TSSJS Prague - Day 1

The TSSJS Europe conference has begun in earnest in the lovely city of Prague. Between swinging alfresco dining and lovely continental beer I have regarded the 1st day of the conference as intellectually rewarding. There were quite a few talks that stood out for me.

First of all the introductory but well thought out talk by Nati Shalom of GigaSpaces on Cloud computing. There was informative eye candy on his slides and his talk brought to the fore-front of my consciousness the fact that capacity planning and scalability are thorny issues in general. I will be investigating the GigaSpaces stack, as before now it has been on my radar but hasn't been high priority enough.

There was the double whammy of Spring talks one of which was by Costin Leau. It raised important questions in my mind on things I could be doing better. The fact that SpringSource is re-aligning, re-inventing and re-positioning itself with offerings like Spring DM (which plays quite well with OSGi), Spring Batch and Spring Integration has not gone unnoticed and personally from the capabilities demoed today, I'd advise anyone to give the new Spring stack a look in. I have already started to look into some OSGi bundling tools like aQute and will be sharing my thoughts in a while.

The SCA talk by Mike Keith of Oracle to my mind raised more question than answers. Not the least the fact that some of the issues it addresses like assembly, overlap with other product sets in the market like ESBs and even the JBI spec. I have resolved to go away from that talk and
undertake more research to see if there's more to this shining new spec.

The Grails talk was well articulated but gave very little in terms of TDD support in Grails. Issues of this nature are close to my heart and I hope improvements will be made for future talks.

With regards to organisation, I'd like to see a conference where the video content of presentation is available to attendees by close of play everyday, even if in a raw/unedited form (a-la Parleys.com and JavaPolis). This can help if you are torn between two sessions you desperately want to attend.

All in all 8 out of 10 for Day 1. Bring on day 2.