NFJS Dallas - Day 2 of 3

The first couple of sessions I went to weren't really weren't all that exciting for me.

Viva La Javolution by Brian Sletton seemed forced and just a bunch of slides to expose us to the libraries that were developed for Real Time by Jean-Marie Dautelle. Since the Java license agreements says,

Software is not designed or licensed for use in on-line
control of aircraft, air traffic, aircraft navigation or
aircraft communications; or in the design, construction,
operation or maintenance of any nuclear facility.

what it really means is that do not use Java for a Real Time application where execution of the code will always happen within a specific window of time. So Garbage Collection, which can happen at any time, becomes a big problem.

The techniques that are used are very cool, I don't know that will ever be able to put them to use. We'll just buy more hardware and start using new Java features like StringBuilder(see Venkat's Know your Java presentation).

(re)introduction to Spring Security by Craig Walls. I've never used or really looked at Spring Security 2.0 (was Acegi). But it does look interesting. Craig did a good job of covering the framework even if it wasn't something I really care about.

Know Your Java by Venkat Subramaniam was excellent. Venkat is very entertaining and appeared to be very knowledgeable. He kept asking questions like: "what will this code do?" and "which way to do this is better?" No one else was answering so I (tried) to answer several questions. I probably got 60% of them. My favorite part was about floats/doubles/BigDecimals since this has become a pretty big issue to me at work. NEVER use floats or doubles when dealing with currency. Venkat seemed to really hate/loath the String constructor for BigDecimal and I did not get a good answer from him on what is better that BigDecimal. :( He even showed us screwy things with Groovy and numbers. The StringBuilder (new with Java 5) class seems pretty cool.

Advanced Web Development with Grails by Jeff Brown was pretty good. He got a good start on building an application that had 3 domain objects. Object A has zero-to-many B's and B has zero-to-many C's. I didn't follow it all but it was a good presentation. Especially since it was all coding and no slides. I love that kind of presentation.

The Birds of a Feather on Hibernate and Spring with Criag Walls and Brian Sam-Bodden was ok. We ended up talking a lot about web ?framworks?