At octobre 12, I was one of the employees of Amis that visited JFall. I haven’t been to one of these days before and I really liked the setup of the day. A few general presentations of key-persons from the bigger companies like Oracle and Sun, many parallel sessions to choose from, and enough time inbetween to have coffee and meet some new people.
The first parallel session I visited was “A beginner’s guide to the Spring and Acegi security framework” by Jettro Coenradie of Capgemini.
He gave an good overview of how easy it is to implement a sound login-procedure, and the ability to create different roles for different users in your webapplication, when using the acegi security framework.
All functionalities were demonstrated in a simple demo, which made the presentation alive and clear and nice to listen to.
My second session was “Productivity: do I still have a choice?” by Robert Willems of Brilman of LogicaCMG. He gave an overview of the technology they use when building applications, from using Oracle Forms and Headstart, to Oracle Webforms and now Oracle ADF. He was very enthousiastic about using Forms a few years ago, because of the rapid development and solid forms it creates. But while being a bit reserved, they’re now moving on to Oracle ADF.
His first impression of ADF was good, and the productivity was higher than he’d expected. The integration between the different layers are good and the visual editors, especially the struts-config one, makes it easy to work with and even possible to show to your customer.
My third session was “Spring web flow” by Steven Devijver of Interface21. He gave an introduction of the Spring-implementation of how to create webpages like wizards. Since I’m working with many wizards at my current job, I was very excited to see how easy it can be to create pages like this:
Definitely great stuff. I hope I can start using this soon.
My fourth session was “Top ten sensitivenesses of web applications in J2EE” by Vincent Partington and Eelco Klaver of Xebia. They gave a great overview of how easy it is to hack into a webapplication and the do’s and don’ts for programmers. Like always check the parameters which are inserted from outside the application like cookies and headers; don’t call external interpreters from outside but always make it internal; don’t create sql-statements by concatenating strings but use PreparedStatement when adding parameters to a query; always use a sound security framework; etc.
Great subject and a good presentation, with funny examples of situations that did go wrong.
My last session was “Java development: Fast and simple, right?” by Phil Abernathy, Hilbert Schraal and Erik Buitenhuis of Wisdom. They gave an overview of how their development cycle is, and how they learn from each project. Which tools they used at their latest project and how they evaluated it. Although I was looking forward to this presentation because I really like the idea of sharing experiences like this, the presentation wasn’t very informative. They didn’t explain how they made their choices for tools and what the exact experiences were with the different tools, which I would’ve liked to hear.
At the end of this day, I felt well informed about new and hot things and it made me eager to try out some of the new technologies. I’ll definitely join the next J-Spring in 2006!
The only thing I couldn’t help notice, was that I could only spot maybe 5 or 6 other women at this exciting day. But then again, no queues at the ladies room…
