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 in a year’s time; I now have free wifi in my hotel room as well as at the JavaPolis venue. Allowing me to write this short blog entry.
And so I won’t be accused of blogging just for the sake of it, just because I can blog, I will list the university sessions that I’ll be attending tomorrow.

• First off is Eric Evans, talking about domain-driven design. This promises to be not only a theoretical introduction to the subject, but also an interactive domain modeling session. I’ve been looking forward to hear more about ddd since visiting Sogyo’s evening session two weeks ago. Especially as that session has left me confused whether Rails might be seen as a domain-driven development framework. I’m still not convinced; maybe tomorrow’s session will bring some clarification–and new arguments!
• In the afternoon, I’ll be at room 4 for the Dynamic Languages session. More in particular, for the JRuby part of that one. Originally, this session was scheduled as an all-JRuby university session; but somehow, the Groovy guys have managed to squeeze their way in as well. I really don’t see the point of Groovy, other than proving that Java can be as cool as Ruby if only we mutilate the language enough and make it dynamic. I promise I’ll keep an open mind during their session tomorrow, though I don’t think I’ll be able to take in anything after seeing Charles and Tom perform the miracle of Rails-in-a-war-on-Glassfish.

The all new JavaPolis 2006 bag

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 a WebLogic server, maybe you could use data sources or JMS queues from within Ruby code, or even call EJBs. You could profit from WebLogic’s scalability. Another advantage I see is that with BEA ‘supporting’ Ruby, it would be much easier to use Ruby in a corporate environment (that is, if they use BEA in the first place). BEA, bring it on!

(Note that I’m silently ignoring the mention of PHP here. Mentioning PHP and Ruby together does not do justice to Ruby; too many people I speak already think Ruby is just another PHP variant. I think BEA would actually lose credibility if they were to support PHP.)

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.
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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…
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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 it’s still so far away: Jeroen (colleague also attending JavaPolis) and I figured we’re lucky if we’ll be able to use Java SE 5 in our daily work (read: in BEA WebLogic) by the end of 2006 (when Mustang, Java 6 is already out), and Java EE 5 by the end of 2007 (when Dolphin, Java 7 is out). Two years and two more Java versions before we can use the technology we’ve been presented this week! So I’ve more or less lost interest momentarily and gone back on track with Rails.

There was very little mention of Ruby at JavaPolis. None of the people I spoke with had actually done anything with Ruby. What I did see:
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