Hello Stranger

I attended the Gateway Java Symposium this weekend and thought I post
my experiences.

The conference started off at 1:15pm on Friday. The first session I
attended was on webservices. Jason Hunter, the servlet guy, presented
an overview of webservices while explaining the difference between SOAP
and REST approaches. After hearing a bit about REST, it dawned on me
that my group at work have a home rolled implementation of this. Weird
how something I thought I knew very little about is actually familiar.
The second session was on Xdoclet. Eric Hatcher, the guy that wrote
mannings ant book, presented this. I saw the usefulness of the tool,
but it didn't contain any "shock and awe" that will push me to try it
out anytime soon. Following lunch I attended "Dynamic Java", which
went over bytecode generation/manipulation using the BCEL from Apache.
It also involved a lengthy discussion of Reflections and how it could
be used effectively. Again, nothing that really shook my world.
Dinner was served following this session, which was great because I was
starved. A keynote by Dave Thomas, author of The Pragmatic Programmer,
which was highlight of the day. Dave went into the ways we get
ourselves in unmanageable situations. He offered 12 practices to help
manage hitting deadlines, budgets, etc. Fantastic speaker with a topic
that hit home with everyone.

Saturday morning I attended Bitter EJB presented by Bitter Bruce Tate,
actually he was bitter at all but since he is authoring his second book
in the serious the name sticks in my head ;) For those of you who
don't already know, our very own Bob Lee is coauthoring Bitter EJB with
Bruce and several others. Anyway, Bruce's talk was fantastic and
reaffirmed that my dislike for EJB's was shared by others as well.
While Session beans might have their place, Ill always view them as
monolithic utility classes that pollute source trees. After Bitter EJB
lunch was served and all attendee's got to ask questions to the expert
panel, consisting of Ted Neward, Bruce Tate, Stuart Halloway, Robert
Martin, Jason Hunter, and James Duncan Davidson. This was quite
interesting. There were many strong conflicting opinions on where Java
was headed, how dynamically typed languages could play a role in the
next "java", and lots of other rants and raves. After the expert panel
ended, I attend the Robert Martins next two sessions. OO Class design
and Java package design. He was nothing short of spectacular. I
enjoyed both sessions as well as his diatribe's on astronomy and atoms.
That finished up Saturday.

I began Sunday with Test Driven Development presented by Mike Clark.
This was a 3hr long(2 sessions) explanation of how to use Junit and
also the various tools that complement it. I thought he did a good job
of presenting the material. He was clear and concise about how to use
these tools to deliver higher quality software with possibly a better
design. I did, however, disagree with his statement that the tests
could be delivered to clients of your code instead of javadoc. After
lunch I attended Objective C presented by James Duncan Davidson(author
of tomcat and ant). Even though this topic had no bearing on my day to
day professional life, I was very interested. I recently purchased a
Titanium Powerbook and wanted to learn more about Objective C as a
language and Cocoa as a framework for OS X. I left realizing I have a
lot more to learn in order to do anything productive on this machine
with respect to Objective C and Cocoa. I did enjoy the course though.
The final session that I attend was Aspect Oriented Java. Bob Lee
presented this and went into various frameworks floating around the
net, including one that he wrote. This topic really sparked my
interest after hearing how easy it would be to put logging into all
methods in all classes without cluttering up every class with this
code. In other words, you could implement this logic once and
interject it at runtime. Now how cool is that. I know several members
of my team would have loved to know about this approach a few months
back. They had to sprinkle audit logging in all of our source in order
to comply with HIPPA regulations. Not the most pleasant thing to do.

I saw several other roundtable members at the conference, Id love to
hear their thoughts on the conference and the speakers as well.

Mike