JFall 2006

On October 11, 2006, the Netherlands Java Users Group, NL-JUG, organised their biannual Java Conference. Since the second conference of this year was held in October, it was called JFall. In this weblog I will describe my experience of that day.

Since AMIS had a stand at the conference, I skipped most of the general sessions so I could chat a little with my colleagues at the stand. The first actual presentation I attended was done by Xebia’s Vincent Partington. Having discussed the Top Ten Enterprise Java Performance Problems And Their Solutions with his colleagues, he gave a nice wrap up of the dos and don’ts of J2EE performance. The number one spot was taken by the Database. Fortunately, his conclusion wasn’t to stay away from the database, but to get it to know better which I wholeheartedly agree to.

Next for me was a presentation about a Swing layout manager I never had heard of: Synth. Arjan Schaaf proved to be an expert on this layout manager and gave an in depth look at Synth. Possibly the only shortcoming of the presentation was my need for more examples. Arjan told us all about the possibilities of Synth, but having an actual visual helps get the picture (pun intended).

After lunch I attended another Xebia presentation. Michael Franken discussed the definition of Agile with us and showed us that Agile is a very productive way of development. No more cascading development for me, Agile is the way to go!

Next another Swing session: Karsten Lentzsch showed us how to do MVC in Swing. Well, not actually MVC but rather MVP, Model View Presenter. Karsten brought us up to speed on keeping View logic and Program Flow logic separated in Swing.

Finally I planned on attending the JSF Made Easy With Facelets presentation by Rene Boere and Jan Kuiper but unfortunately the room was completely full and very warm. I decided to skip this one. Pity.

Besides attending all these sessions I happened to run into several people I knew and hadn;t seen in a while. And a few weeks before the JFall conference I attended an EJB 3.0 Workshop at InfoSupport in the Netherlands. Here’s the prove that I attended the Workshop: