Hanging Out

I’m up at the No Fluff Just Stuff symposium where I just spent about an hour drinking with Dave Thomas. For the last twenty minutes or so, I was actually helping him hype his Ruby For Java Programmers course. Quite an good feeling!

The networking has been the most positive part of the conference so far. Second place was Dave’s talk on state machines, although I personally may have a little work to go before I’m ready to use that in my toolkit. I left the Mock Objects talk knowing exactly what to do, but not so this time. Java Server Faces seems usable to me, but only just. That’s a lot of thinking and a lot of typing to get what you’d like. It’s clear that the pressure was on Sun to get something out to be a “standard” when it wasn’t quite ready. AAARRGH!

Erik Hatcher’s talk on Lucene was a good one. I simply have no need for the technology as yet, but I’m glad I stayed to hear about the basic decision matrix, and the single most important topic to think about when deciding to use Lucene.

Details on this issues will all come later. For now, I’m going to brush my teeth and hit the hay.