NFJS Atlanta 2008 Report

I just realized that I started writing a blog entry about attending the No Fluff Just Stuff conference here in Atlanta (May 16-18) - but never finished it...Oh well - Anyway, it was a great conference and the provided backpack will certainly serve me well :-)

Here are the sessions I attended:

Friday

1. Developing Rich Internet Applications by Richard Monson-Haefel
2. Java Memory, Performance and the Garbage Collector by Ken Sipe
3. Architecture and Scaling by Ken Sipe

Saturday

1. Tactical Continuous Integration with Hudson by Andrew Glover
2. SOA's Challenges by Ken Sipe
3. Dojo: Getting Started by Nathaniel Schutta
4. Configuring Spring with Annotations by Mark Fisher

Sunday

1. Enterprise Integration Patterns with Spring by Mark Fisher Part I
2. Enterprise Integration Patterns with Spring by Mark Fisher Part II
3. Introduction to Tapestry 5 by Howard Lewis Ship
4. Pragmatic Patterns with Tapestry 5 IoC by Howard Lewis Ship

For me the best presentation was the second part of the Enterprise Integration Patterns talk by Mark Fisher. It was basically all about Spring Integration - This project looks way cool! It basically allows to componentize your application, similar to how you work with JMS. But Spring Integration is working on a lower level. It also has features that are typically found in ESBs such as adapters for mail, JMS, FTP etc. Mark Fisher hinted that in the future Spring Integration may also evolve into a workflow solution.

In terms of speakers - Ken Sipe was simply terrific. I did not expect an overly exciting presentation when listening to "Java Memory, Performance and the Garbage Collector" but I was very impressed. Great talk and very informative.

Lastly it is always nice to listen to Howard Lewis Ship - Tapestry looks good and I really need to play with it at some point - if only the day had 48 hours...

Can't wait for the next conference - Jay, job well done.