Raible Designs

[TSSS] BOFs, Booze and Benitar

On Friday night, I attended all three of the 7:30 Birds of a Feather sessions. The first one I went to was Spring, where Rod talked about what's coming in Spring 1.3. Rod did a 25 minute presentation on the new stuff and then opened the floor up to Q and A. The session was well attended and I skipped over to the Tapestry/Trails BOF when the Q and A started.

I was surprised to find that very few folks where at the other BOFs. While the Spring BOF had 50+ attendees, the Tapestry one only had around 15-20 and JSF had around 8. I quickly left the Tapestry/Trails BOF when Chris started walking through his Trails Video. He was doing a live version of it, and since I'd already seen it, I figured I wasn't going to learn anything new. I've also been following Trails since it first started, and was more interested in talking about Tapestry.

I walked into the JSF BOF as Ed was talking about JSF 1.2 and what's next for JSF 2.0. This was good timing as I had a few suggestions for 2.0: HTML Templates like Tapestry, bookmarkability (don't make everything a post) and thinking about tools like Tiles and SiteMesh. While neither tools is part of the spec, I think they should be remembered in case there's an opportunity to make integrating with them easier. Ed did mention that JSF 1.2 has pretty much solved the content-interweaving problem, so putting HTML in your JSF JSPs should be better supported.

The very interesting part of this BOF is that Ajax capabilities are very much on the radar for JSF 2.0. They plan on providing native XMLHttpRequest capabilities. My suggestion for this was to provide the setup and registration of requestable class methods as part of the framework, and leave writing the JavaScript to the developer. This was a good BOF and I'm pumped to see that JSF is embracing the next-gen way of developing webapps. Let's just hope JSF 2.0 is released this year and not 2 years from now.

After the BOFs, I joined Matt and Jim to wait for one of Matt's buddies (Scott) to come into town. After he arrived, we headed over to the OpenSymphony open bar at the Bellagio. There, I got to meet Patrick Lightbody and enjoyed several beers and good conversation with the likes of Seth Ladd, Thomas Risberg, Mike, Dion and Christian.

After the open bar closed, Jim, Matt, Scott and I headed just off the strip to the Gold Coast Casino. Matt and Scott wanted to find some poker (tables had a 2-hour wait on the strip) and Jim and I wanted cheap Blackjack. We were pleased to find $5 tables and stayed there for several hours. I don't know what time we headed back to our hotel, but I'm guessing 1 or 2. The rest of the night was pretty funny. Jim and I gambled until 7 in the morning at several blackjack tables. Our hotel had this "celebrity theme", so we had dealers like Pat Benitar and Stevie Wonder throughout the morning. Both of these dealers were great and I got "hooked up" on several occasions. There were at least 10 times where I asked for a card and they didn't give it to me (after which I won b/c they busted). We ended the night at 7:00-7:30 with 5 crisp $100 bills in my pocket. Total cost of the whole trip: $100. Not bad eh?

Getting home yesterday was quite an adventure. After going to bed at 7:30, I woke up by some miracle at 11:00. I don't know if I had a wake up call or what, but my buzz was still in full swing. I caught a cab and headed to the airport. I paid the cabbie with a $25 chip, which he didn't like, but after I told him to keep the change (it was a $6 cab ride) - he happily obliged. At the airport, I took a nap while waiting for my flight to board and almost missed it. They called my name over the intercom b/c I was the only passenger left to board. Luckily, I was awake and made the flight. Upon arriving in Denver, I walked to my car and promptly locked my keys in the trunk. The airport officials got them out for free and I made it home to a very happy family around 6:00 p.m. It's good to be home.