No Fluff Just Stuff 2007 Orlando, Day Two

Originally posted 2007-09-02 16:38:03

I spent the morning of Day Two with David Geary, JSF, Seam, Facelets and Ajax4jsf. The session came in two parts, and I could have stayed for a part three and a part four if they’d been offered. The Seam/Facelets/Ajax4jsf development model represents significant advancements beyond the Servlet/JSP model we’re preparing to upgrade, and Geary does a terrific job presenting those technologies. He seems to get into a lot of different technologies. He also presented Rico, Prototype, and Scriptaculous, as well as a two-part series on Google Web Toolkit. He presents very well, with clear-cut examples, and leverages the Mac’s built-in zooming and window hiding capabilities to display and focus what’s relevant.

One reason geeks inadvertently amuse non-geeks comes from what we find amusing. In Geary’s JSF/Seam presentation, one attendee complained about problems he had when developing on Windows. A full two seconds of silence elapsed, and the Geary said, \”Get a real OS.\” The entire room erupted in laughter. Later, a coworker said something about WebSphere, and after the requisite pregnant pause, Geary said, \”Get a real app server.\” No wonder the business folks don’t let us play golf with important customers.

All the buzz about Enterprise Service Bus that I’ve conveniently ignored has nagged at me, so I attended Mark Richards’ session called \”The Enterprise Service Bus: Do We Really Need It?\” The loaded title might lead you to believe that Richards claims no one needs ESBs, but you’d be wrong. Instead, Richards did a nice job outlining what an ESB is and what situations could profit from one. I concluded that our company needs no ESB. Now I won’t feel nagged by my ESB ignorance.

I ended the day in Bruce Tate’s \”Effective Teams\” presentation. He started by outlining a staffing scenario in which the top few programmers direct the mediocre many. I felt sick, as I always thought Tate to be a smart guy, and couldn’t believe he espoused this foolishness. Happily, he doesn’t, but wanted to point out that too many hiring managers fall into that morass. He said to get the best programmers you can and pay them whatever they want. He also spent some time going over interviewing techniques, including having people write code. He threw out a sample problem: have them convert Roman Numeral numbers to integers.

I wish he hadn’t done that.

I spent the rest of the talk pretending to listen while I mentally coded a Roman Numeral to integer converter. After the presentation, I ran up to my hotel room, wrote the unit tests, wrote the algorithm I devised, and ran the tests. It all worked, first time. Of course, I avoided addressing the hard details, like how many lesser numbers you can put in front of a greater number to effect subtration, or the maximum length of runs of the same letter, but what I’d done satisfied me. Management decision 🙂