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by Vinny Carpenter.
Original Post: No Fluff Just Stuff - Day One
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The first day started with the usual welcome/registration session. The turnout was great and Jay told me that there were 160 people here this year, which is a 40% improvement from last year. I hope and wish more people turn up to this next year as No Fluff, Just Stuff symposiums are awesome, and incredibly cost-effective.
The first session I attended was JavaServer Faces (JSF) Fundamental by David Geary. David is the author of Advanced JavaServer Pages, Core JSTL: Mastering the JSP Standard Tag Library and the upcoming Core JavaServer Faces. David is also a member of the JSF and JSTL expert groups. David was a great presenter and I really got a thorough understanding of JSF. I love the way David described JSF – If you put Struts and Swing in a particle accelerator, you get JSF. That’s pretty cool. JSF is basically a web application framework like Struts with components, layout managers and an event model like Swing. JSF is also slated to become the standard ‘view’ technology in J2EE 1.5. There are some great features of JSF like built-in localization, state saving, managed beans, and built in tag libraries. I also attended part II of this JSF session where David talked about advanced JSF topics and Tiles. David did a great job of presenting this topic and you could tell he really knew his stuff. I walked away with a great impression of JSF, but I didn’t have an ‘ah-ha moment’ where I just wanted to run home and start coding my first JSF application. I think JSF is very powerful but I am very happy with Struts and JSTL. If anything, I will migrate to Spring or WebWork from Struts instead of JSF in the near term.
After lunch, I attended the ‘Programming with Hibernate’ session by Bruce Tate. Bruce is the author of Bitter Java and Bitter EJB and the upcoming ‘Better, Faster, Lighter Java’ from O'Reilly. I’ve played around with Hibernate and was looking for a good in-depth introduction to Hibernate and I got that. Bruce is a bright guy and a good speaker and I enjoyed this session, but I had hoped for a lot more hands-on and lot less PowerPoint. I was disappointed that Bruce just stuck with the slides and didn’t just fire up MySQL and a Java IDE locally to walk us through Hibernate.
After Hibernate and dinner was the panel discussion with David Geary, Dave Thomas, Robert Martin, Mike Clark, and Bruce Tate. I went home for dinner and never made it back and missed the panel discussion.
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