CSS Day 1

We made it to the conference on Sunday afternoon, checked in, and still had time to watch most of the second half of the Packers win vs the Colts. There was a nice reception Sunday night with a buffet and lots of food. My first time eating buffalo...tastes like beef.

Today's conference opening keynote focused on the enterprise of the future and characteristics of those which are most likely to succeed, especially in the current economic climate and specifically those in the finance world. A technology outlook was presented which depicted the future of the industry, reinventing the way computer systems are built, utilizing multi-processor computing grids, "cloud" computing and the use of social and data networking for the enterprise (facebook, linkedin, etc.). The ability to do business anywhere, anytime, and in real-time are and will continue to be prevalent. We are in an ever-increasing service-oriented economy, and enterprises are innovating their business models with a collaborative approach rather than outsourcing. As this continues, SOA governance is important.

The first presentation today, I saw a presentation about Google App Engine which allows for developing applications and deploying and running those apps on Google's infrastructure. It seems to be mostly geared towards start-ups and providing ajax based services. It currently supports python based apps but more languages will be supported soon (including java?). Next was a presentation titled "Laptop Linux" which gave tips, tricks and lessons learned while migrating completely from a Windows world to a Linux/Open Source environment. After that I saw a presentation titled "Pimp my webapp (with Google Web Toolkit)". GWT is definately a very cool, easy to use, cross-browser compatible technology that GL should consider, especially with the emergence of web 2.0/RIA. It is far easier than the way we have been implementing ajax-based webapps. Multi-browser support is built-in, and client side code is written in java, while GWT "compiles" it to javascript. No need to be a javascript wizard, GWT does it all for you. It also scales better than other apps because only data is transferred over the wire. It is anticipated that by 2010, 60% of all new webapps will be RIA. Finally was a presentation about what's coming up in Spring 3.0. The focus is support for REST-ful service implementations, less xml/more annotations, a robust expression language, and the potential merge of Spring MVC and webflow. It is however behind schedule, and being developed "behind closed doors" which has cause for concern among the open source community, especially with recent announcements from springsource regarding the availability of maintenance releases to only those customers paying for support. JEE5 has made great strides in closing the gaps that initially made J2ee cumbersome and led to the emergence of light-weight frameworks such as spring. In some ways, JEE5 could now be considered more light-weight than spring (jee.jar is smaller than spring.jar). As such, the value-add of spring has diminished, mostly left to a robust DI implementation. Google Guice is something to look into, focused on a simple easy to use DI framework, while leaving the JEE container for the web framework (JSF), remoting (JAX-WS), persistence layer (JPA) and transactions (EJB).

Tomorrows agenda includes JSF, more REST, maven, domain-driven design and agile development. Until then...