I went to The Spring Experience and it was great! As I said before, I didn’t plan on blogging TSE and I didn’t. What I’m gonna do now is get down all the sessions I attended and maybe a thought or two on each one. As I go through my notes over the week I may have more to say.
Friday 12/8/06
- An Introduction to Domain-Driven Design – Eric Evans
- What a let down. I was really excited to attend this and was not impressed at all. It was almost as if Eric Evans didn’t even prepare for the presentation.
- Rapid Web Application Development Essentials – Rob Harrop
- Great presentation. Entertaining and Packed with useful info.
- Practical Techniques to Improve the User Experience with Ajax & DWR – Bram Smeets
- Bram did a good job introducing DWR. If I wasn’t using Flex right now, I’d be looking at DWR.
- Spring (Acegi) Security with Ben Alex Birds of a Feather Sessions
Saturday 12/9/06
- Effective Java Persistence Using Spring and iBatis – Mark Richards
- One of my favorite sessions. And I won a copy of iBatis in Action.
- System Integration Testing with Spring – Rod Johnson
- No surprise, Rod knows how to test with Spring. He also does a great job explaining the concepts in this session.
- The Holy Grails of Web Frameworks – Guillaume LaForge
- Another favorite session for me. Guillaume did a great job showing how easy Grails is to work with. His examples were easy to follow and duplicate. I MUST find a way to use Grails at work for something.
- The Design, Architecture, and Implementation of InfoQ.com – Alexandru Popescu, Floyd Marinescu
- Very interesting. I got to admit that after sitting in the Grails talk I was hacking away at my first Grails app while sitting in this session. The good news is that the InfoQ guys recorded the session. I’ll be watching InfoQ for the video to show up and then catch the session a second time.
- Rapid Fire Session – What’s new in AppFuse 2.0 – Matt Raible
- It’s hard to say anything bad about a session when the speaker is serving free beer. Matt didn’t disappoint. He skipped his slides altogether and went straight to examples, stopping along the way to answer the crowd’s questions. Hopefully, I can get my head around Maven by the time AppFuse 2.0 is released.
Sunday 12/10/06
- JMS in a Spring 2 Environment – Juergen Hoeller
- The Role of Spring in an ESB – Mark Fisher, Ross Mason
- Another great session. Mark’s examples went perfectly with the material. Note to self: email Mark and ask for the examples.
- The New “Fat” Web Client Architecture: Benefits & Tradeoffs – Colin Sampaleanu
- Considering my work with ThinWire and now with Flex I was very interested in this presentation. The title should have been everying you wanted to know about GWT. Colin had horrible luck with his examples and IDE, but I did learn a ton about GWT. If I was Colin I would have had those horrible Interface 21 guys in the front row removed from the session. Just kidding, but Rob and Adrian gave him a hard time. The best part was when they both pretended to be sleeping.
If you want to know what I passed on to attend the above mentioned sessions check out the full TSE schedule. Also, let me add that Matt Raible did a great job covering the sessions he attended. Go read his blog if you want a solid recap.