SpringOne

I just got back from the SpringOne conference in Antwerp (Belgium), it was a joined effort of Interface21 and BeJUG, the Belgian Java User Group.

It was a pretty good conference, but not great as most of the talks were rather superficial and sometimes even shameless plugs for commercial tools, I guess that's more or less normal since these kind of events use sponsors to keep the price down but still bring some cash for the organizing parties, ah well..

These are the presentations I attended:

• Practical Quick Start with Acegi Security: very good presentation by Ben Alex, concise and to the point
• Guaranteeing Spring Application Performance: this presentation should have been called "let me show you what my Symantec profiler can do", the word "Spring" was not uttered once; I was hoping to learn about some of the pitfalls and design decisions when using Spring which could affect application performance, I wasted my time on this one
  
• Spring RCP: RCP stands for Rich-Client Project which is an attempt to make Java Swing more accessible and maintainable in applications, I've been using Spring RCP since 6 months so I wasn't really hearing anything new, good presentation by Keith Donald though
• Pragmatic Spring: two guys quickly threw together a presentation about how they abuse Spring at work, nothing to learn here about applying Spring in a pragmatic manner
• Practical Rich Domain Models: presentation by a local guy, pretty good actually, but a little too dogmatic, and suffering a bit from the Martin Fowler/thought leader syndrome; I hope to discuss the subject of rich domain model later on
  
• The art of domain modeling: I was hoping Keith would have a bit more tips and best practices for us when modeling the problem domain, as a heavy user of UML/MDA this would have been very interested; on a side note: I got the impression Keith himself wasn't really convinced of the stuff he was presenting
• Embeddable lightweight Messaging: pretty good presentation on an open-source JMS alternative, targeted at a novice audience but interesting nevertheless; the idea behind the project presented here (called MantaRay) is to no longer have a JMS broker but have the distributed endpoint/nodes copy the information such as topics and queues, Spring is able to make an abstraction out of this (just configure the connection factory for the JMS template and you're good)
• Spring Patterns: presentation about how to integrate your own technology into the spring framework by following certain conventions at the same time, mildly interesting as I won't be doing that kind of stuff
• Core features of Spring 2.0: Kinda weird to have this presentation at the very end of the conference; Adrian Colyer did a good job though, seems Spring 2.x features scripting support, simplified configuration, reloadable beans (very interesting when you have Drools rules that could be hot-deployed, like I'm doing in my current project), some improvements in the JMS area etc..

So overall I enjoyed being there, I'll be reflecting on the domain model stuff in the next couple of days, I'll make sure to post my findings/conclusions...