Last night I returned from the Rocky Mountain Software Symposium. It was a quick trip. Flew into Denver around noon on Saturday and got back home at around midnight last night.
I didn't go to any sessions on Saturday because I was brain-dead and needed to relax. So, we (Raymie was with me) went to see Shrek 2. After that we went back to the hotel and rested. Or at least one of us did. I was too busy trying to figure out why my demo for my Spring talk wasn't working. At around 1AM on Sunday morning, I found the source of my problem: my own stupidity. As it turns out, I was trying to put a Set of java.lang.Strings into what was supposed to be a Set of Topping objects. Hibernate didn't like that very much. But once I figured it out, I was able to get some sleep.
On Sunday, my XDoclet presentation seemed to go very well. The crowd seemed interested and responsive. At lunch, I got a chance to chat with Glenn Venderburg for a bit and then sat on the expert panel with Glenn, Rick Hightower, Dennis Sosnoski, Howard Lewis Shipp, Rod Cope, and another individual (whose name escapes me right now). It was a good panel discussion and we covered such things as favorite ORM tools, why the ORM problem hasn't been definitively solved by any of the existing solutions, and .Net's simplicity vs. Java's complexity.
After lunch I started my 3-hour talk on Spring. This is a modified version of my 1.5-hour talk, with more actual code. In the process of refactoring the talk, my slides had changed and so I lost my place a few times. But once I got around to showing the Pizza demo, things started to click.
For those of you who attended my talk and wanted to get hold of the Pizza demo code, you can get it (and other stuff) at http://nfjs.habuma.com. A few caveats, as discussed in the talk: I'm using Maven to build it, so you'll need to download and install Maven to actually build the code. I'm using Hypersonic DB, but Maven will download that for you. But you will need to download the Pizza DB (at the same URL as above). Finally, as I also mentioned, I designed the code in a way that best demonstrates my points in the talk and not necessarily how I would've designed it in the real world.
Overall a good conference, even though I didn't attend any sessions in which I didn't speak. Next up: The two LoneStar Software Symposiums. Austin in July and Dallas in September.
