Blog

The Spring Experience was an awesome conference. The amount of information that was shoved in my brain over the conference was amazing. My head still hurts.

I thought about blogging in detail about the conference but right from the start there were posts from Matt Raible and Craig Walls covering the openning keynote. From there there was a ton of info blogged by Patrick Peralta, Jim Moore, and some good posts by James Halberg. Obviously, Matt and Craig kept on blogging throughtout the conference.

So I won’t re-post what has already been covered. I will give some random stuff that wasn’t covered.

One thing I was surprised that didn’t get much coverage was the Spring Birds of a Feather sessions. I attended the IOC, AOP & Metadata session with Rod Johnson, Juergen Hoeller, Rob Harrop, and Adrian Colyer. It was great. Both informative and humorus. Somebody asked the panel to give some Spring Anti-Patterns.

Here are a few Spring Anti-Patterns they came up with:
• Cut-n-Paste
• one bean per client
• raw jdbc
• using JSP

I found the “using JSP” Spring anti-pattern to be funny. That was one of Rod Johnson’s quotes. Rod was very funny. This was the first time I had heard him speak. Here are a few other amusing things he had to say. “JSP is really, trully awful.” I guess Rod doesn’t like JSP. And, “Struts MVC… A bad implementation of good patterns.” I guess Rod also isn’t a fan of Struts.

Rod’s session on Testing with Spring was great. One of the best sessions I attended. I hit the Sat morning session. I got more out of that session then probably any other session I attended. I franticly scratched out 5 legal-pad pages of notes.

I also hit a couple of Matt Riable’s sessions. The Laszlo one was good. A quick reccomendation to anyone looking at doing RIAs is to hit the Laszlo demos. Matt has already covered his talk so I won’t add anything here other then the fact that Matt had a hilarious background on one of his laptops that got a lot of laughs everytime it showed up on a screen. It had a picture of Napoleon Dynamite and said, “Heck yes, flippin’ open source is the coolest thing ever…. Gosh!”. Very funny Matt.

Another session I must comment on is the Agile Dev with Spring session by Keith Donald. Awesome. That session alone payed for the conference for me. I’ve been working on implementing a common build system at work and this session was an exact blueprint for me. By the end of this week I should have all our apps refactored using the build process Keith covered. Quick hint to those that didn’t attend. Go look at Ivy!

Dang near every session was good. Craig’s talks I attended were good. Specifically, his Spring Portlets talk. Having just spent 4 months working a web app written with a custom portlet solution Craig’s talk was very relevant. Take a look at Spring Portlets if you are doing any portlet work. I also really enjoyed Justin Gehtland’s AJAX and Spring talk. One thing I wasn’t aware of was the JavaScript debbuging tool, Venkman

The Spring Experience wrapped with an entertaining keynote where Jay Zimmerman asked some random questions like “what would you do if you weren’t programming?”. We all found out that the Spring/Interface 21 guys could easily form a band. My question is what type of music would they play/write? I desperately hope that Jay can get those guys on-stage next year to perform for us. Imagine a band made of the likes: Rod Johnson, Keith Donald, Colin Sampaleanu, and Adrian Colyer…