The city here is absolutely beautiful. The fountains are the most spectacular I’ve ever seen. At the top of the royal palace steps is a huge waterfall with massive fountains at the base of it. Little fountains (maybe 10 feet high) line the palace stairs all the way down. At the bottom is a computerized fountains…the volume of the water is absolutely massive. They must loose hundreds of gallons of water every night. They only come on evenings and night, at least on week days. I go for my long run today and am looking forward to it. 6 miles today…very slow pace.
The Server Side Symposium
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I did my second talk today. Three technologies to watch. Continuation servers, metaprogramming, and Erlang. I thought I was off, but marks were excellent. James Strachen (sp?) talked before me. He’s an excellent speaker, but went long. Then the AV guys plugged in the monitor and remote while the computer was hibernating and I had to reboot. You have to understand that this talk has A LOT of setup because I do four live setups in 3 languages. I try to do most of the stuff from scratch in the talk, but there’s still about 15 minutes of setup. I had to set up on the fly, and it showed. I eventually got rolling though.
ActiveMQ and Ruby
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ActiveMQ has a Ruby client. It’s a very promising Java/Ruby integration strategy. You’d use a POJO from a ROJO (I’m so glad we don’t have that acronym in Ruby!) I’m going to have to add it to my Ruby talk. Sometime soon, I’d be willing to bet that we’re going to see a Centaur with a Rails head on a Java body. I would think JRuby would work on the server side as well, but haven’t tried it out yet. The train rolls on…
JCP expert panel
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The JCP did an expert panel and talked about letting technologies succeed in the wild before standardizing them. In the mean time, there were panelists from JBoss doing Seam and Java business process integration. Both are either very new or are new approaches to established problems. It’s much too early to standardize this stuff in my opinion. Ready, Fire, Aim…
Receptiveness
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This was a VERY STRONG Java audience. People were in general very receptive to the message of learning about technologies beyond Java, but not many at this conference were doing many things with Ruby yet. All in all, I was humbled and grateful for my reception here. Europeans (mostly the UK and Scandinavia) went out of their way to make me feel welcome. It was strange to be here while RailsConf was going on at the same time. (When the conference booked, I didn’t feel like I had enough to say to present there. I’ll definitely submit a few papers next year.)
That’s all I’ve got for today. I’ll try to post one more blog entry while I’m here or in transit.