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by Mike Shoemaker.
Original Post: Gateway Software Symposium - Day 1
Feed Title: Unruly Rambling (java category)
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As with every other year, I started off the event with a predetermined list of which sessions that I would attend. Only time will tell if this list will remain accurate. Typically I tend to stray off and see other sessions, spur of the moment.
Classloading in Java - Building Dynamic Systems Without Pain Sessions 1 & 2
By: Stuart Hollaway
Part 1 of this presentation was the same one gave last year, but since there wasn't much else at this timeslot, I ended up repeating part 1. As always, Stuart's presentation was given with much energy and most importantly with IDEA on the screen half of the time. I'm not a big fan of the PowerPoint only presentations. Most of what was covered was above the virtual machine layer but below the application layer. The difference between explicit and implicit classloaders was expounded upon. The way certain applications like JUnit, ANT, and just about every application server violate the classloader delegation rule was discussed in depth. All in all it was a session all Java Programmers should see.
Ruby for Java Programmers
By: Dave Thomas
Since I've been interested in Ruby lately, I figured I'd give Dave Thomas's talk a shot. I'm glad I did and now I'm even more eager for the Ruby group to get productive. Dave was his usual entertaining self walking around in his socks and never running out of puns. In this talk, Dave covered some basic syntax that probably seemed bizarre to most people, I know it was the first time I came across it. Other things that were covered included, writing some code to pull web service data from Amazon to show book rankings. He had to mock up the Amazon web service since there was no internet connectivity. The final demonstration was storing this web service data into a mysql database using ActiveRecord.
Dinner was served around 6:30 and Dave Thomas's Keynote address followed. As with last year, there were not many food choices that were Lent aware, so I stuck with potatoes and bread. Oh well, no big deal. At Dave's keynote, the topic was the Art of Programming. Similarities between Art and Engineering were discussed. Concepts such as modularity were discussed in the context of writing software and how Michael Angelo painted the Ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Both are made attainable by a divide and conquer mentality of breaking large tasks into small sub tasks. Other trials and tribulations of his work experience were touched upon. Several funny situations were discussed that i could not do justice for here so I won't even try. All in all, the Keynote rocked!
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