Off to St.Louis
I’m at work finishing up some emails and waiting for the morning huddle to communicate a few things to my team, then it’s off to St.Louis for No Fluff Just Stuff …or as Than keeps calling it, “No Stuff Just Fluff.” 
I’ll be posting live from the conference for anyone interested in the content of the sessions that I’ll be attending. Looking over the schedule, it looks like today’s sessions will be a little “light”, but only because I’m familiar with the technologies being discussed OR I have attended them in the past. For example, I have no need to attend yet another introduction to JSF… nor do I need to find out about GWT, dojo, Adobe Flex (I already know and use these!). And of course… how many groovy sessions have I attended? I have 2 Groovy books and a Grails book on my bookshelf, but I MAY still attend one of the sessions on groovy again.
Anyhow, here’s my projected schedule for today, subject to change:
- Spring+JPA+Hibernate: Standards Meeting Productivity for Java Persistence by Ken Sipe
- Well the standards created EntityBeans…. yea. and the community created Hibernate. Fortunately the standards body learned some lessons and created JPA. JPA requires a vendor implementation and none make a better choice then Hibernate. Combined with Spring this trio is a powerhouse when it comes to developer productivity on applications requiring persistence.
- Spring 2.5 - Spring without XML by Ken Sipe
- Spring 2.5 is brand spanking new, with a number of fantastic features. With growth of large and complex Spring applications which struggle with xml manageability and with the added pressure of Guice and SEAM there is a push for less XML, with solution leaning towards annotations. Spring 2.5 adds to the toolset provided in Spring 2.0 to provide a development environment where XML is greatly reduced… or eliminated if you so choose.
- Grails for (Recovering) Struts Developers: A Groovy Alternative by Scott Davis
- Struts enjoys an unprecedented marketshare in the Java web development space — 60%-70% according to most surveys. As newer, modern web frameworks come to the scene, very little attention is paid to the real costs of migrating an existing Struts application. This talk shows you ways to mix Groovy into a legacy Struts application, dramatically reducing both the lines of code and the complexity. We’ll also introduce you to Grails (a Groovy-based web framework) whose URL-mapping capabilities allow it to replace your Struts application without breaking legacy URLs.
On an unrelated note… I put in a contract on a house last night. If everything goes according to plan, I’ll be moving into my very own house April 2nd (I couldn’t close on April Fools Day )! Suffice to say I’m very excited… although I had a bit of doubt in my mind because I kept thinking “what if I get an amazing job offer? Then I have to sell it!” But decided to settle. Let’s think about it: I have a pretty good job that I love, friends that are great, a decent salary, and a town that is a great place to live. What if I live here for 5 more years? I don’t want to keep living in an apartment based on a mistaken assumption I may some day move.. and besides, I think my next job would have to offer enough that selling my house is the least of my concerns.
Anyhow, come April 2nd I (should) have my own chunk of land that I can call my own. WOO HOO!!
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