Georgia Pok Guy

I really need to start writing these entries earlier in the day.  Curse having fun with my brother!

Today I attended a good number of sessions dealing with web technologies, in particular AJAX.  AJAX seems like a promising little technology.  Unfortunately, the one session I went to that was devoted to AJAX did not cover much, and I was left as much in the dark afterwards as I was beforehand.  I didn’t see the potential really until I attended the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) session later in the day.  There I got to see what AJAX could do in conjunction with Java technology via GWT.  You can produce some really slick web apps using GWT, and the Google team has taken great pains to include lots of Java functionality, such as Javadocs and compile-time errors.  They also really emphasized that the goal of GWT was to create advanced web apps that had the same feel as standard HTML pages for the sake of end-user continuity.  For example, the back button would return you to the previous page without any fuss.  It is definitely something to explore, and I could see using it in the future.  I also attended a session on JSF, AJAX, and Portlets.  The three seem like another promising framework to create web apps, however, the demo given didn’t exactly work, so I didn’t get to see the true potential for the three.

I also attended a session for the upcoming book Effective Java Reloaded.  The central theme was making your Java code as generic as possible.  I learned a few interesting things, like what a Bounded Wildcard is (Collection) and how to do dynamic class casting.  Might be something to pick up when it is published later this year.

Some of the other sessions I attended were pretty much worthless, so the less said about them the better.  JavaOne has some fantastic sessions alongside some really blah ones.  But, really, you can’t win them all.  And for some it turned out the subject was not as interesting as I thought it would be.

The conference was a madhouse today, with some session lines snaking outside the Moscone Center.  Also, they need to expand the male bathrooms, since they are above capacity this week.  The weather was a lot colder today, but I still ate my lunch (lasagna) outside.  Tomorrow I’m thinking about catching the MUNI up to the Fisherman’s Wharf area so I can hit up the In-n-Out Burger.  Good stuff…

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 10th, 2007 at 3:56 am and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.