JavaPolis 2005 - Day 2 - University

Second day of the conference, another day of university sessions.

The exhibition floor was now open, which meant open season for goodie hunting. Before the sessions started I did a small round and funny enough spent most time at the Microsoft booth. The explanation for this was ofcourse the presence of an XBOX 360 with Call of Duty 2 and Project Gotham Racing 3 showing. My colleague Jeroen gave Call of Duty 2 a try and was instantly slaughtered by a German sniper ;o) According to Jeroen it was due to the stupid XBOX 360 controller which is not suitable for 3D shooters. Yeah right!

The morning session I attended was a classic titled ‘Effective Java’ and presented by Josh Bloch from Google. Josh is another one of my alltime Java heroes and I gladly took the opportunity to attend his session. I do consider myself a seasoned programmer with about 10 years of Java experience, but still, Josh is able to point some fine details where there might be room for errors or attacks. It was a great session, constructed from some of his older materials that he presented at past JavaOne conferences. He put in some new stuff regarding specific Java 5 features. Some of the patterns covered were Static Factory, Singleton, Utility Class, Typesafe Enum pattern, Duplicate Object Creation (or actually how to avoid that), Defensive Copying, and Immutable Classes. In my opinion every Java programmer should at least attend this talk once, or buy his books for that matter. Josh is the author of ‘Effective Java’ and ‘Java Puzzlers’.

The second part of his talk covered guidelines for API design or to put it in his words: “how to design a good API and why it matters”. This is rather unique material as Josh is responsible for some of the J2SE APIs he has lots of experience with API design. Nowadays, everybody is able to release all sorts of Open Source APIs and frameworks in the open and good API design is something that is not very trivial. Some soundbites that make you think:

“displease everyone equally”, “expect to make mistakes”, when in doubt, leave it out!”, “minimize accessibility of everything” and he added “..make your members as private as possible..” hmmm…wonder how this fits in with the JavaPolis theme :o)

The afternoon session that I picked was titled ‘AJAX in Action’ and was presented by web development gurus Ben Galbraith and Dion Almaer. There was so much information in the AJAX session that it will be nearly impossible to sum it up here, so I encourage you to get a copy of their slides at ajaxian.com or hold your breath and get hold of the JavaPolis 2005 DVD when it will be available. I bought last year’s DVD and have no regrets. A lot of the presentations on it are stil current.

I’m quite happy with both universities that I’ve picked today. Excellent speakers and a lot of stuff to think about. Now that the first part of JavaPolis is over, I’m quite anxious to what the remainder of the conference will bring. University was definitely worth every penny!