Dave Landers

It has been a great week - I’ve now got a lot of things to dig into more. There were things I learned directly from the sessions, and other stuff that I picked up outside the sessions themselves.

I need to try out Virtual Box to host Linux on my Mac.

I want to look at World Community Grid and maybe contribute to something useful rather than my iPhoto screensaver.

I wish I could find an excuse to build an iPhone application - there were several good iPhone development sessions this week. Looks like fun.

I have this proxy application that I wrote and have re-written several times to investigate various technologies. I have a MINA version, and so was interested in the MINA talk this week. After that talk, I think I will now have to re-write it again to wire up the MINA filters and handlers using Spring.

I need to play more with JMX to understand how to use it for configuring and monitoring. Maybe I’ll do this as part of that same MINA/Spring update.

Simon Phipps, talking about standards, asserted that standards should be about Substitutability not Interoperability. That is, if we concentrate on building a standard that lets us Substitute one thing for another we will have a more useful standard than when we focus on interop. I’m going to have to think about that one.

And on Monday morning, I plan to clear the whiteboard and grab the slides and my notes from Subbu’s REST talks - because I have a RESTful service API to build.

What a great week. I am educated, informed, inspired, reconnected … and tired.

Technorati Tags: colorado software summit, conference, softwaresummit

More good sessions today, but the best was from my friend Subbu, who talked on Pragmatic REST.

Subbu gave a really great overview of REST - what is it, and how do you do it. This is especially going to help me as I am just starting a project to build a RESTful API for WebLogic Portal, so I have this timely reminder to serve as a guide - thanks, Subbu!

If any of you are interested in REST, I suggest you check out his blog and his slides from this conference (they should end up on the conference web site eventually, or Subbu said he would post them to his blog soon).

Technorati Tags: colorado software summit, conference, REST, softwaresummit

I enjoyed day one of Software Summit, now we’re on to day two.

Yesterday, I attended several sessions. Highlights for me included Bryan Basham’s Becoming a JavaScript Wizard and Simon Roberts’ What OO Doesn’t Address

I don’t actually do much JavaScript - I spend most of my time doing server-side stuff. But last year I made a conscious decision to shed my decade-old prejudice against JavaScript, and found it to be a language with some interesting concepts and features. It happens to have most exposure in a browser, but the Java Scripting API (and the inclusion of Rhino in JavaSE) now makes it a compelling option on the server. Bryan spent some time talking about the language basics before diving into browser-based stuff (he mostly talked about prototype for this).

Simon’s talk surprised me - I almost skipped it. I was going by the title, which doesn’t do anything to represent Simon’s entertaining and energetic presentation style. The main take-away I got from this is that we “Software Architects” are (should be) mainly around to inject reality into the design. That is, a pure OO domain model won’t necessarily consider things like security, performance, scalability, networks, usability, etc. Satisfying these concerns requires insight, experience, and a high-level understanding of lots of conflicting issues. And it often means backing down from an ivory-tower design purism.

We had some interesting weather come through in the afternoon - lightning, thunder, and rain. Then it turned to a rain snow mix - some really huge flakes mixed in with the rain. Very wet. The temperature was I thin just a few degrees too warm or we’d had a great snow.

The sun is coming out this morning, and I’ve got some good looking talks on my schedule. Should be another good day.

Technorati Tags: colorado software summit, conference, softwaresummit

It’s now Monday morning at Keystone, and I’m looking forward to a good week of learning and catching up with old and new friends.

For those of you who are unable to be here this year, here is the annual obligatory picture of “the goods”.

The coolest thing this year is how they are distributing the conference session slides. In the past it was in a big 3″ 3-ring binder. Last year, we got a CDROM. This year, everyone got the slides on a 1.8Gb USB thumb drive. Nice!

Technorati Tags: colorado software summit, conference, softwaresummit

The 3-each-session scheduling at Colorado Software Summit pays off again.

I looked at the schedule, and picked (based on content) the sessions I pretty much want to see this year. I ended up with 18. There are only 20 time blocks.

But because of the way they do the scheduling, I was able to fit in all 18 of my preferences into the 20 time slots. Just try that at other conferences!

Here’s how I do my schedule, in case you care:

Since the iCalendar format schedule is now also available, I subscribed to that (I use Apple’s iCal). Then, I created a new “myCSS” calendar and copied all the sessions I might go to (that’s 18 sessions at 3 times each). Some of the time blocks only had one session I wanted, so I deleted all the other instances of that session. That opened up yet more blocks. Lather, rinse, repeat. In the end I only had about 3 or 4 time slots to manually resolve. It probably took me less than 10 minutes total (not counting reading all the session abstracts to choose the 18 in the first place).

Thanks, Wayne & Peggy!

Technorati Tags: colorado software summit, conference, java, softwaresummit