First keynote was held by Ted Neward. Interesting and funny like always. He is a born speaker and gets right to the point. Session was about “Rethinking Enterprise” where the main conclusion was – be cynical, question everything and don’t blindly follow “best practices” because every problem/company/domain is different and there are no best practices.
Then came Roy Fiedling. Right. Ok, he is smart and is creator of REST architectural style, he was Apache chairman, wrote Apache httpd webserver etc. But he is sooo dead boring! He obviously is not a conference guy. He can’t present anything, he can’t keep audience awaken and he is totally unprepared and confusing. All the excitement that Ted gave us, vanished quickly with Roy.
The next session was about JBI and ESBs. It was quite poor. Guy was quoting “Enterprise Integration Patterns” book and gave a very little hands-on experience.
But then came a real delicious session – Joe Walker on DWR and Comet. I am a great fan of DWR so for me it was a must-see session. And it was great. Joe spoke about all the hacks, tips and tricks behind DWR and reverse Ajax. Browser’s world is nasty and mean and Joe explained and obviously mastered it very well.
‘Managing data in SOA’ was next session. Didn’t understand a word. SOA and all WS-* specs together with REST is such a buzz that I can’t hear my thoughts of all the buzzing around. I think we need to give these guys another 5 years so they have enough time to understand these concepts themselves and then to come up in front of us again. I am a low-level developer who need to see things in a real perspective and to see real-world examples how something works before using it on some project.
“AOP meets the real world”… just starting… I have high hopes… see you in one hour…
One hour later: I’m back. Disaster and disappointment. Who brings these lamers to a conference? I am going home. Enough for today. See you tomorrow.
Nemanja Kostic 