Monday July 04, 2005 JavaOne Afterburner
Back home in Holland again, and still digesting the information gathered last week. With all of the J1 memes tumbling and bouncing around in my head, I figured that it would be good to put some structure to it. Let's start by organizing it a bit by personal preference. Here are the sessions that I liked most:
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TS-7121 -- A Hitchhiker's Guide to SOA: Orchestrating Loosely-Coupled J2EE™ Services With BPMN and BPEL
The funniest and most dramatic session. (In a possitive sense.) Could very well be the tiny start of a big broadway show. Charles Beckham and his co-presenters mapped some of the SOA problems to an exploration of hyperspace, came up with Hitchhiker definitions of things like BPMN and BPEL, managed to put everything in perspective, demonstrated how tools bind everything together, and on their way found the Ultimate answer to Life, the Universe and Everything. (Which is 42, by the way.)
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TS-7397 -- Shale: The Next Struts?
Craig McClanahan and David Geary gave an irresistible overview of the project that they consider to be the next big thing in Web UI development. Very compelling. The cool thing about Shale is that - and this must be the very time in history - they did start of with the work already done in JSF, and simply considered Shale to be an extension of the JSF platform. And a very good extension, I'd say since it starting to incorporate a lot of stuff that a lot of us have been waiting for quite a while. (Like the having dialogs as first class citizens, mechanisms preventing requests to be processed twice, tiles, etc.)
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Thursday Morning Keynote
James' session seems to be the keynote session that everybody is waiting for, the entire week. It had a lot of interesting things in it this year, and in fact introduced me to some of the work Sun engineering did that I wasn't even aware of. And it looked awesome. But I find the discussion afterwards even more inspiring. Even though it did not really reveal a very clear topic, it was very interesting to see all of these grand scientists struggling with what the future might entail. Right after this session, it felt like all of the important things had just been said, and that the remainder of the day could only be extremely boring.