JavaZone 2011 - My two cents

I just came back from JavaZone 2011, and I have some thoughts.

All in all it was a nice conference. The first day was a little booring. Few really nice talks. However the last day had some really nice talks.

The talks I went to that are worth mentioning are:

CoffeScript
I am not sure what to make of this relatively new scripting language. At first during the presentation, I was very sceptical. The idea is basically to remove/hide out a lot of boiler plate JavaScript code and replace it by magic that adds this at runtime later. It also adds a lot of features on top of JavaScript which made it very cool. That's why I am still on the fence on this one. Can't really decide. However, I don't write that much JavaScript, and thankfully with the help of JQuery, I don't need to. So I don't think I will be looking into this until I really feel that I write a lot of tedious JavaScript.


JavaPosse
Always great! Nuff said!



"Men så hør du da bruker det feil" (dust)

This was a really nice talk from Kåre Nilsen, which basically warned us about Java Frameworks and library hell. He said that we should all think before we add or use a framework, and have a valid reason as to why we use it. We also should know what each library that is bundled with the framework is doing, and we should ask our self if we really need it. Maybe we just can take out the part of the code in the library we are using, and just paste that in our projects.


Play! Framework: to infinity and beyond

I had heard and tested Play! once before this talk, and I found the framework so interesting that I wanted to learn more. And boy am I impressed. This is a framework that you definetly will hear more about in the future. But they did announce that in Play 2, they might break java compatibility and only work with Scala. I don't know what I feel about that, because that kinda forces you to learn "two" things at once. Both Scala and Play!
However, instead of me explaining what Play! is, go check it out!


DISCLAIMER: If your talk is not in this list, its probably just because I didn't attend it. It doesn't mean your session was bad or uninteresting.