J-Fall 2006: Behind the scenes

With barely two more days to go 'till J-Fall 2006, preparations are running at full speed. Attendee count went through the roof last weekend, and even now people are still signing up. That will be some crowd! So make sure you arrive on time to make it to the opening session.

Meanwhile I've been preppin' my own talk as well. It will cover the latest milestone of project Dali, an Eclipse plugin for aiding development with the new EJB 3.0 Java Persistence API. A large part of the talk will be demos and demos always require that little bit of extra attention, at least if you don't want to end up like Charles Beckham 🙂

I'm also looking forward to attending some of the sessions myself. For example the Hibernate session by John Rizzo and Nicolas Brasseur from JavaBlackBelt.com. It's not that I'm eager to learn about Hibernate (I probably already know it all) but it's the way they will be giving the talk. John and Nicolas developed a new way of teaching tehnical content using so called 'TechAnims' or a way of extreme visual learning as they describe it. I cant' wait to see it, and you should definitely stop by to check it out as well.

My coworker Jeroen Leenarts will also present a talk at J-Fall. His session covers designing User Interfaces for both Web (1.0, 2.0, …) and Rich Clients (Swing, SWT, etc.) and choosing between which UI will be the most appropriate for what type of application. I've seen a sneak preview and so far it promises to be an interesting talk as well.

While attending J-Fall, make sure you walk by the booth of my employer Info Support on the pavilion floor. There is a nice must-have goodie waiting for you! Not allowed to tell yet…come see it for yourself!

Last but not least, J-Fall is also about meeting people. While browsing through the list of registrations I recognized a lot of familiar names from people that I've worked with or that I've been teaching Java to. I'd love to shake hands and chat a little with all of you. See you there!