JavaZone 2004 in a nutshell

The JavaZone conference is sold out this year. 800 tickets got sold out a few days before the conference started. I've been on all three of these conferences and I value the effort that Totto with friends put into this conference.

I started the day with participation of Tom Gilb's presentation about quantifying quality. In general the presentation said: "You can measure everything within software industry so just get started". Very little practical advice other than using google and you will find a method to help you. His books might be more practical and before christmas it's available on his website. Don't think his book is on my highest priority list...

The next session was Kevlin Henney talking about value object pattern (yes - the real value object pattern). Some practical advises, but nothing revolutionary stuff. Henney is a great speaker, and I like his perspectives on software development.

Aslak Hellesøy was next out with a talk about the PicoContainer and NanoContainer. Showed some interesting features adding aspects to the components by using NanoContainer. Unfortantly the sound was fubar so it was a bit difficult to hear Aslak.

John Crupi talked about a project inside Sun called SALSA which is used to govern projects by analysis code and identifying architectural patterns (based on his work on Core J2EE Patterns). Pretty ambitious project and it will be interesting to see the result of this work - especially the visualization part of this. Currently I would focus more on XRadar since it's free, but it definitely could benefit having something like SALSA at the architectural level.

Eric Evans (written the book Domain Driven Design) talked about the modeling and a way to establish a common languange between developers and domain expert. The problem is that Eric is increadable boring to listen to. Had a few good points, but I think the book probably is a better choice than listening to the man.

Took a little break after Evans session and took a beer with Andre and friends. Some of them had bought books from the new series from O'Reilly; Developer's Notebook.

Next out was Rickard Öberg. His talk was about how his AOP sort of gives back the value of domain modeling - or maybe OO analysis, but it's definitely not OO programming. Since last time I heard Rickard on this kind of talk, it seems like they have taking a more extreme route when it comes to utilizing AOP. Prior Rickard have been talking about using AOP to add infrastructural services to objects, but now they use AOP also for core business functionality. It will be interesting to see how SiteVision will do in a market full of big competitors. Recommend to look at the presentation when it's published on the JavaZone site.

Stallman was at JavaZone talking about the Java trap. I thought this was going to be a bit more detailed, but then again I've never heard the man speak before. He clearly have somewhat extreme views upon the software industry. He also mentioned the distingtion between free software and open source. I have actually been ignorant about these conflicts. Anyway - he is a curiousity, but nothing more than that to me....

I participated on Maven2 BOF. I must say that Maven 2 looks VERY promising. Speed, no more Jelly and corrected some of the annoying behaviour. Within a few weeks an alpha release of Maven 2 will arrive. I'm also headed toward a new project so I might try the alpha release. We'll see....

Then it was PartyZone ;-)