Day three starts the conference part of Javapolis and more specifically the keynotes. That was the second time I see James Gosling live (I actually can’t remember when/where the first time was!). His part was overall funny to watch, full of very interesting quotes:

  • “I’m very excited about NetBeans 6.0. Are you still using Emacs? Then go shoot yourself. Emacs was a good idea - about thirty years ago.” - I am sure Richard will appreciate!
  • About Java support in the GWT: “We’re happy Google is doing this, but fundamentally it’s just Google’s product. Besides, they have infinite cash so they don’t need support from anybody“
  • About JDK6 on the Mac “There’s nobody that can tell Steve Jobs what to do. It’s really difficult to know where Apple’s head is at, because they don’t communicate about what they are doing“

James also had a question about JavaFX and a statement regarding Flex: he was pretty much aggressive on that one saying that one of their customer had actually very poor performance using the flex’s VM for rendering complex histograms, which lead them to render the images on the server-side and send the binary representation to the client. I wonder how the flex’s guys felt about that.

Kick starting the Content Repository, AJAX meets JCR was a session that my boss suggested as interesting and I had scheduled to see Google Web Toolkit in a first place. Hey, he had a good idea actually since it was full of nice ideas about some of the stuff we’re using at work. First, I had no idea about this Java Content Repository specification and Apache Jackrabbit sounds like a very neat implementation. We actually use JAXR at work and I wonder what the fundamental differences are between the two. The guy showed us a nice RIA to access the content of the repository as well as to update it. Two words: fast & impressive. It seems to be part of the commercial flavor of the product though. The core of the talk was about u-jax (micro-jax), a tiny ajax library that allows you to easily get, add, edit and delete. I found that a bit cryptic but I am not really the kind of guy that should have a look to that sort of thing.

SOA Development using JBossESB was very theoretical and was lacking of structure: it was actually quite hard to figure out the relationship of one slide with the other. All in all, this was another SOA platform talk. I am not saying it wasn’t interesting or the platform does not provide cool functionality but you need to have at least a set of use cases that actually need that kind of stuff to be involved.

Scrum in practice for non-believers was the session of the day I was expecting most. And I was very disappointed. The theoretical part was interesting but the rest was a bit rude and it was probably the first time the speakers were presenting this to a so large audience. Anyway.

The future of Computing panel gathered a bunch of interesting people but it was hard to follow a QA session at the end of the day, especially when they have not received the topics in advance (or not prepared them!).