Well, I just got done with two days of the Denver No Fluff Just Stuff conference. First off, unlike the previous NFJS conferences, this one wasn’t held in the DTC. You forget how far that is from Boulder, until you drive there and back twice on a weekend.
Anyway, I thought I’d share a few choice thoughts and tidbits regarding some of the sessions I attended. These are by no means full summaries of the talks.
Mock objects–Dave Thomas
Mock objects are objects that emulate behavior of external entities that make testing difficult. (I’ve worked with a few Englishmen in my life, and Dave Thomas had the same acerbic sense of humor.) Dave illustrated how to choose when to implement a mock object, as opposed to using the real object. He also touched on the true difficulty of mock objects, which is figuring out how to choose which object to use in your class (factory, pass the correct object into the constructor, AOP, class loaders).
JSF (both beginning and advanced)–David Geary
JSF is the new standard for web frameworks. David compared it to Swing and Struts meeting in a particle accelerator. Thompson’s fussed about tools for JSF, but I don’t think they’ll be needed for all JSF development, just like tools for Struts help, but aren’t required. I think that the most important bit about JSF is that it really tries to treat HTML widgets as full featured GUI components, which is something that is a bit of an adjustment for me. I’m really really used to thinking of HTML interfaces as generated strings, but this higher level approach (which has been used in the rich client world for a long time) is interesting.
There was an expert panel, consisting of several of the speakers. One hot topic was whether EJB 3.0 had been hijacked by Gavin King; everyone seemed to have an opinion on that. However, the choicest statement to emerge was Bruce Tate saying Java’s “type safety is an illusion” because everyone who uses a collection casts whenever they take anything out.
Herding Racehorses, Racing Sheep–Dave Thomas
This was a non-technical talk discussing how to improve programming as a profession. He referenced the Dreyfus Model of Skill Acquisition (novices learn differently from experts), and referenced Patricia Benner and her study of nurses in the 1970s, and how it was analgous to the current situation of developers. A great quote was “Training is how you give people knowledge; time is how you give people experience.” He also talked about how to move up the skill ladder, and how that will make it more difficult to outsource. However, he didn’t talk about how the relative dearth of novices would create a future shortage of experts, other than to acknowledge that everyone, anywhere, can move up the skill ladder and we need to prepare for that. Prepare by having a plan; this makes sense, as what you’re really doing is choosing where to invest your most precious commodity–your time.
TDD in the web tier–Rick Hightower
Rick covered the basics of Test Driven Development, and seemed a bit surprised that everyone wasn’t practicing it; he said it’s helped his code quite a bit. He went over a few tools that make testing (not just unit testing) easier today. A key point seemed to be the differentiation between TDD and Continuous Integration; tests that run for TDD need to be fast, since you’re running them multiple times a day, whereas CI tests can be slower. He also made the offhand comment that you could have JMeter proxy requests from a QA tester (in a web browser) and use Canoo (a JSP testing tool) to automate those tests. Wouldn’t that be cool?–cheaper than LoadRunner, that’s for sure.
Another expert panel. Someone asked “what are you folks going to be looking at in the next 6 months” and I was struck by the lack of diversity in the responses. Groovy, Hibernate, Tapestry came up again and again. Where do the new ideas come from? And where does deep knowledge come from, if everyone is running to a new cool tool every 6-12 months?
An offhand comment that someone made when we were talking abouty why so many apps had extraneous EJBs: “Yup, that was design by resume.”
Appfuse–Rick Hightower
Appfuse is a way to kick start your Struts applications. It provides a large chunk of best practices all in one place, along with a few pages that everyone needs (user creation, user authentication). Its license is liberal enough that you can use the code in your own project. I was struck by how many times Rick mentioned ripping stuff out, but I’m sure that I would learn quite a bit by poking around it. It was also clear to me that AppFuse is great for staring new applications, but I’m not sure it’s a good thing (other than a learning tool) for retrofitting best practices to existing applications. Also, Rick mentioned multiple times that he wouldn’t use Struts for a new application; given that AppFuse is primarily a Struts starter kit, I was a bit confused by this statement.
GIS–Scott Davis
This was a 1,000 foot overview of (primarily java) GIS applications. There are quite a few tools out there for displaying GIS data, which has several standardized formats (both those formally blessed by a standards organization, and those informal standards that grow out of network effects). There aren’t a collection of open source data sets, but you can get a ton of GIS data from government websites. The satellite that Scott’s company owns takes photos that are 15GB of data, and takes 500 such photos a day. Talk about storage needs. Also, anyone who wants to find out a bit more about satellite imaging would do well to read “Private eyes in the sky”, an article from the May 4th 2000 edition of the Economist, which is a good overview of the business.
Again, apologies for the jerky nature of my comments above. (Hey, at least I’m not talking about tugging any unmentionables.) Hangovers are not conducive to good note taking, but even if I had been rested, I still couldn’t do justice to 90 minutes of expert dialog in a paragraph on my blog. But it’s well worth going to one of these conferences, especially if you’re doing java web development.
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