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by Chris Winters.
Original Post: NFJS day 3
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Finally we come to the last day of the No Fluff Just Stuff conference. (See day 1 and
day 2.)
The conference seemed to be running very smoothly, only marred by the
fact that we had to pay for wireless or even wired net access. This is
incredibly short-sighted: net access has no marginal costs (one person
can be served as easily as a hundred), the setup cost is fairly
minimal, and the monthly cost is fairly low -- they probably spend a lot more washing the daily towels than they would on monthly access. Dumb dumb dumb.
So the first session of the day was about Java Server Faces with
Bill Dudney. Bill was a very good speaker: calm, personable and he was
clearly very knowledgable about JSF and related it to existing systems
(like Struts) while also discussing some of the motivations behind the
framework decisisons. JSF is fairly interesting, particularly for the
apparent ease of installing different types of components (like a
calendar component, or different type of layout). Not enough people
pay attention to this kind of thing. But the spec is a ways off, with
the tools and frameworks behind that (frameworks closer, but
still). I'll try and keep a 5,000-foot view of what's going on but
that's about it.
The only problem with the presentation was the people asking questions. For some reason there's always a group of people who can't deal with temporary uncertainty. (This problem popped up later in the XML Schema presentation.) They have to understand every part of what
they're seeing and have no problem holding up the other 40 people in
the room to do so. It's difficult to cut these folks off without being
an asshole but you gotta do it, particularly if you're going to deal with the question later on in the presentation.
Next was Enterprise Messaging with Paul Perrone. There wasn't much
new for me, or at least not much that I hadn't read in the ORA JMS
book a while back. I would have liked to see more examples here as
Paul kept it fairly high level -- that is, an example used and built
upon throughout the presentation.
Next was lunch and another brief panel discussion. The panel this
time was dominated by the threat posed by offshore workers and what we
as developers can do to protect ourselves. Good discussion here,
particular from Ron Bodkin who really impressed me with his ability to
speak in lucid paragraphs. (I didn't go to any presentations by him so
this was my only exposure.)
As a group we decided to skip the last session because we wanted to
get home before midnight, so the last session of the day was Stuart
Halloway on XML Schema. It was fairly straightforward and he
used excellent examples to illustrate his points. Again, he dropped
into IDEA to illustrate by example how namespace URIs worked as well
as creating a schema and validating a document against the schema. I
know that it's tough to type live in front of lots of people, but I wish everyone did this.
Going into the session I knew a potential side effect would be that
I'd want to replace all our DTDs with schemas (not many, but still).
Unfortunately I was right, and now I want to change an application to
make this happen. It will make my life easier in the long run, but
it's still something else to do.
All in all everyone seemed to learn a ton at the conference, and
hopefully we'll be able to use that in the very near future.
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