J-Fall 2007 and session titles.

On October 11th, J-Fall took place. Twice a year the dutch Java User Group (NL-JUG) organizes a conference. Sessions often have ‘real life’, or ‘in practice’ in the title. Often this is just a trick to attract people. The presentation that Martijn van Berkum (GX) gave about the Java content repository 2.0 was a pleasant exception. His session was titled: “Java Content Repository (JCR) 2.0 (aka JSR-283)”. He explained the specification very clearly, both the 1.0 and 2.0 version. Because GX uses it in their product WebManager he could share some real life experience with the audience. This, unfortunately, was not the case with “Real world usage of JBI”. Jos Dirksen knows a lot about JBI and Enterprise Integeration Patterns, but his presentation only had some code samples. That is not what I expect when the title says ‘Real world usage”. Project experience, examples of clients who used JBI and a specific product, is what I expect and want from a session like that.
The discussion “the Enterprise Architect confronts the Application Architect” also did not offer what the title promised, but this time I did not care. It was very nice to have a different format (discussion in this case). The subjects they talked about were very interesting and real. A session that delivered exactly what the title promised, was Duncan Mill’s presentation. The session was titled: “Controllers – The Next Generation”. He gave an overview (and did that very well, because he is an excellent speaker) of the different webframeworks and how these frameworks deal with the Controller in the Model-View-Controller pattern. If you are curious about PageFlow in ADF and how this compares with Spring Webflow and Seam, you can download the presentation in November from the NL-JUG site. Don’t forget to try the PageFlow stuff with JDeveloper 11 (technical preview). That is what I am going to do, too!