NFJS – Day 1
Today marks Day 1 of the Twin Cities edition of the NFJS North American tour! What a difference a year makes; clearly, the word is getting out on NF in my circles. Last year, I didn’t know a soul at the event but this year, it seemed like I ran into someone I knew everywhere I turned. Of course it helped that I brought 2 coworkers but while standing inline to register just in front of me I discovered none other Andy Madigan! I couldn’t believe it, but it’s been two years already since he moved on to West. We didn’t have a ton of time to chat but hopefully we’ll catch up at lunch tomorrow or Sunday. Of course I knew my friends Joe Athman and John Shields would be there but I wasn’t expecting to see my favorite Java programmer Christine Simon! She went to some of the JSF tutorials I went to so we had a good chunk of time to chat. Still, I *really* wanted to spend a couple of hours catching up with my old mates!
Just when I thought I couldn’t possibly run into anyone else I knew, there before me was Jeanette Takaoka-Miles! Jeanette is probably 80% of the reason I earned two of my certs…alas I didn’t have much time to talk – hopefully tomorrow! In the break after the first session, I ran into Jeff Jensen of TC JUG fame. Speaking of which, Ryan and I will be back at TC JUG in July. Before dinner, I had a chance to say hi to Venkat Subramaniam coauthor of the fantastic Practices of an Agile Developer – I didn’t get to any of his talks today but he’s first on my list for tomorow! I know there were a couple of other friendly faces but they escape me after a 17 hour day!
Some general thoughts about today. First, while I’m really pumped about the sessions I’ve been to/am planning on, I have to admit when I saw the names that wouldn’t be here, I was really disappointed. No Dave Thomas, Bruce Tate, Ted Neward, Glenn Vanderburg, or Howard Lewis Ship. I was also a bit surprised that the agenda shows only one talk on Rails and not a Ruby talk to be found… Still, we’ve got a good crop with David Geary, Justin Gehtland, the afore mentioned Venkat Subramaniam, and local boy David Hussman among others. As I mentioned earlier, the word is out – and we’ve got a packed house! The venue is good though I was surprised that I didn’t see any laptops in action – maybe there just aren’t that many bloggers in the big Minnie. Speaking of which, every presenter I saw today was using a Mac and IntelliJ IDEA…
So what did I actually see on day 1? Well, I was all about JSF meaning I can recite David Geary’s bio slide (and an impressive one it is I might add). I attended JavaServer Faces: A Whirlwind Tour, JSF: State of the Art, and Shale: Turbo-charge your JSF Apps. I don’t know a ton about JSF but I’ve been intrigued ever since I first hear about it…back in 2001. Though announced at JavaOne in 2001, it wasn’t released until 2004 however it hasn’t taken off until quite recently. David has seen a steady stream of consulting and training of JSF for the past 6-9 months so maybe we’re finally getting some momentum behind this approach.
David’s second talk focussed on Apache Tomahawk (JSF components), Facelets (Tapestry like views for JSF), and Seam (JSF marries EJB 3.0). Though a good introduction to these technologies, I had to wonder what pain these eased for developers. It seemed like the JSF components are a real free for all (especially now that Oracle’s ADF is part of the mix). And while I’m still holding out a glimmer of hope for EJB 3, I had to laugh when David flashed Gavin King’s quote from a Java Posse interview where he said Seam was inspired by Rails! I’m sorry, but putting Rails and EJB into the same sentence just made me laugh…
David’s last talk focused in on Shale. Now, this talk got my attention. First, Apache’s Commons Validator is *very* slick indeed. I’d worked with it indirectly at my last job and I really liked it but it sure seems to have grown! The ability to specify client and server side checking was way cool. Though the support for annotations didn’t do a ton for me, I was pretty excited to see how Ajax played with JSF (hard to believe, I know); using Shale made Ajax very simple…almost like cheating. Support for Tapestry like views was interesting but the ability to create wizards and control navigation via web flows really caught my eye.
After dinner, Neal Ford of ThoughtWorks gave the keynote on Language Oriented Programming which is really just a fancy way of saying Domain Specific Languages. Though not nearly as engaging or inspirational as Dave Thomas’ The Art in Computer Programming talk, none the less it was thought provoking. Neal showed JetBrains MPS in action and I have to say, the ability to define a language for complex rules that my customers could easily use is quite tempting. Still, I haven’t quite drunk the Kool-Aid on this one yet… That said, when you see how hard it is to write a DSL in Java, it starts to make you wonder how much longer Java has. Speaking of which one of my coworkers asked one of the speakers about Java vs. Ruby – he said *all* of his work is now in Ruby/Rails. So, for those of you that think there’s no money there, well, you’re wrong. But then you don’t need me to tell you that.
Whew – I can’t promise I’ll get around to providing greater detail than this (I took surprisingly few notes, either that or the pages I’m using this year are narrow ruled) but it’s getting late and I have a full day tomorrow!
