Whew… What a weekend. NFJS is over and my brain hurts… Talk about information overload. After three days of non-stop Java and a bit of Ruby there is smoke coming out of my ears from running my brain so hard. It will definitely take me a week or so just to think back through everything I learned. Let me give a quick recap of the sessions I hit the last two days (Friday was all JSF and all good).
Saturday:
Killer Web UIs by David Geary- Good presentation. Geary covered some best practices for using Tiles and Sitemesh and covered how to use them together. He was pretty clear that he liked Tiles better then Sitemesh but that it was mostly because Tiles works better with JSF.
Ajaxian JavaScript Frameworks by Ben Galbraith- This was good but I would have got more out of it had I went to Ben’s Intro to Ajax, also. He did a good job showing how Google Maps works. Pretty cool stuff.
Ruby on Rails by Dave Thomas- Holy Crap! My three year old son could roll out a RoR app… I’d say that Dave made it look REAL easy to crank out a RoR app but I don’t think it was anything Dave was doing. Ruby on Rails is just amazingly easy to work with. With just a few dozen lines of code Dave created a working bookstore application. Amazing.
Java Collections Power Techniques by Glen Vanderburg- Good, informative presentation. Summing it up, we all need to spend a few minutes reading the JavaDoc for Collection.
Sunday:
Advanced Enterprise Debugging Techniques by Neal Ford- Awesome. I think this was my favorite session of the weekend. Neal covered some real cool stuff. He’s not a fan of println’s but he likes Selenium.
Intro to Hibernate by Bruce Tate- Very good description of Hibernate and what it’s good at. Bruce is a great presenter and I wasn’t gonna not hear him talk this weekend. He could make anything interesting.
Building Enterprise Applications with Spring, Part 1 and Part 2 by Keith Donald- Keith was great. He spent half of both sessions showing how nice it is to work with Spring. He practically made RoR look hard. Ok, it wasn’t as easy as working with RoR, but I really see why people are moving J2EE projects to Spring. Keith had some bad luck with his laptop and his code examples but he did a good job and I will definitely look for him next year at NFJS.