Codemash, Day #1
Posted by Brian Sam-Bodden
The Codemash conference got up to a great start. Rarely do you see a first year conference being this well organized. Overall very little hiccups and a great experience. Along the lines of the NoFluffJustStuff tour and at an unbeatable price of just $99, Codemash delivers!
Today Joseph Nusairat from Integrallis delivered his EJB3 - What's new? session and I did my session on Chris Nelson' promising Trails framework. People seemed to enjoy the presentation and I did a bit of live coding. Not enough to screw up on stage but enough to get the Wow factor going.
As a Rails convert is fun to try to emulate the things that I'm able to accomplish with Rails in frameworks like Trails and Grails. It is interesting to compare and contrast development styles, even on a single individual (me) as I move from Ruby to Java and back to Ruby. Trails definitively has a great future as one of Java's new breed of meta-frameworks. The project website definitively needs some work and some documentation needs to be refined and some created to drive more traffic to the project. Overall, one of the things that's sold me to Trails is its usage of Maven2. Maven2 definitively makes building and managing dependencies in a Java application a breeze.
After my session I got to attend Ted Neward's Java/.Net interop and was promptly used by Ted as a presentation prop. Ted's style of presenting is entertaining yet it drives the point home. Ted's whole point is that 80 some percent of shops are either Java or .Net and the bigger the shop the more likely is that you'll have both and that they will need to share something or talk to each other. Ted outlined the two stacks and the places where they can interoperate, from sharing the DB, to Web Services with REST or SOAP. Also, he touched on some of the areas I've been working/playing with such as integration of Windows native applications with Eclipse RCP. Interesting stuff. The one thing that as an aspiring product development company we were reminded of by Ted's talk, is that Office, like it or not is still the desktop killer app and riding on it's entrenchment on the desktop is an effectively vehicle for your product to reach a large audience.
This past weekend Brian and I were at Codemash and while talking to Neal Ford and Joe O'Brien at one of the sponsors parties, the topic of development tools and tips on the Mac came up. Both Brian and I are relatively new Mac owners. He has the PowerBook, I have the smaller MacBook. Both Neal and Joe have owned Macs for a while, and started rattling off must have utilities. I started frantically scribbling down notes of all the programs they were suggesting and sure enough like any good geek I went back to my hotel room later and googled all of them, downloaded some and started playing with them.