rebelutionary / 2.0

TheServerSide Symposium wrap up and downloads / 2003 Jul 03

OK, well I guess I'm the last person on earth to blog about TSS Symposium - perhaps I'm just lazy. Here goes nothing:

Thursday

I went up to Boston on the train from NY, which was very pleasant. Large table, power and good lighting - why on earth take the plane? Arrived at the Tangosol office and met Cameron Purdy and the other guys there. We did the ritual technology-company-witty-t-shirt exchange thing ("Get Fuster-clucked" vs "Because you've got issues" - close call). After that a few of us drove to the airport to pickup Jason Carreira and we went sailing on Marblehead Bay and the Pacific Ocean - I think. Alas the wind was taking a day off that day, but we still had fun sitting on the boat and talking-tech. We needed more beer - I always think boats need a lot of beer - but that would come.

That evening we checked into the hotel - gah - no internet in my room. Luckily the lobby had a hotspot! Unluckily someone hacked the firewall apparently and took down the connection for the whole hotel - selfish prick. TSS had organised an informal speaker drinking session downstairs which was a lot of fun. Chewed the fat with Dion Almaer, Tyler Jewell, Cameron, Jason, Vincent Massol, Erik Hatcher and a few other guys.

Friday

Friday was when it all really began. Saw the Oracle keynote - well, it was a keynote. Why is everyone obsessed with making tools for corporate develoeprs to draw pretty Struts-pictures now? After the keynote I saw Rod Johnson's AOP session - excellent breakdown of the different AOP approaches (dynamic proxies vs bytecode manipulation vs classloaders vs special language) and the strengths and weaknesses of each. After that I saw about half of Erik's Advanced Struts course (loading up on ammunition to defend WW) but had to leave to film my tech talk. I did get to catch Bob Lee's (crazybob!) JMX talk - and we had a good chat about the crazy things you could do by injecting beanshell using JMX to build AOP interceptors. Don't try it at home kids.

The Compuware MDA talk during dinner was a load of horsecrap (sorry - it was) but the Open Source panel afterwards was fantastic (no, not just cause I was on it). Along with Vincent, Gavin, Erik, Christophe from ObjectWeb and Bill Burke from JBoss we chatted about all issues related to the Open Source J2EE community. Every question to do with open source vs commercial software seemed to get angled at me, but I hope I answered them intelligently enough. The quality of discussion was very high I thought, and the questions afterwards carried over into the bar for hours! (As the Java magician pulled a disappearing act on us all and never showed)

Oh, and a side note to conference organisers - pick somewhere with a bar that stays open past midnight, or somewhere with drinking establishments close by. Developers like that :)

Saturday

Saturday started with Tyler's BEA keynote (yet more pretty Struts-drawings for 'corporate developers') followed by Rod's J2EE Myths talk - which was a very well thought out treatise on some of the problems with J2EE.

After that was my Java.blogs presentation - which seemed to go very well judging by the audience response, although at 80+ slides in 70 minutes it was indeed like "drinking champagne from a hosepipe" as I was told later.

I then watched Bruce Tate's (of Bitter * fame) Persistence frameworks talk which was again excellent. A good historical run through of persistence mechanisms in Java (from beans with JDBC, through EJB, JDO and Hibernate). His favourite persistence framework? Hibernate! (A pity Gavin had ducked out and missed this talk - he would have been jazzed by all the praise)

Then came my WebWork 2 talk, which also seemed to go down very well with the crowd. It was a little trickier than the first because of the shifting ground (WW2 is still evolving even as we speak) and because of the number of Struts enthusiasts in the crowd. Nevertheless it was well received I think, hopefully we'll get a lot of WW converts out of it (like Erik)!

Incidentally I'm told I didn't plug JIRA as much as I should have during my talks - just a brief mention. I hate vendor pitches personally, but perhaps I should have tried more :) Anyway, if you're looking for an issue tracker, bug tracking or project management package - give JIRA a try.

Saturday finished off with an amusing TSS feedback session (Floyd discovered that everyone disliked TSS 'crayon colouring' and that the clustering idea was a joke), a Rick Ross keynote, a J2EE vendor panel (except for the poor guy from Compuware who just couldn't stop saying MDA) and then 600 pints of Sam Adams consumed by what appeared to be a crowd of about 50 developers.

Gavin, Crazy Bob, Morten Wilken and myself left the hotel at about 1am searching for anywhere to live it up near Wakefield (just after Merrick announced he had to leave as he had two women upstairs). We found a night club in a strip mall (you don't want to mess up that sentence ;)) but sadly it had some bizarre door policy and didn't reopen to the public until 3am. Sometimes I don't understand America - no beer after 1am?

Sunday

Watching the Novell keynote at 8.30am I had a revelation that perhaps I didn't really need to get up after 4 hours sleep to watch yet another vendor pitch. My bad. The day was improved with Scott Ambler's Agile Modelling session complete with lashings of humour ("Just get your developers to try pair programming for a while - tell them they have to use it, you know - on pain of death.") followed by John Crupi's equally amusing session on Jackpot and all of the Sun research projects ("Sometimes I have problems with my little balls.").

Bob Lee rounded out a great conference with his AOP session looking at jAdvise and a killer demo (real-time sequence diagrams of executing code). We also debated the possibility of using BeanShell and AOP to dynamically introduce interceptors and reroute messages - thereby refactoring your code in a running JVM. Scary stuff.

Summary and Links

I'd like to congratulate the TSS crew on putting together a brilliant conference. I'll certainly be coming back for the next one if they'll have me. The quality of talks was excellent, as were the attendees who came. An excellent weekend all around.

• For more coverage, Cameron has the full scoop and links to more blogs.
• Download my java.blogs presentation
• Download my WebWork 2 presentation
• Try JIRA - the world's best issue tracking and project management package :)

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