Wilfred Thinking Aloud

@JFall

Yesterday, we celebrated Java at the JFall conference in Holland, and I had a great time.

Reunion@JFall

First of all, it was like a big Java geek reunion; I ran into several people from my former lifes at other companies. None of them did Java back then, but they are now all working in the Java space.

Jackpot@JFall

I myself presented Jackpot to quite a big crowd. (It's almost like they hadn't read the warnings and disclaimers in the summary of my presentation. ;-) Jackpot is both a framework for source code transformations and a couple of plugins in NetBeans. It comes with an extremely simple and convenient rules language allowing you to almost script transformations, but behind the scenes it relies heavily on more complex things like the different models that javac builds before turning Java source code into bytecode. So it was quite a relief that - after the talk - I still had everybody in the room.

In fact, they even noticed an erroneous Jackpot rule in one of my slides. ~:^[ And they came up with some interesting suggestions, like using Jackpot to turn untyped collections into typed collections. :^D (Java 1.5)

NetBeans@JFall

After my session, I got to talk to Geertjan Wielenga, part of the NetBeans team and the world's most noticable NetBeans blogger. He showed me how NetBeans 5 allows you to create a new NetBeans module in a blink of an eye, and blew me away completely. I'm telling you, it just can't get any easier than this! This way, even my 5-year old is able to create NetBeans modules. (Is the NetBeans team promoting child labour or something?)