Lesson learned: a hotel which advertises with ‘WiFi’ as one of its rooms’ facilities may actually charge a substantial amount of money for that service; do not assume that it’s included in the room price. Not that I can’t afford 22 euros for a day of WiFi access, or that my employer wouldn’t pay it for me; I just refuse to pay that much money for it. At home (sorry, product placement) I get high-speed Internet access for a month for that amount. And it’s not that I’m in some faraway country; I’m just around the corner, in Antwerpen, at the JavaPolis conference — where there’s no reasonably priced WiFi available either. So this blog entry is written on old fashioned paper (the fancy JavaPolis notebook that we got in the goody bag), and you won’t be able to read it until Saturday, when I return.

On my first day at JavaPolis, I’ve already seen several interesting new things. After seeing a presentation on EJB3 and the new persistence API, I was left wondering why anyone would want to use Hibernate anymore. In a year or so, you’ll have this elegant-looking, standard ORM solution built into the application server you’re already using anyway. Furthermore, writing EJBs suddenly seems to become a fun thing to do. Just write the business interface, chuck in an annotation or two, and you’re ready to deploy.

I saw two excellent presentations, one about concurrency in Java 5: Brian Goetz explained very clearly, and with numerous examples, how to use the new concurrency functions, and why you would want to use them. Concurrency performance turns out to be much better than using synchronization. In Java 5 that is; in Java 6 the core language team optimized synchronization so the performance is up to par again with the concurrency library. I wonder why they waited so long with doing that optimization…

The other presentation was about Shale, by David Geary (who has some interesting blog entries about his experiences with Ruby and Rails by the way). Shale is named ‘the new Struts’, but technically it doesn’t have much to do with Struts — and maybe that’s just as well. It’s based heavily on JSF for its web interface, but it also borrows from Tapestry, Seam, and Spring WebFlow; although Shale’s webflow mechanism seems to be somewhat easier to use. However, now that I’ve seen Ruby on Rails, it occurred to me how insanely many XML config files are still used by something like Shale. I hadn’t expected this from someone so enthousiastic about Rails. Is it really impossible to have anything in Java without a heap of XML files accompanying it? I don’t think so; the EJB3 presentation showed that it is possible, using annotations and convention over configuration. People are starting to understand that developers want to code, not configurate!

The best moment in any vacation is when you shut the office door behind you, the night before the vacation begins. You feel a free man, even if it’s only for a few days or weeks. Today I had that moment, and I’m still enjoying it now.
This year, my Christmas vacation starts off with a visit to the JavaPolis conference in Antwerp, Belgium. Technically, it’s still work; but it’s a lot more fun than solving issues and debugging code, which I’ve been doing since our first major release back in October.

The other night, a colleague told me he doesn’t like going to conferences because you get so little out of the — usually short — presentations. But for me, a conference like this is all about hearing and seeing new things, being inspired, getting new ideas, thinking up new plans, new projects… As well as meeting people: people I’ve worked with in previous projects, or people that you only knew on-line, or people who helped build the stuff we’re using everyday: Java, Google, Spring etcetera. Not that meeting them would change the way you work with their tools, but I think that people who’ve created something noteworthy, are often inspiring to meet and talk to. A conference can be so much more than just the presentations you attend. I hope JavaPolis will be like that.

I’m going to try to blog whenever I can, but that will probably only be at night, in my hotel. WiFi seems to be the one thing missing from JavaPolis, unfortunately.