September JUG spread

I attended a NovaJug meeting last night with Neal Ford talking about Domain Specific Languages and Patrick Peak who spoke about Hibernate.

Domain Specific Languages seem like something I’ll keep my eye on, but are nowhere close to being used in real applications today. I’m intrigued by some of the possibilities, but if, as in our presentation, readability and clarity for the end user are the goals, then, honestly, I’m not sure if it will gain much traction. I might post my reasons why if I get the time, but let’s get serious, no one cares.

Patrick’s talk was slightly more useful to me, since he was able to confirm that my worries with integrating XDoclet with Hibernate.

My main impression is still that I’m closer to being a speaker at one of these meetings than getting much out of them anymore. I was fortunate enough to start my Java career after EJB, I stay abreast of the blogosphere goings on, and most importantly, I use these frameworks myself. (Or at least evaluate them, usually.)

I was sort of surprised to see that Patrick was caught up in an attack on Rails deployment. After meeting the fellow, I find it impossible to believe that he was out to attack Rails, and that you should believe him in his follow-up post.