Day two's events began at 8am and ended at 5:30pm. A continental breakfast was served from 8am-9am with the first presentation beginning at 9am. The following are the sessions I attended along with any random thoughts.

Tapestry by Example (Erik Hatcher)
I thought this session was really good. It had a totally hands on style. Erik started with nothing and banged out a sample app in a matter of 90 minutes. Other than a beret of off the wall questions, the seminar went pretty smooth. The parts of Tapestry that I liked most were "Previewable HTML", correct line numbers in stacktrace's, and there seemed to be less moving parts than Struts. One overwhelming thought was, do I really need to learn another framework that competes with struts. Good or bad, struts is fairly widespread and my efforts would probably be better spent learning more advanced ways to use struts or looking at a lightweight framework like Spring.

Pragmatic Mock Objects (Dave Thomas)
Pragmatic Mock Objects was a tough topic to glean information from since I have never really relied on them before. Sure, I've stubbed out classes before but Dave was very clear that mock objects were much more than that. Unit testing is a personal goal of mine. Im hoping to start incorporating unit tests into every line of code that I write, very soon. I think this shift would be much easier if I didn't spend my time working with the web tier. Even though there are frameworks to aid in unit testing web apps, they never seem very easy to use. Although I've never fully bought into XP, I think there is tremendous value in writing unit tests. I have also had problems believing that TDD is about design and not testing. Well, maybe but testing seems to be a pretty big one to me, I wouldn't discount the safety net that it provides.

Metaprogramming (Stuart Halloway)
As I mentioned previously, Stuart was probably my favorite speaker at this years symposium. His session on Metaprogramming was much of the same. In a nutshell, metaprogramming means writing code that manipulates code. To be more specific, automating repetitive tasks that cannot easily be automated within the language. Stuart picked out a handful of patterns, explained why they existed, and offered better ways of solving the problems.

Programming with Hibernate(Bruce Tate)
This presentation was a bit disappointing. It was made up of entirely powerpoint presentations with no coding examples. Sure he had some code splatter on a slide or two, but at no point did he open up an editor to show or run any code. I liked Bruce's Bitter EJB talk last year, so I expected this to be a good session. Turned out, I was wrong. Other than giving a general overview of Hibernate, Bruce didn't do much to sell the framework. Instead he seemed to be more partial to JDO instead. On a few occasions, he mentioned advantages JDO had over Hibernate.

Responses[1]

Posted by Mike Shoemaker on March 23, 2004 8:08:33 PM CST #