My WJax Review

I just came back from W-Jax/SOACON yesterday where I've seen a lot of great talks. Three days of high quality input can really make you feel your synapses growing in your brain.

I learned a lot of things while staying in Munich. MVS (Most Valuable Speaker) for me was Gregor Hohpe who is a really cool guy. He is co-author of one of my favorite books (Patterns of EAI) and I was really excited to meet him in person.

He was the first one who made clear to me what SOA is really all about, something that all these SOA hype business people never were able to. You don't know how annoying these people are. These people make you feel like a second class citizen if you don't have WS-* everywhere and use some BPEL and BPM and BLA BLA BLA.

But thanks to Gregor, now I know that we are on the right track. More than that I know we can reach leading position if we abstract a little bit more here and do some looser coupling there, etc. Nothing to difficult, nothing to worry about, just utilizing more patterns and make things work.
I had a very nice discussion with Gregor and almost missed my flight from Munich back to Berlin.

Gregor Hohpe also was the one who encouraged the audience to write more blogs and articles about patterns and related topics. And this is exactly what I'm trying to do right now. ;-)

But I learned a lot more things on W-Jax. I attended some talks about OSGi which soon will be featured in every serious Java project. I swear. In 2009 you won't see any bigger Java project (open source or not) which isn't OSGi-enabled. I bet Peter Kriens would tell you the same.

And I attended some talks about the Java language, Groovy and Spring.

These guys from interface21 seem to be really busy these days. They just released Spring 2.5 and are working hard on Spring Webflow 2.0 and Spring Batch. I'm thinking about using Webflow as lifecycle controller in my project. As far as I know do they try to utilise Spring Webflow to manage the JSF lifecycle.

Groovy lead Dierk König showed off some really cool Groovy stuff. I have to admit I bought 3 books on Groovy & Grails and 2 Spring books approx one year ago and never had time to do more than a little Grails demo. Shame on me. I promise I will do more with Groovy. Hopefully my team leader at my dayjob will allow me to use it.

Angelika Langer showed some cool stuff she did with Java annotations. I use annotations on my project too, but it's astonishing what different things you are able to do with them at compile time and runtime. Someone should really write a book about annotation patterns.

By the way, does anybody know a good book about AOP patterns? Runtime annotation analysation with reflection seems to be a lot like AOP to me and I want to know more about that.