JavaPolis 2007 - University

A provoking experience...

It has been a while since my last post. Not that there was any regularity in posts being released. But, when I started this blog I was planning to post more regularly. I must confess that I have several posts "in the oven". I just haven't come around to finishing them. Or even starting them for that matter. Last month has been a very busy month. All my free time has been taken up by my education. I had 3 exams this month. I Passed 2 of them and failed 1. That leaves me with only 2 exams to finish for the whole education. (Not that the whole education will be finished just by finishing those 2 exams)

This month I went to JavaPolis 2007. Only the first 2 day, the University sessions. The University sessions were 3 hour in depth sessions. One could follow a morning session and an afternoon session. Twice a day one could choose a presentation from a menu of different presentations. The presentations I chose for the first day were Java Collections and Generics and Seam in Actions. The second day I followed Thinking in Flex and Introduction to Java SE 5 and 6.

The first session was Java Collections and Generics by Maurice Naftalin. In the first part the presentator discussed various topics on generics. Interesting was the internal mechanics of generics. The second part was about the current state of the collection interfaces and implementations. I must admit to falling asleep several times. 3 hours is a short period to discuss everything about collections and concurrency. In the end the book "concurrency in practice" was recommended.

The second session was Seam in Action by Pete Muir, Peter hilton and Nicolas Leroux. This presentation consisted of two parts with different presentators. The first part was a technical review of Seam. Showing the basics of the framework and later the possibilities of rapid application development for Seam using eclipse. The second part was more of a promotional by 2 people using Seam for a year to produce applications. Basically with Seam one can be productive but beware of the steep learning curve.

The third session Thinking in Flex by Bruce Eckel and James Ward. The basic premise was that the web as we know it is passe. It is slow, unreliable and above all ugly. And Flex is here to change it. The presentation itself was done very professionally. The lack of internet access at the start gave a really nice twist to the presentation. It also showed a weakness of current RIA's, they need internet access to function. Performance was addressed and the case was made that Flex is very strong in performance. Last, obviously, the case was made the Flex is visually attractive. And it indeed is. The presentation ended with some demonstrations of rapid application development with Flex in eclipse.

The fourth and last session was Java SE 5 and 6 by Sang Shin. It is clear that Sang Shin is a passionate java technician. This presentation convinced me to install NetBeans and start going through his material on www.javapassion.com website. The presentation itself gave an overview of everything new in JavaSE 5 and 6. 3 hours were hardly enough to cover everything lighly. From the improvements that are part of JavaSE 5 and 6 it is clear that SUN is not content with java being a/the main language for server development and want to see java take a larger role in desktop applications too.

Well that concludes my JavaPolis experience. I will definitely go next year again. But next year I will go to the conference. That way I can get up to date with more topics.

Jaron Schut