thejavajar

Great news! The No Fluff Just Stuff – Greater Florida Software Symposium is definitely coming to Tampa April 16 – 18 2010. I have attended a few training classes in my past and I have also attended a few No Fluff Just Stuff events. I really like the NFJS events because the topics are fresh and I walk away from each presentation with new ideas and techniques to help me become a more effective and proficient software developer. I highly recommend attending the event here in Tampa, especially if you are a local software developer. I will see you there.

Good news for software developers/engineers in Florida! The No Fluff Just Stuff (NFJS) – Greater Florida Software Symposium (GFSS) will be held in Tampa, FL from April 16th – April 18th, 2010. All of the details are still being worked out, but go ahead and start talking to your manager or team lead about getting this event booked on your team’s calendar and budget for 2010. The NFJS crew brings authors, experienced trainers and subject matter experts that can help make you a better, more productive developer. Check out http://nofluffjuststuff.com for more details and I will post more details as they become available in the next couple of months.

Day three was an exciting day. I attended an awesome presentation about DSL’s in Groovy presented by Guillaume LaForge. I got to speak with him a bit, he is a great guy. I attended Christophe Coneraets and Jeremey Grelle’s presentation on the technical pieces of Flex and Spring. Flex is great (already knew that), but being able to make remote calls to Spring is where it’s at. Spring’s BlazeDS support is very Spring-like and that means you an leverage your spring knowledge to work with Flex remoting. I checked out Keith Donald’s presentation, “Working with Spring Web Flow”. I really like Web Flow. I like Web Flow with JSF because it makes sense when you have to use JSF and I also like the Web Flow hooks inside of Grails. Hamlet D’Arcy’s presentation, “Legacy Code, Groovy and You”, really spoke to me. Some of us work in environments that need to pay attention to some of his key points on re-factoring/re-writing and TESTING. At the end of the day, I attended “Groovy AST Transformations” with Venkat Subramaniam. First, he is a great speaker/presenter and I look forward to attending most of his presentations because he knows what he is doing. Second, AST transformations look really cool, but I need to let it digest a bit before I dig in. It is a great feature of Groovy, like MOP, but it can also be dangerous, like MOP, if you don’t know what you are doing. I am looking forward to attending “OSGI and Groovy Jump Start”, “Design Patterns in Java and Groovy” and “Grails Without a Browser” on the final day of the event.

What a great day of presentations. I checked out presentations on topics including, clustering Grails, RESTful Grails, Spring Roo, JVM optimization for Grails and then stopped by the Grails BOF. It was great to sit down and just hear about Grails from Graeme Rocher and Jeff Brown without an agenda other than a passion for the technology. I am passionate about technology and it is great to be around an incredible group of attendees/developers, speakers, authors and project leads/committers that are just as passionate, if not more passionate. The food has been great and all the other amenities have been incredible. The Roosevelt is a wonderful hotel/venue for the event and it is chock full of American history. SpringSource, a division of VMWare (had to sneak that in), has really got their stuff together. The NFJS crew knows how to put on an event and the word on the conference floor is that we will be getting a NFJS conference in Tampa. I will be posting more after day three’s activities and I will have some more posts that are a little more technical in the next couple of weeks.