NFJS Dallas - Day 3 of 3

Whew, what a weekend. We got back from Dallas around 10:15pm Sunday night.

Beginning Object Relational Mapping with Hibernate by Brian Sam-Bodden was a pretty good intro to Hibernate. I didn't get much out of it. I probably should have gone to something else.

Caring about your Code Quality by Venkat Subramaniam was awesome.

• Treat warnings as errors! What a concept. I've been fixing warnings when I run across them most of the time. Usually it's just unneeded imports or unneeded 'else' statements.
  
• Code reviews - I've been trying to review new code when I sync up. I've caught a few problems and would like others to do it to.
  
• I liked his 'triangulation' bit. When you copy and past code, get the copied code working, then extract the common code. I'll have to try it that way. I usually extract the common code to some base class and then make it work.
  
• He recommends JLint and FindBugs for doing code analysis. I'm afraid to try that on our code. But really, how bad could it be? ;-)
  

Agile Test Driven Development with Groovy by Jeff Brown was pretty good but I thought the title was misleading. I thought this would be writing tests in Groovy that break for the right reasons and then fixing the real code until the tests passed. But it was a pretty good introduction into testing with Groovy. I was also a little disappointed that you can't change the behavior of your Java code from the test with the Expando or MetaClass Groovy classes. The Mocks and Stubs in Groovy looks like something that Java should implement in Java 7.

Powerful Metaprogramming Techniques With Groovy by Jeff Brown was really good. I'm starting to understand Closures - passing chunks of code around like I would a variable. The XML and Markup builders are awesome. Too bad we don't do a lot of XML in our group.

None of us won anything this year. Some poor buy won a 6 month license for all the Atlassian stuff (Jira, Confluence, etc).