Like Mike, I attended the symposium. For those who didn't, I can only
say, you missed one of St. Louis' best training opportunities in years.

I attended several of the same sessions as Mike and found them generally
very useful. I would say that in Bruce Tate's "Bitter EJB"
presentation, Bruce was NOT down on EJBs at all, just Entity Beans. He
said he liked the whole JMS/MDB thing a lot and also thought
SessionBeans (preferably stateless) are a good solution for large-scale,
distributed applications. He was down on EntityBeans (as would be
anyone who worked with EJB 1.1 BMP), and suggested consideration of
alternative persistence mechanisms, like JDO and Hibernate.

(I've just begun reading about Hibernate,
http://hibernate.sourceforge.net, and have to admit, it looks very
interesting. Once I get my mind around how it does the O-R mapping, the
framework will probably become addictive because of its power and
simplicity. Large, unwieldy SQL involving multi-table joins is reduced
to a couple of lines of code. And of course, unlike EJB-QL, all the
desired SQL constructs are available, including ORDER BY, HAVING, GROUP
BY, as well as standard functions.)

One interesting, and mildly disturbing, statistic was presented at the
keynote address by Dave Thomas. While discussing the need for continual
learning, he said a recent survey showed 90% of developers don't
purchase books on development. I suspect many of the same folks would
never attend training unless someone else was paying for it.

However, I was heartened to see about 150 people, probably including
several stlroundtable members, gave up their weekend to attend this
event.

Jack