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A Weekend Spent at No Fluff Just Stuff Symposium (NFJS)

Paying for the Symposium

I hadn ’t been to a conference/symposium in almost two years. The last one I went to was The ServerSide Symposium (TSS) 2003 in Boston. During my Java career that spans the last 8 years, TSS was the first Java conference that I had been to. It was a great experience to witness server-side presentations, and to talk to many authors and experts in the J2EE/server side area. I have good memories from the TSS conference.

The last two years have been very busy for me. That included the responsibility of family expansion from the two of us to three! It’s a daughter! Therefore, I have also been trying to save money as much as possible from my full-time contracting job – to be honest, in other words, I’ve been trying to utilize money for right reasons and right purposes.

Having said that, some kind of hesitation always exists in my mind before I invest money for a symposium or a conference like this one.

Why I Decided To Register Myself

There were two reasons why I decided to go for it. One is – I am a strong believer in conferences (because that’s where you network in your own ways). The second reason was particular to NFJS – I knew the name “Jay Zimmerman” from TSS 2003, and had seen him organize the TSS event. He was a good host then. I didn’t flip a coin; I went online and paid for the conference.

About NFJS 2005 – Northern Virginia Edition

NFJS 2005 was going to be held Friday afternoon, all day Saturday, and all day Sunday in Reston, VA. I printed the agenda and descriptions of the sessions. One day in advance, Jay Zimmerman gave attendees a chance to complete a short survey in the email and choose sessions for themselves. I printed my own tentative schedule, and was all set for the start of the event on Friday (May 20, 2005).

To me, the format of NFJS looked very similar to that of TSS 2003. In one way, I was relieved to see that kind of format (since I was used to it from TSS, and I was hoping at least the management of the event would not screw up – and they didn’t!).

Friday – May 20, 2005

It rained heavily in the afternoon. The conference started at 1:30 PM after the registrations were over. There were a couple of familiar faces (from local Java/BEA user groups). I also met two old friends of mine. I introduced myself to everyone among those who appeared familiar.

On this day, I attended the following sessions –

• Intro to JavaServer Faces by Kito Mann
• Principles of Service Oriented Architectures by Justin Gehtland
• Struts Shale: Struts 2.0 by Kito Mann (again!)

Each session in the NFJS was 1.5 hours long. In a few cases, two time slots were combined so that the speaker could cover the material to the desired depth.

Kito Mann is a bright guy, and that showed during his presentations. He covered the introductory material on JSF well (although I and a few other people that I talked to thought that some more spice could be added). He used Java Studio Creator – an IDE designed explicitly for developing JSF applications – to demonstrate his examples. By spice, I mean that he could have used more than one IDE that supported JSF and have compared their features with the Java Studio Creator. Also, time permitting, the Hello World example could have been taken to a little more complex level. Kito ended his talk by covering some principles of creating custom components. He suggested performing a search in the market before creating a component yourself. Some of the other tips were useful. There was also a book giveaway. That was nice of him!

Justin Gehtland seems to me like a hard-working, committed individual. He appears pretty straight-forward in his speech and clear enough in his talk. He kept us engaged throughout the 90 minutes. I was glad that I attended. I clarified some of the doubts in my mind about SOA by asking him questions. Now, after a few days of rumination, what I think is that Justin could have stressed the importance of the POX/REST web services stack (there were other speakers later who explained why REST was a way to go! Reason: its simplicity). But, overall, Justin was good in his talk. Everyone seemed to enjoy it.

Kito Mann reproduced a very important slide that compared Servlets, JSP, Struts, and JSF capabilities in a pillar-type diagram in his talk on Shale. Shale is web framework proposed by Craig McClanahan in November 2004. Since the framework is extremely new, Kito didn’t have many examples to talk about during the slides, which was understandable. I hope that Kito is available through email or JSFCentral so that we all can post questions as Shale evolves.

Note that, during this first day, I (and many others) did not see much of real code – except for some philosophy in the talks. That fact made me a bit uneasy. I wondered my unrest was due to the fact that I hadn ’t been to a conference in two years, and wasn't sure I was adapting to the so called “conference culture” immediately. I drove back home thinking, I didn’t do much today! How would the next two full days be? Productive? Useful?

Saturday – May 21, 2005

I went to the show half an hour early on Saturday morning. I wanted to talk to Jay Zimmerman and wanted to provide some verbal feedback to him in general. There were a couple of ideas in my mind (about the current market requirements) that I expressed to him. Since Jay gets in touch with his speakers often, I wanted to mention some initiatives that leading J2EE specialists such as Rod Johnson, Bruce Tate, and Floyd Marinescu could think about undertaking together. Jay said that what I said made sense to him.He also spoke of his future plans for his NFJS-like conferences, which sounded interesting to me. (For details, send Jay an email and ask!).

On this day, I attended the following four sessions –

• Aspect Oriented Refactoring by Ramnivas Laddad
• Herding Racehorses and Racing Sheep by Dave Thomas
• Lightweight Development Strategies by Bruce Tate
• Java Security by Stuart Halloway (attended for 50 mins) and Fallacies of Enterprise Systems by Ted Neward (attended for 40 mins)

Ramnivas Laddad is an easy speaker – no ambiguities in speech or in explanations. I liked that about him. There were about 30 people in the room. Since AOP is very new, Ramnivas suggested we all take baby-steps in learning this paradigm. A similar thing was mentioned by Bruce Tate later in one of his talks. The demonstrations done by Ramnivas were superb. He mentioned that his next book about AOP Refactorings was underway and that it would be published in this year. I think that the book will be a valuable addition to the existing AOP literature.

"Herding Racehorses and Racing Sheep" by Dave Thomas was the WINNING talk from the whole symposium (I thought so, and many others did as well!). This guy is an extremely good speaker – more than that, the material he presented was brilliant. He basically explained “The Dreyfus Model” (perform a Google search!) and also covered the sensitive areas of “project outsourcing” without hurting anyone’s feelings. Like he promotes – the talk was all practical. He also introduced his advice for software developers without touching anyone’s egos! Marvelous effort. To be honest, he kind of reminded me of Rick Ross at TSS 2003. A good motivator too.

Bruce Tate is another big supporter of light-weight development strategies that include a lot of open-source technologies. He seemed pleased that open-source software is gaining momentum. The overall impression he gave about the Java language is that the language was bloating and isn ’t getting any easier. Some bright minds are leaving Sun – or have already left. So, the fear is: what happens to Java if (and that’s only an ‘if’) Sun gets into trouble?? EJB 3.0 is late, and is in trouble (Bruce thinks so). After discussing this background material, Bruce did a good job of introducing light-weight development practices. Personally, I shall consider his suggestions during implementations. Largely, I liked Bruce’s way of presentation. He is serious about the evolving technologies.

At the end of Bruce’s talk, I was still thinking about Dave Thomas’ lecture. It was that impressive. Go Dave, Go! There were a several interesting sessions for me to choose from towards the end of the day: XQuery by Jason Hunter, Killer Graphics and Professional PDFs with XML, JAAS by Stuart Halloway, and Fallacies of Enterprise Systems by Ted Neward. I still didn’t know much about Java Security. So, I decided to go ahead with the JAAS session by Stuart.

Stuart Halloway used his MacIntosh system and his favorite editor, ‘eMacs’, effectively. I was tired from the whole day and sat in the back. The room was crowded, many attendees wanted to hear about JAAS. I was unable to read the slides and demos from the back, the font was too small from that distance. So, after hearing Stuart for 50 minutes, I decided to leave the room and go for another interesting session by Ted Neward. I was late in entering Ted’s room, but to my happy surprise, Ted had advanced only 6 slides out of the total 23 slides or so. He spoke in general about his experiences in handling Enterprise Systems. He wrote for us some simple SQL code during the presentation, and explained SQL attack problem etc. Then, the discussion turned to Internet viruses and network security topics in general. During the next 40 minutess, Ted advanced only two more slides. His slides looked good, so I was eager to listen to all of his experience regarding each one of his slides. Unfortunately, that did not happen. Frankly, I couldn't listen to Ted saying “riiiiight?” after every alternate sentence any more. Try saying it that way yourself, and you will know what I mean. I left the room at 5:35 while the session was still going on. Ted, I expected to learn more from your talk! Some people like Ted’s style of presentation and some don’t (I later found out from my dialogs with many other attendees). I think, in the case of Ted, it’s a matter of adjusting yourself to the speaker’s style rather than seeing the speaker deliver to your expectations. Oh well…. I got so busy on Sunday (which proved to be equally as entertaining and productive as Saturday), I would have loved to get a chance to talk to Ted in person. He had just left to the airport Sunday evening by the time I was done talking to David Bock.

Ramnivas, Dave, Bruce are all excellent speakers. They are experts in their areas. So, overall, Saturday was much much better than the day before. In fact, by then, I was well convinced that I had made the right investment in paying for the conference. I can probably do this conference once every 1.5 to 2 years on an average. The local Java/BEA user groups (and sometimes, BEA Dev2Dev days) provide similar opportunities. Conferences such as NFJS have their own value in the community; in the absence (God forbid!) of user groups, I will probably go to conferences more often.

Sunday – May 22, 2005

This was the last day of the conference. After interacting with people, I couldn't help but notice all the hype about “Ruby”. I could not go to any of the Ruby sessions (and there were two successively) on Friday; but I did heard people saying “Dave Thomas created the whole e-commerce site during just those two sessions on Ruby”, “Ruby is that powerful” etc. Even speakers like Bruce seemed to be impressed with Ruby’s capabilities. In my mind, I was thinking, that’s Dave Thomas again (who created waves earlier on Saturday, when everyone liked his talk on the Dreyfus Model). I mentioned to Jay Zimmerman that Dave Thomas should be a key note speaker in this conference. Jay in fact said – Dave has always been a key note speaker for the NFJSs except for this symposium.

Anyway, on this last day, I attended the following four sessions –

• Tapestry by Example (Part I: 90 mins) by Erik Hatcher
• J2EE Transaction Management Techniques (Part II) by Mark Richards
• Spring Overview by Bruce Tate
• Hibernate & J2EE Transaction Integration by Mark Richards (again!)

Erik Hatcher is brilliant. He is completely dedicated to Tapestry, although he said that he has explored other frameworks. The point is that Erik starts out slow during his presentation, but before you realize it, he has your complete attention. That’s dangerous (in a good way!), isn’t it? I say this because while his talk was going on, I did not have a thought about any other sessions that I might have planned to attend. Pretty engaging style he has! Sometimes, he looks shy, and could speak “up” a little, and also show more confidence in his good work. But, again, that’s just me, and I don’t know if others thought similarly.

Mark Richards’ session was very productive. During his talks, Mark sounds and looks like a strict, dedicated teacher – the one from my schooling days in India. This is a good comment, by the way, that I have to make about Mark. In other words, he is “authoritative” in conveying his ideas and implementations. I learnt about XA’s. Given a chance, I will definitely use his transaction patterns. Those pattern ideas are very useful. The examples and scenarios that Mark described were invaluable. I was glad that I attended this talk.

Just as Ruby, “Spring” was another buzz word throughout the conference. I now wonder if there was a conspiracy behind polluting the air with these two words (I am only joking here when I use the words pollute and conspiracy). Justin Gehtland provided an overview on Friday (which I did not attend). Bruce Tate covered the same topic on Sunday. Spring framework is a promising technology, and I'll leave it there for now. We, as developers, really have to wait and see where these framework technologies take us in near future. If I commit on the Spring project, then I too won’t hesitate in saying “Spring is the only winner in the frameworks market!”. I'm not ready to commit yet, but, like I said, it looks like technology with a lot of potential and promise. The everyday experience of the Spring founders in dealing with real-life projects shows in the way the Spring has been architected. It has an AOP support, but to quote Bruce – “WISDOM is not there yet in how to utilize AOP and other new things”.

For the last session in this symposium, I automatically turned myself to the one by Mark Richards for his authoritativeness. This was a Hibernate & J2EE Transaction Integration class. I haven’t used Hibernate much to date. I was focused initially in the talk. But, as the talk went on, I was feeling the effect of being at an absorbing Symposium for 2.5 continuous days. I had reached the saturation point. I realized I was just listening to Mark and not thinking about the contents in the slide. I knew that I could always email Mark and ask him, riiiiight? Mark seemed a friendly individual, and I am sure, he will respond quickly to email queries by anyone.

While I did attend talks on my favorite topics, I knew that I had also missed out on a few other interesting ones. But, that’s to be expected at any conference. You can only attend one session at a time and not more, riiiiight? For example, “Designing/Developing Pluggable Application Architectures” by David Bock looked quite remarkable. But, since David is a local guy, I kind of knew I could request him later on to reproduce this session at a JUG meeting in NOVA. I talked to David towards end of the day – about this specific query and about a few other things in order to learn from his vast experience. What a nice individual he is! He did not have any hesitation in sharing his views or opinions. I had met David before once at a JUG meeting; but, today he appeared even friendlier. I shall be thankful to him for responding to my queries.

A Few Things I Forgot to Mention

There were over 20 books given away. There were also the give-aways of expensive stuff such as a SONY iPod. There was also a keynote at the dinner on Friday by Jason Hunter. Jason talked about “Open Source from the Inside” and shared his experiences. It was an entertaining, insightful talk. I think, my trust for the open source software went up one notch. Moreover, Jason told us that he never wanted to put all the eggs in one basket (and may be, that’s why he got away from Java two-years back to do XQuery). Everyone was listening while he said this. There was one expert panel discussion consisting of 8 speakers – this was where one speaker (I forgot his name – he was sitting the last on the left) mentioned his terrible experience of buying some software from Macromedia’s web site that used Flash technology! This was in response to audience queries about Rich Client technologies. During this discussion, the panel thrashed out dynamic languages in comparison to Java (compared strong and weak points on both the sides). Again, the “Ruby” topic was raised in this regard. I am now really intrigued by this Ruby. Also, on Sunday, there were 3 simultaneous ‘Birds of a Feather’ discussions. I went to the one on ‘Software Architecture’; the panel consisted of David Bock, Mark Richards, either Ben or Glenn (I didn’t know him), and Ted. It was interesting to watch Mark (with some support from the audience) differing with Ted on the use of the term “Best Practices”. Mark was of the opinion that “Best Practices” existed, whereas Ted believed “there is no such thing as a Best Practice”. Someone from the audience tried to convince Ted by suggesting to use the term ‘a widely used practice’ instead. Ted didn’t seem to buy that either for his own reasons. So much for the term!

Overall, About the Conference

To sum up, I have to say that I was satisfied with the conference – in fact, quite satisfied. I have expressed my opinions about this conference and its talks in the article. The only other thing I would add is that next time, I would definitely try to take advantage of the group purchasing discount. But, for a well-in-advance registration, the price of $675 that I paid is still justified. Again, it's up to the individual, riiiiight?