. It was just a long list of problems you may encounter when managing a development team, without giving any other solution except for (drumroll) Enerjy!

It was time to go home.