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JavaPolis 06 - Day 1 - Warmup

December 12th, 2006 Mario Hochreiter

After managing the “management” staff and finding out how to get a bus in Belgium I enjoyed the first day at the Javapolis 06.
I decided to start with a “non technical” topic in the morning: Domain-Driven Design - Putting the Model to Work presented by Eric Evans. Although I already knew basics about DDD I never had the time to read the book from Eric Evans but I am going to read it now. The presentation by Eric Evans confirmed my personal attitude about how important a domain specific language for a project can be and how important it is to find the “right” language in which you can talk with the business guys and in which they understand the technical people and vice versa.

Directly after the DDD speech I decided to cancel my lunch and watch a so called quickie about Maven 2.
This was a bad decision as the very short presentation did not tell me anything new about Maven. Furthermore, my stomach was yelling for food. Unfortunately, there was no more food available when I arrived at the lunch area. Hungry for food and information I decided to watch the presentation about Dynamic Languages on the Java Platform in the afternoon. After a short introduction into JSR 223 and the general stuff about dynamic languages two of them where presented in more detail: JRuby and Groovy. As I already knew some basics about Ruby and Groovy I was very interested in the “battle”. The JRuby part was held by Thomas E. Enebo and Charles Oliver Nutter.
After a short introduction about the features they showed a very impressive example of JRuby in conjunction with Rails. Although, not every detail of Ruby is yet implemented in JRuby it looked very interesting to me. I think it is a good possibility for me to learn Ruby in more detail by playing around with JRuby.
The Groovy part was held by Dierk König. The presentation was very similar to the JRuby one besides that the syntax was a little bit different ;-). It convinced me once more that we should use Groovy in our project for writing unit tests and maybe for more like configuring Spring Beans.

That’s it for the first day. More to come soon. The day will be closed with two Leffes (that’s a belgian beer brand) and a lot of very interesting discussions with my colleague Peter.

Entry Filed under: JavaPolis06