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 expected more of an introductory session.
Right now I’m in a GWT session where one of the speakers has been delayed and time is being killed by someone demoing GWT applications somewhere on the Internet, followed by another substitute who starts his presentation with the announcement “Let’s see how fast we can go through this stack of slides.” and welcomes every slide with a half-surprised “Okay…” — has he even seen these slides before?
To start the day off, there was a triple keynote: Stephan Janssen, building up via Bruce Eckel to James Gosling himself. Something that caught my attention on one of his slides: Java would enable you to “Learn Once, Work Anywhere”. Is that really true? Even in the Java EE world I’m in, developers are getting more and more specialized, making a switch non-trivial — let alone the gap that exists between business application and real-time development. Yes, the language may be the same, but different libraries, frameworks, and even the entire context within which you’re working may well require you to virtually start afresh, if you’re thinking about switching.
There was of course some obligatory promoting of NetBeans 6 and Java FX; a short and not very impressive demo with Sunspots and robots (read the book, seen the movie — again!); and a plea to Neal Gafter to get closures into Java 7. Which is kind of weird if you think about it: the “father of Java” asking a Googler to please implement the feature the he himself was unable to include in Java in the first place.

Simon Ritter doing a robot demo

Near the end, I saw a JasperSoft employee losing about 5 litres of sweat: his guest appearance in Gosling’s session went sour when the beamer, switched over to his laptop, remained black for an uncomfortable number of minutes. The gum he was chewing did not help his demo either, by the way.
The GWT session did not end well. Both guest presenters battling for attention, both ignoring any comments one makes about the other’s slides; as well as the text on half of the slides being garbled and unreadable… Fortunately GWT looks slick enough (both code and end result) but definitely needs better promotors.