Raible Designs

Saturday Afternoon

I have a whole bunch of notes from watching all the speakers this morning, but there's no point in me regurgitating all the stuff that Jason has written. Unfortunately, I don't have unlimited bandwidth on my phone - so this post (and checking my e-mail) will probably cost me $20. I finished my talk about a half hour ago and damn it feels good. All my worrying from the last week is over. I'm done. Phewfta. ;-)

Below are my thoughts on the speakers so far. I'll update this for Vic (speaking now) and Jason as they speak.

Clinton Begin: - iBATIS. He actually works for ThoughtWorks in Calgary, which I didn't know. I've met Ted, Jason, Rod and Tom this morning. All very cool guys. It's funny to see Jason and Ted sitting at the same table - I thought they were mortal enemies. ;-) There's not a whole lotta folks here - approx. 30 right now. That's good since this room doesn't look like it'd hold much more than that.

Clinton wrote SQL Maps because Data Models are rarely perfect. He's actually using Hibernate right now - b/c his team has control of the database.

Clinton is toying with the idea of using something like XDoclet to generate SQL Maps.

Caching - on a single box OSCache is the slowest caching mechanism. It'll actually cost you more than it helps you. For distributed systems, however, it's the only choice. He doesn't know why it's so slow - it just is.

Rod Johnson - J2EE without EJB. Rod actually flew in from London just for this event. It's his first time to NY, as it seems to be for many speakers here. I took a lot of notes from Rod's presentation. He was mainly advocating that you can write fast, scalable J2EE apps without EJB. He didn't cover Spring much, but did point out that Spring offers most of EJBs built-in services. After watching Rod's presentation, the only reason I can see for EJBs is for distributed systems. However, these days it seems that more folks are using web services instead of RMI.

Ted Husted - Commons Chain. Ted's presentation was quick (1/2 hour) and I missed most of it, so I can't really comment on it.

Vic Cekvenich - basicPortal RIA. Vic's presentation was titled "basicPortal RIA" but that's not what he covered. He ended up talking about requirements, project management and good programmers. Damn, I've heard this talk before - nothing new here. It's good stuff though, and an enjoyable talk.

Vic's predication: in the next 12 months, declarative languages (like Flex, XAML and XUL) will be next generation of MVC frameworks. He thinks it's very liberating to not write HTML anymore. As I said yesterday - you're still writing XML, so as a developer I don't think you have to learn that much. He just showed us some Flex code - it's pretty simple stuff. 10 lines of code to declare a data grid (like the display tag) and load its data from a DAO.

I asked Vic if calling a DAO from the View (Flex page) is a bad thing. Isn't that like using scriptlets in your JSPs to call your DAO? I mentioned that the design pattern bigots would bash all over this. He said - "screw the design patterns, this works." I suspect the next guy (Christophe Coenraets on Flex) might promote cleaner design patterns. This should be fun - a bunch of open source fans about to be presented with a closed-source, expensive product.