Session One was a loser. Automation of MDA to J2EE (TS-7466). While a potentially interesting topic it wasn’t apparent from the description that this was basically a vendor demonstration. Those things should somehow be noted better. Every five years I sit through (as a skeptic) and listen to the model driven generated application idea. I’m always disappointed, and was again. Most of the time was spent on how the tool worked under the covers without really giving us a picture of what it did. We basically never got a real idea of what the tool did so the presenter told the crowd to just visit the booth to see that part. Worst session of JavaOne for me.
Next I went to an awesome session on Mylyn (TS-6421). I think Mylyn used to be Mylar which we trialed a couple years ago. It’s come a long way and is a great platform to track what you are doing in the IDE and just show you what you need to see to complete your task. It has awesome integration with tracking systems (JIRA, etc) and even includes the ability to organize emails and more into a work “episode”. Since so many of us context switch a lot this is a huge help. We’ll be incorporating this tool into our development efforts very soon.
I was signed up for an OSGi session, but was lured to a presentation on how to create your own DSL (Domain Specific Language). It was very well done, by two guys from Verisign. I think Sun should be scheduling more talks from accomplished IT guys at different companies like this (good presentation skills). Did I mention I’m available for next year? 🙂 They covered not only how you can invoke scripting languages from Java but also how to create your own. They made a clear case for where this was useful and walked through the basics to do it with a few examples. I didn’t follow it all but I got the basics. Very useful – made me think about a card game I’ve been wanting to create.
Next I visited a session on how to choose a web framework (TS-6457). Since I am involved in a lot of technology evaluations this was actually a good session. He started out with the typical criteria (some I had not thought of) and added in some of his unique ideas. I really found this useful. Then he reviewed several of the frameworks and gave his thoughts. I think he messed up Struts 2 – he treated it like a new project. AFAIK it is just a new version of WebWorks with a new name, I could be wrong. Overall a good session but it would have been better if he went deeper on three different frameworks instead of several similar ones.
Met with JBoss on a variety of topics and then headed out to dinner with my team. Good day, I’m ready to go home, Java has worn me out and I can’t drink anymore of it! Missed Bob’s Guice BOF 🙁