[series of entries regarding my trip to JIA]

As a minor developer on a framework, I was quite interested in the content of this session. To be able to see someone go through, code, and explain how frameworks differ would be a very useful thing for not only my development work but for the extension of RIFE.

Earlier on Matt took a poll on what frameworks are being used and what the audience knew. Which is quite a nice idea for presenters. It provides a way for you to gauge your audience and really tailor your presentation. FWIW it seemed everyone and their dog was using Struts.

Matt's presentation style is more of an informal style and it was fresh entertaining and nice. Although I might chalk it up to the early morning coffee. Later on in the presentation he had some code demonstrations that completely failed and merely wasted time, but live code demonstrations are never very easy. Preparation is always a good idea. I've seen other presenters prepare all of their code in steps beforehand, test it thoroughly and still have issues. Scripted and simulated “live” code demonstrations are probably the only safe method.

The presentation had a lot of content, but the slow demonstrations really brought the whole thing to a standstill. The earlier slides about the architecture and design of the framework were quite instructive and even a little frightening in the case of JSF, who's diagram consisted of no less than 20 individual parts. Compare that to Webwork or Spring which had at most 5 or 10.

In conclusion, the information in the first hour or so was interesting, but after that it just dragged and fell apart. Complete with mumbling and complaining about Apple and their Java implementation and fumbling for a power cord. So in short, presenters: Please, have a backup plan. This was quite possibly the longest three hours of the entire conference.

[series of entries regarding my trip to JIA]

JMS was, before this conference, something I had actually never heard of. I had a passing acquaintance with various messaging solutions. More like I'd just heard they existed. I wasn't even planing on attending this session, but I talked with Pearson the night before the session and he convinced me that it was worth my while to attended. He refused to try and sell me on JMS, but I drug out some information about it and was immediately interested.

Before I continue further I did want to mention that Chris double-teamed this presentation with Phil Miller. another Formicary employee and I didn't catch his name. I couldn't find it in my materials nor could I find it on the JIA site. If someone would comment with the name I would be happy to give credit where credit is due. For now I think we'll refer to him as The Enigmatic Dude, or Ted.

Phil Ted started off the presentation and gave an overview of what JMS was, a few ideas of what it might be used for and just really some general information. Once the crowd was well informed about the state of JMS and a snippet of its background. Chris came to the front to take presentation over.

The presentation was oriented as sort of a Consumer Reports for JMS. Various JMS implementations were discussed and reviewed. No real “winner” was announced, but Chris went through the caveats of the various implementations and it was clear that IBM's Websphere MQ was the loser of the reviewed products which included both open-source and proprietary products.

Pearson also provided a clear client/server code sample that ran flawlessly and showed a simple example of how easy it was to use.

I've really got an itch to use JMS now because of the presentation, the problem is I don't know what for! Formicary provides financial solutions for clients and that's about the only use I heard for JMS. I would've really like to have heard something on other uses, or what other companies were doing with the technology. This detracted a bit from the after-feeling of the presentation. I felt like I wanted to use JMS, but had no outlet in my current projects or even in future uses.

I thought this presentation really hit the mark though. I learned about JMS and got the urge to use it. Which is exactly what I expected to get out of the session.

Update: Thanks to Hani Suleiman and Ted Phil Miller himself "The Enigmatic Dude" is no longer a mystery.

[series of entries regarding my trip to JIA]

I really must commend Justin on an excellent presentation. This was one to attend. Maybe next year TSS can record the presentations and place them online to purchase and download. I would purchase and download this presentation even though I watched it live.

Justin really did an excellent job of taking the information and presenting it in a way that everyone near me in the audience could relate to. He used concrete examples. He showed us the browser and what everything he coded did. He had all his code in steps so he wasn't writing totally live, but still allowed for the feeling of the senior programming giving you some hints.

I loved that he really seemed excited about the topic that he was presenting. The energy and enthusiasm he exuded really permeated the room and energized everyone. A three-hour session can get very long if the presenter doesn't have the drive and the ability to keep the room going. Justin's session was the only one that I pulled out my laptop and was writing code in.

The examples that he pulled out were pretty cool as well. The first was a simple City/State lookup by zip code. Really just laying the groundwork. He presented some really interesting ideas. I never thought about sending just plain raw text down the pipe. I had always just assumed that XML was the way to go and then you'd parse/handle the text in your JS code. He even showed an example of sending JS code down the pipe and then eval()'ing it on the client-side. Which initially had me a little squeamish, but he made sure that our security fears were waved. Since most, (if not all), browsers run JS in a sandbox, so it can't hurt your system anyway. But he did then say that you could access all features if you added the JS to a jar and signed the jar. So I'm not sure how safe that is either, otherwise you just get guys signing their jars with self-generated certs to push malicious code. There must be more to it than what was covered.

All-in-all good tips, good code, good information, and good ideas for development. An A+ presentation.

Update: I have been informed that the presentation was not, in fact, presented by Dion Almaer but in fact by Justin Gehtland as Dion had a family event come up. While Justin did use Dion's slides, I wanted to update the post to give credit where credit is due. Thanks to all that commented to correct my mistake.