JAX 2009, 1 h Java EE Hacking, Interactive Keynote, Patterns Annihilation - Crowded Workshop 📎
This year JAX conference was a huge success. I spent only two days at JAX - I underestimated my current project workload. I was surprised by the venue in beautiful location directly at the Rhein-river in Mainz. The next surprise was the number of attendees. The conference was very well attended. I guess about 2k attendees.
The first person I met was smiling Ed Burns working in the hall with a cable internet connection. He was happy about my slot in the keynote room - and gave a really good presentation (attendees told me that) about "Rockstar Programmers". I gave the presentation "Hacking Java EE 5 in 60 Minutes with all buzzwords" at thursday. The was a little bit "Communication Breakdown" between me and the organizers - and I arrived one day too late :-). Meanwhile I got tons of emails and tweets, whether I'm o.k. I started to tweet where am I (airport etc.) and cover the conference from my iphone. This led to chosing me to be one (4th.) of "Top 10 Java Twitter". I got 300 followers in one day - and my mailbox blew-up :-).
Sebastian Meyen dropped my an email, whether I would like to present something during the keynote. The emphasis is on "something". We synchronized us shortly before the keynote. The conversation went like:
Sebastian: I will ask you some questions like "Why you like EJBs", is it o.k.?
Me: Ask me whatever you want...
Our reharsal was completed in about 3 minutes - this is what I like :-). I started the keynote, without a keynote :-), but with Nebeans 6.7m3 and Glassfish v3bea3. I built some Singletons, Session Beans and servlets in about 10 minutes from scratch - I had no time for the preparation :-). There were some connection problems with my Mac and the beamer - what is strange. Next time I will reactivate my Vista machine :-).
Someone asked about my opinion about JRuby and Rails during the keynote. The guys seemed to develop Twitter in 50 minutes - I was astonished by the long time needed in Ruby and offered my help. Michael Johann responded immediately in twitter - and we fighted a bit. I used my phone under the table on stage for this purpose :-)
Just after the keynote I gave my "interactive" workshop "JSF, SOAP, REST, EJB 3.1, JPA, Test and Interceptors in 60 Minutes". The next surprise: the workshop was overcrowded - there was not enough chairs...It seems like EJB 3 become more and more popular.
I used in my session GF v2 - but forgot, that GF v3 is still running in backround. I recognize after second try - so the session started with a stack trace. killall java solved the problem :-)
The other sessions (I gave 3 sessions and a part of the keynote in one day) went without surprises - no wonder - slides don't crash...
And now the most amazing thing. At Friday I gave a workshop with the title "Productive Java EE 6 – Rethinking Best Practices – Killing Patterns". I intended to build an app interactively with about 5-10 attendees... The workshop started with about 50 and ended with 60 attendees. The workshop wasn't free! I got many questions about EJB 3, 3.1 connectors etc. I even went through a JCA connector implementation and discussed, Guice-, legacy POJO, Wicket, JSF etc integration. Covered caches, locking, unit testing, layering, patterns becoming anti-patterns - and many other, sometime project-specific, questions. I used samples from my current book (coming soon).
The attendees were very nice as well - they brought me Coke (I had 5 bottles at the end :-)). One participant even insisted to pay me the taxi on the way to Frankfurt-Airport.
So thank you all - see you at JavaONE, then W-JAX, and sorry for the cancelled session at Wednesday. Some flickr impressions.