S.Ohio/N. Kentucky NFJS
August 7th, 2004 by HenFirst day of the annual NFJS over.
It’s moved from just north-east of Cincinatti, to south of it in Hebron, KY. This may sound like the middle of nowhere, and truthfully it is, but it’s also where the ‘Cincinatti’ aka ‘North Kentucky’ airport is located, so a pretty good place for the organisers I suspect. Also makes it nicer for we few KY-located attendees.
I’ve come up here with Eric and Mike from Genscape, their first NFJS, and it’s good to see that they’re having the same reaction to NFJS I had last year. It really is a superb eye-opener, especially when you spend the first day bouncing back and forth between Stu Halloway and Dave Thomas. I’ve got to admit that for the return attendee it is a bit of an anti-climax, entirely due to how good it is the first time. You can never repeat that first time 
Scott Davis got the day into order with a quick intro. No Jay Zimmerman, the man with the plan behind NFJS, this time as he’s taking a well earned break. Scott’s also going to be giving a talk on GIS on the last day.
I started the morning with Stu Halloway’s Reflection talk. This is a lead into his Metaprogramming talk (given twice, I’m opting for the Sunday one) and covers the world of reflection pretty well. I’ve messed enough with this area (BeanUtils usage/coding) that a lot of it was stuff I knew, so I really should have chosen a different talk. Still, hearing Stu’s talks are always an object lesson in how to hold an audience’s interest and I happily listened along. I like NFJS because I can also sit and just have ideas, or remind myself of things I need to get involved in (Commons Reflection? Code generation using old ideas of mine and velocity etc).
Next up was Dave Thomas’ State Machines talk. I’ve blundered on code that creates state machines without really having an awareness of what the deal is. Dave quickly covered the subject, showed bad ways to do them (at least the way I use is the best of the bad ways) and then showed how the pro’s do it. Wonderful talk with very low attendance (10 of us?). No buzzwords, but probably one of the most educational of all the talks on offer.
Lastly, Intro to Spring by Bruce Tate. A hard job for Bruce, following Dave and Stu and something that he (and most people I suspect) is not entirely able to live up to. Bruce covered Spring from a high level, dipping occasionally into the murk of implementation and gave us all a general idea of what it is (for me, I’ve defined it as “Aspects w/ Avalon + Services). I tend to get the feeling that Bruce is a good scout to keep an eye on. The stuff he gets fervent about is worth keeping your eye on.
Next…dinner and the expert panel.