thejavajar

Unfortunately, all good things must come to end and that means it is time to pack my things, check-out of my hotel room in NOLA and catch a flight back to Tampa. The good thing is that the excitement of SpringOne / 2GX doesn’t have to end. I am little late to press with completing this post (MacBook battery, sleep, travel, work), but anyone who works with me or who lives with me can tell you that I am still amped about what I saw and experienced at SpringOne / 2GX.

At the beginning of day four, I checked out Hamlet D’Arcy’s presentation on Groovy and OSGI. I have seen a presentation at the Tampa JUG on OSGI, courtesy of my colleague, Vladimir Vivien and Hamlet’s presentation really helped me get a hold of the technology again. He is a wealth of knowledge and a talented software developer / presenter.

One of my favorite presenters, Venkat Subramaniam, discussed design patterns in Java and Groovy. It was a very useful presentation. Venkat is an incredible presenter and the content of his presentations are right on point. He knows what he is doing!

After lunch, I checked out Jeff Brown’s (SpringSource / Grails) presentation on using Grails without a browser. I really enjoyed Jeff’s presentations all week. It is awesome to hear about a technology that I feel passionate about from the source. As Jeff said, Grails is a Web framework but Grails really offers more that just rapid Web development, it is also a platform. He proved that in his presentation.

SpringOne / 2GX 2009 was a great event. My Rod Johnson bobble-head is already on my desk solving enterprise Java problems. The No Fluff Just Stuff crew and SpringSource hosted a great event, at a great venue, in a beautiful city. Looking forward to the 2010 event.

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.

Day One Recap:

Attended a nice reception with beer and wine provided by the event sponsors. There were some nice cheeses and fruits and a whole mess of SpringSource employees wearing their yellow SpringSource shirts (I would like one). I got a great event t-shirt, an event binder and a USB drive with all the presentation material.

The venue, The Roosevelt Hotel New Orleans, LA is incredible. SpringSource/NFJS did a great job on getting an incredible hotel for the event.

Dinner was great. Salad, pasta, Cajun shrimp and jambalaya with a red velvet cupcake for dessert.

During the keynote, speaker Rod Johnson discussed where Spring has been and where Spring is headed. He stressed SpringSource’s goals of developer oriented simplicity and the support of the community. Rod then gave the floor to Spring project leads (Jeremey Grelle, Mark Fisher, Graeme Rocher and Jon Travis?) to demo Flex, Spring BlazeDS and Spring Integration, Grails with Spring Tools Suite and Spring Insight. Spring Insight looks incredible!