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So, deciding that after my late night drinking with the Java Posse crew, I would sleep through the Oracle session, I cam in for the tech session. Another JAX-WS session, same old stuff…

Then came the highlight of the show: the rather blandly titled “Java Technology for Developing AJAX Applications”. I have already posted on Google Web Toolkit, but I am still in awe.

Bruce Johnson and Joel Webber lurk in the darkness

I won’t dwell on it, but you really should check it out.

Next I went to the “Integrating XML into the Java Language” session. It was Ok, but I was a little disappointed with the tacts discussed. Again, a previous post on this.

Next came to the Struts Ti session.

I know in the JSF world, Struts gets a bad rap, but I have to say, I still believe that any web framework that hides the actual nature of the protocol and infrastructure from you is generally a bad idea. Even the technical tour de force GWT stuff, still WORKS in a web-centric browserish way. At any rate, a lot of this was an intro to WebWork 2, which merges to Struts Actions 2. They also laid out the roadmap for the future of Struts. Frankly I agree with almost all of it, but I am really disappointed with the long timeframes discussed. Struts is way past the sell-by date, and really needs some newer paradigms now. My friends and I are already looking at Stripes, which while it lacks some of WebWorks better features, is basically, Struts modernized. It is actually a shame that in this world of exploding frameworks the most venerable of them can’t seem to get the coder help to get back on top.

The big news from the JRuby camp is that RoR now (kinda-sorta) works on Java.

Nutter lays it out

This was one of the better BoFs, simply because it covered both basic intro to people who haven’t used Ruby, and also covered the more technical roadmap issues the old hands wanted.

I went to a few more things, but a lot of it is marginally discussable. The XQuery session wasn’t bad, and the Java on OSX session wasn’t bad either, but they were kind of what you expected. A few Orbitz guys gave a talk about their JINI infrastructure, and it was OK, but I didn’t really get much new out of it. They did discuss their custom message dispatcher framework, and some of the JINI folks pointed out the things that have improved since they worked around it.

And lest I forget, Chris Adamson’s Lloyd project presentation about enhancing the functionality of Quicktime for Java in lieu of a real Java media system.