NFJS: Third day
August 11th, 2004 by HenLastly, a descrption of the third day at the No Fluff conference.
I began the day with a talk on Tapestry by Erik Hatcher. I actually began the day with WaffleHouse, we found it this time. Not too impressed with it, bit of a dive.
Anyway, Tapestry. We’ve dabbled with this at work (Tapestry-2 and not the latest, which is 3). It’s gotten a bad name at work, mainly because we were not very good at it. Erik’s team hired Howard for 2 days to come teach them, and that would have been a good thing for us.
I used mind-maps for the first time with the Tapestry talk. Very amateurly I’m sure, but I got a lot of information down. One interesting part was OGNL, it looks quite cool. A better BeanUtils.
All in all, I like the look of Tapestry. It’s a mindset change, but changing keeps you agile. I’m not sure I want to push it at work, simpler to just change our one Tapestry thing to Struts (or even just plain-jane JSP which is my preference) and someday goto the GUI-generated JSF.
Erik had a lot more slides than time, so bit of a rush towards the end.
Next up, expert-panel time. One main quote I liked was Stuary Halloway’s term of ‘Console Naked Objects’. sed, awk, bash, grep etc etc. There were various IDE questions, and I always like to answer that with, “my IDE is vim, grep, sed, awk, perl, bash, tail, wc, …”.
Lunch was partaken at this point. Good time to mention two complaints about the hotel; the temperature was far too low (everyone complained) and the food was so-so (I’m picky, but the non-picky eating machines I went with were also unimpressed). A third one is that the wireless signal did not reach my room, but ended at the door. Helped me get sleep though I guess.
After lunch… GIS talk with Scott Davis. Scott was mainly organising things, but took time out to talk ot some of us about the wonderful world of GIS. Nice for me as I’ve got some vague plans for an educational product here and despite exposure to GIS in the past, had some questions. In fact, since getting back I’ve played with JUMP (buggy, but works) to get my first data-set together. Scott’s took a bit too long to cover the basics (GPS, phones etc) and lacked time to get deeper into other areas.
Finally, I went to the second showing of Stuart Halloway’s Metaprogramming talk. Like State Machines, this one was interesting because there was no religion. It wasn’t telling us about tapestry, or groovy, or aspects etc. It was telling us about the JDK. Couple of code snippets here that might work their way into Commons Lang, and Stu also used aspects to highlight his point, without it being a talk to sell aspects to us. Very nice to see them in a supportive role, ie) how we’ll mainly use them.
That’s it. Mike and Eric both seemed to like the conference a lot; much in the way I liked it last year. This year it’s a bit less of a discovery, but still lots of good learning.