Our friends in Columbus, OH will host Rod Johnson on Thursday, January 24, from 6-8 pm. Rod is the creator of Spring and a hero to many in the J2EE community for giving them an alternative to EJBs. Rod will discuss new features in Spring 2.5. If you're ANYWHERE near Columbus, I think it's worth stopping by. I'm disappointed that I won't be able to make it! I would definitely venture deep into Buckeye territory for that talk.
Tag Archives: Spring
Our very own Patrick Steele joins Compuware Speakers at Technical Seminar Series
May 17, 2007 at 5:30 pm
SRT Solutions' consultant Patrick Steele joins Brian Cassista and James Brown to speak at Compuware. Compuware is holding an evening networking/technical seminar event on May 17 starting at 5:30 pm. I would love to attend Patrick's talk, "Taking Advantage of Generics in .NET", but I think that I will be headed over to James' talk on Dependency Injection and Spring instead. If neither of those suits your fancy, then the Brian's talk on Project Management and Continuous Integration also sounds great. I just wish I could be in three places at one time!
5:30-6:30 is for networking and hors d'oeuvres, compliments of Compuware. The 3 parallel sessions will start at about 6:30 and go for an hour, with an hour of questions and answers following.
The event is free, and you can sign up (by May 14) by emailing Mary Johnson or calling (313) 227-7729. More information can be found at Compuware.
I think it's going to be a great event. I'm really looking forward to it.
Java Posse Roundup Day 1
The conference officially begins!
The Java Posse Roundup officially started today. About 25-30 people have gathered here in Crested Butte, Colorado. Bruce Eckel and the Java Posse together organized this open spaces event, and I’m really enjoying myself so far. I won’t try to transcribe the sessions here, since the Java Posse will be putting them out in podcast format, assuming the audio is all fine. It’s a great experiment, and I hope that it comes out great.
The day started out at the event location, with Bruce describing the structure of Open Spaces. I’ve blogged about that before, and I’m a total convert. The ability to be able to put up ideas for discussion while at the event, thereby shaping your own experience, has totally ruined me for the eyes-forward (eyelids dropping) conferences.
It always seems a bit strange to newcomers, but those of us who have done this before eagerly rushed over to the board to grab post-it notes and write down ideas for discussions. We egged on the others, and soon the boards for all 4 days were pretty full, with 4 concurrent sessions.
The first session of the day offered many choices, all difficult to choose from. I went to a talk on Dynamic Languages on the JVM. It started out with a discussion about dynamic languages, but quickly headed toward Domain Specific Languages (easy to build with dynamic languages). At one point, we realized we had diverged, but everyone voted to keep going. We had a great 1 hour talk that included mention of Jython, Groovy, Spring, Scala, CLOS, LISP, Ruby, tuples in Java, Domain Driven Design, performance of exceptions, and many many more topics.
And, as always a huge number of book references came out of the discussion. Some were technical, others fun but also offering some perspective to technical things. I’ll list them here, just for fun (and so that I have a place to look when I want to read a new book):
Poignant Guide to Ruby (online book)
Innovation Games (by Luke Hohmann)
The Design of Everyday Things (by Donald A. Norman)
That was it for the first part of the first day. We all headed off to ski, and planned to meet up later at Bruce’s house for a BBQ. While most people downhill ski at these events, I had a hard time ignoring the Nordic trails, so off I went with another attendee and we skied the “Town Loop” (a free, flat loop in town). It was great, just what I needed while I was adjusting to the altitude.
And yes, after skiing, everyone headed over to Bruce’s, where geek talk went on well into the night. I finally left around 9:30 pm or so … it had been a long day.
Friday in Crested Butte
Web Frameworks Jam, continued
This was the last day of the workshop (Friday). We finished up what we could and then recorded a podcast describing what we had done and detailing our experience.
In general, we all found that one of the barriers is installation and setup of the framework (from a development standpoint). All of us battled installation and configuration issues. Spring is simply complicated. Google Web Toolkit is immature in terms of packaging issues. TurboGears is still in alpha and we were definitely chasing a moving target (versions a6, a7, and a8 were released during our one week stay in Crested Butte). We didn’t battle deployment issues (yet), but these hold concern for all of us as well.
As for my personal feeling? I still want to get some more airtime with Google Web Toolkit. I’ve done a little with it at home, but would like to get into it in more depth and look forward to its maturation. And I’m totally smitten with TurboGears. I’m going to use it for some small projects and see what I think. I have some customers that I think might benefit from it, once version 1.0 is released and things are a bit more stable. Spring? Well, I’m still unsure about that. I think that the question in all of our minds is where IS the limit where the lightweight frameworks break down and more complicated frameworks like Spring (or even Struts) become necessary?
The TurboGears team is hot on doing a TurboGears Jam at some point (and several of the other attendees from the jam expressed interest in doing that as well). Of course, logistically, it’s a bit complicated, so I’m not sure if/when it will happen, but it would be great.
As for the hike, on Friday, we hiked the 401. This is an absolutely beautiful trail, also up by Gothic. We were surprised by a huge tent that someone had dragged up the mountain. It was an out and back, and the wildflowers were gorgeous.
Thursday in Crested Butte
Web Frameworks Jam, continued
The TurboGears team finally is all working with the 0.9 release, and we made a lot of progress today. I was able to get the things working that didn’t work yesterday (i.e., the JSON support), and we moved forward, exploring the TurboTunes tutorial and more of the supporting code.
The TurboTunes tutorial is a lot of Javascript, so not as much in terms of kid and pure TurboGears, but it’s a nice looking demo. Here are some of our notes about that tutorial:
TurboTunes Tutorial Feedback
1.tutorial refers to prod.cfg, which doesn’t exist. Assuming should copy sampleprod.cfg to prod.cfg. No big deal, since we were in development mode anyhow (using dev.cfg)
2.In 0.9.a7, sqlite is assumed in dev.cfg … needs to be commented out. This is kind of annoying.
3.Tutorial uses old start command: python turboTunes-start.py, while new version uses start-turboTunes.py
4.Use tg-admin toolbox to start toolbox to access Catwalk. We were able to leave out all mounting of CatWalk, but still need to import model.
The Google Web Toolkit team seems to be doing well with their exploration, and the Spring team is making progress too. During the hiking breaks (and at dinner), we all discuss what people are doing. Ah, it would have been nice to have had more time, so that each group could have looked at another framework as well. Ah, sigh, but realistically, we likely would have just gone into more depth with what we were doing.
This afternoon, we all took a hike to Copper Creek. It’s up by Gothic, which is an old town now used by biologists. The waterfalls were gorgeous and the hike had more elevation (and length) than the previous days.
In the evening, a few of us went to see “An Inconvenient Truth”, which was (IMO) both fascinating and disturbing. In any case, it was great to see someone handing out flyers about how to convert to using wind power in Colorado after the movie.
Ah, tomorrow is our last day here, and I’m hoping that we can look at some more TurboGears in detail.
Web Frameworks Jam: Wednesday
Another Day in Crested Butte
First, work stuff:
We continued our TurboGears quest yesterday (Wednesday). The “out of the box” tutorial experience isn’t really there yet, but we’re still hopeful about the package. Mainly, if I had been working on my own, I’m just not sure I would have been this motivated to continue working with the package, after encountering the roadblocks that we’ve hit. None of them have been insurmountable, but “real” work would have probably drawn me away from it when I did get temporarily stuck and I’m not sure I would have gone back.
The idea of using Best of Breed Components to put together a framework is compelling, and I’m enjoying getting my feet wet with a little Python as well. The “gotchas” seem to be package installs, at this point, further complicated by the fact that we don’t have a live internet connection at the conference location (which really just inspires us to visit the coffee shop next door quite frequently).
We’ve been making notes, mainly about the tutorial and this “out of the box” experience that I just mentioned. Bruce is going to post them, and I’ll add a link here when he’s done that.
The Spring/Hibernate team is plugging along (mainly focusing on Spring at this point, I think). The Google Web Toolkit team is making progress as well. One of the guys has extensive knowledge of the toolkit (has been using it for a while) while the other 2 have great interest. I’ve seen notes from them as well (extensive!), and I’m hoping that they post those as well. I’m looking forward to reading them in more detail, and I’ll post a link if they get blogged. Pretty sure they will …
In any case, we’ll be getting back to TurboGears this morning. Barry finally has everything working on Debian and Bruce has upgraded to 0.9 from the default install of 0.8.9. We’ve learned a lot about the package, and I’m looking forward to getting through the tutorial and onto new things now that (hopefully) the wrinkles have been ironed out.
And now, the recreation report:
We went for another hike (Slate River) yesterday afternoon, hiking to a waterfall. An old mine is nearby. It was a very nice hike, more elevation than yesterday.
And we had lunch at a great little outdoor Tibetan restaurant (Mo Mo’s). I had curried beef with lentils and rice and some chai. It was fantastic and the outdoor garden setting is amazing.
Last night, one of the other attendees and I attended a community forum at the local school. Ambassador Ed Peck, former chief mission to Baghdad, spoke to a standing-room-only crowd about unrest in the Middle East. Pretty timely. He’s an amazing speaker and probably makes a great diplomat. He really stressed the importance of listening to what people (in other countries, especially) are saying and thinking. Imagine that. This isn’t a political blog, so I won’t go into more detail, but suffice it to say that I’m really glad that I attended. I wish that I were going to be here next week, when Sandra Day O’Connor will be speaking. Wow!
Crested Butte is simply a wonderful place. Costly, but lovely. It’s definitely a great place to visit. Some local tidbits:
·I talked to a woman at Camp4Coffee yesterday morning who had ridden her bike there with her 6 month old baby. We were talking about bike trailers. She said that she bought that trailer when some visitors came to town for a week, bought a brand new bike trailer, and sold it for $70 when they left. Nice deal!
·I spoke to a man in the hotel lobby this morning who is a rancher from Texas who has been coming to this town every year for 30 years. He’s here with his grandson this week.