NFJS Gateway Fall Edition
This past weekend I had the joy to attend NFJS once again (thanks Paul!) and, for the 3rd time in a row, I’ve found it to be one of the best conferences I’ve ever attended… and that’s saying a lot when it has OOPSLA and Agile to showdown against. I think it’s the energy and effort that Jay Zimmerman puts into the whole thing. 
The first thing different about this NFJS is that it was greatly smaller… it felt like there were only a handful of speakers and about half of the attendees from the last two Spring events I attended. However, it made up for quantity with quality… the sessions I attended were so fascinating that I actually skipped offers from my co-workers to go out drinking to tinker with the new things I learned (okay, I did take my laptop down to the hotel bar Saturday night to socialize and explore Spring AOP and JRuby).
The most eye opening concept that I took from the event was that I somehow had missed the boat on Spring and Aspect Oriented Programming… and I am very very angry at myself for letting these two pass under my radar undetected! I mean, I had even heard of Spring some 2 or 3 years ago when reading Fowler’s paper on Dependency Injection, but for some reason I never dabbled with it. FOr those unfamiliar, Spring is a pretty nifty application framework that brings all sorts of interesting things to the table, from Dependency Injection, Bean Management, ORM, nice extensions for plugging into 3 party frameworks like iBatis, AOP, and much much more. I went out on a limb and purchased 2 spring books… and I am halfway through Spring In Action.
Now to AOP… AOP is a solution to a problem that had always nagged me but I never really investigated the solutions I guess. What has always bugged me with things like logging and security logic is that alot of times the logic is built directly into my domain objects… weaving into it and dirtying up the purity of my domain model. Enter Aspect Oriented Programming… with aspects I can address my cross cutting concearns by isolating all of my logging and security code into aspects (or just Plain Old Java Objects using AspectJ and Spring) and writing the proper pointcuts to allow for interception of joinpoints of my application. Whew, that sounds like a lot for the uninitiated, but I’ll definately be posting a lot on AOP in the future, so bear with me.
I also attended some JSF sessions, as well as JRuby and Groovy sessions… which were also very top notch as well. As always, NFJS is a conference that cannot be missed.
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