SpringOne08 day one

I was really impressed today, too bad it was not by one of the presentations on Spring.(Don't get me wrong I really like Spring and I use it daily in my job but no wow feeling on the first day). I'm not a UI guy and normally I'm immune to whistles and bells but the demo of the Parleys website http://www.parleys.com and especially the functionality to synchronize video and slides online wow. For the first time in a long time I was thinking this RIA stuff actually works. Maybe it's because I know nothing about UI's I found it impressive never the less.

Enough of that, back to business

• The first session was on Spring AMS: looks interesting but the essence of the talk was lost in AOP, weaving options and spring support for jmx, ... What would have really impressed me would have been seeing how and if it can monitor Hibernate/JPA transactions, aggregating data from multiple instances of the application. To be fair to the presenter I have to say that she did show that they could also monitor ActiveMQ. I'll do my homework and read up on subject. For now I will give it a place on the most_likely_to_be_useful list.
• Next up was OSGI programming model. A very good talk clear and precise, it assumed zero upfront knowledge of OSGI. Perfect to get you up to speed, I knew I should not have read anything upfront that spoiled it for me.
• Spring Dynamic-Modules: An interesting talk and an innovative piece of software (unlike some other modules, but I digress). But it failed to convince that I need/want to use it in a future project. Won't make it to the most_likely_to_be_useful list.
• AOP(again): Some 'clever' tricks with aspectJ. My first thought was if they (whomever they are) want aspectJ to become popular they really should consider doing something about the pointcut syntax * *.*(..) what's that supposed to mean? Well I looked it up and the syntax isn't as bad as I thought. Still I don't think I'm going to move away from the 'simple' Spring AOP to AspectJ.
• Enterprise integration patterns: Good talk but when did SpringSource get infected by the NIH syndrome. If it looks like a camel, walks like a camel and groans like a camel it's probably Apache Camel. What's wrong why couldn't the guys and girls at SpringSource do what they did with Quartz. Make a good product better by integrating it with Spring. Maybe my worldview is to simple...