University day two started with the Thinking in Flex session. I actually expect Bruce Eckel to look different but I like his style, asking naive questions to the other speaker just like he didn’t knew (well at least I hope I got it right!). Most of his questions were very helpful for the overall comprehension of the talk. Regarding flex now, I’ve been amazed how easy the UI can be built using Flex Builder and the overall reactivity of the tool. However it’s pretty much hard to figure out how that kind of tool will help in very complex projects with a non state-of-the-art server implementation; not that the server-side stuff I practically use suck but they just show very nice RESTfull web services or simple XML return streams. With more data, session and all that kind of stuff, I wonder if it would be that smooth and easy. Anyway, as Bruce Eckel said, the first idea of Flex is to provide a UI framework in contrary to most systems out there. And it shows!

Struts2 was very much expected since the Web Toolkit on which I am working on with the team right now is using Struts1 and we are wondering what would offer Struts2 compared to the current implementation. I’ve been a bit disappointed by this one since we focused a lot on this very legacy JSP paradigm (JSP invoking an action on the server, then we have the processing, then we forward the result to my-cool-result.jsp). On the contrary, I was expecting information regarding annotations and especially the ability to completely remove the struts configuration file. When using overlays for instance, it’s very common to have server-side actions in separate war projects and the reconciliation is currently a pain since we need to touch the web.xml file to add our custom struts configuration file. I was also expecting examples of asynchronous requests handling, typically with JSON messages coming back and forth. The next version of Struts2 will actually have annotations (well I hope) and the Ajax-related stuff are underway but … when? I kinda have the feeling that this annotation change request has been there for ages now. I hope we’ll have it soon. Final note, that Ian Roughley guy really looks like to Kiefer Sutherland (Jack Bauer in the 24 tv series).

Developing Software like a band plays Jazz was the final sessions (in two parts). I actually didn’t knew Jazz at all but this sounds like it’s addressing a more and more common use case in distributed teams: how can we work efficiently and how can we react to issues (in its broadest scope)? Access to the tool is still a bit secret for the moment but what we’ve seen in the demo is really interesting: issue tracking, scm integration, instant messaging, build integration system, project management capabilities, etc. I have to wonder if all these tools are IBM stuff or if they integrate with external systems. I am expecting my favorite third party company, Atlassian, to solve that kind of use cases. And apparently, they are doing this with Jira Studio eventhough I am not sure the scope is as broad as Jazz has. Anyway, Mike’s around so I’ll just ask if I can.