I arrived in Dallas late last night sleepy and hungry, so I took care of both needs before waking up this morning to write my last thoughts on TSE.
On the final day of TSE, I attended Colin Sampaleanu's "Spring and EJB" talk. It was a very very good talk. The bulk of the talk compared the capabilities of Spring with EJB 3. The verdict: Well Colin said what I've been saying for awhile now--that is, EJB 3 is certainly a step in the right direction, but it still doesn't match up with the capabilities of Spring.
On the plus side, Colin showed how Spring 2.0 will provide support for the Java Persistence API (JPA...or what some call EJB 3 persistence). Specifically, there will be a LocalEntityManagerFactoryBean and a JpaDaoSupport class, which provides JPA support similar to that of LocalSessionFactoryBean and HibernateDaoSupport for Hibernate (and other similar support for other persistence mechanisms).
The last part of Colin's talk focused on the support Spring has for integrating with EJB 2.x
I was planning on going to either Ben Alex's "Advanced Acegi" talk or possibly Justin Gehtland's "Spring and AJAX" talk, but I ended up talking with Rick Hightower in the hallway and decided to not attend either. Instead I went up to help Raymie pack and get ready to meet SuperShuttle for our ride to the airport.
While waiting for SuperShuttle to show up, a large portion of the Spring team (Rod, Juergen, Colin, Thomas, and Rob) walked by. I stopped Rob to ask him about something I noticed missing in the Spring 2.0 JAR he had given me. Rob and Rod ended up hanging out with us and chatting for awhile. Maisy (my 1-year old daughter) was particular taken by Rod and was talking with him (her 1 year-old vocabulary is limited, but I assume that it was about the shortcomings of anemic domain models and how this will be addressed in Spring 2.0).
In the final analysis: I have found that it is really hard to fully enjoy a conference when you're a speaker, because you are too busy worrying about presenting your own sessions. That said, TSE 2005 was an awesome opportunity. The big news that Rod mentioned during his Friday night keynote was that we'd be doing this again next year. I can't wait for TSE 2006.
