JavaOne is go

Alright, San Francisco: here we come! Our development group is going to JavaOne together this year. Actually, this is the first time there has been a development group to talk about, since I was it's only member until this summer. And there seems to be much fun going on. I'm particularly looking forward to the sessions with a focus on other languages. Sometimes I find it strange to have lots of Java Certifications and still loathe the language.

Things I'm not going to miss: The JRuby session, Best practices with Generics and other Tiger features, What's new and exciting with AspectJ, Rapid web application development with Grails, Portlet Best Practices, Trails in depth, Server-side scripting, Scripting in Mustang, Effective Java reloaded, Mustang and Dolphin. And these are just a few. Wow, it's going to be a busy week, and trying to meet up with lots of friends and contacts in SF is going to make a complete experience of this.

By the way, it's interesting to see that there are many sessions on Spring, Dependency Injection and other stuff that make Java lightweight. One title especially caught my eye: "DI: Configuration Files Must Die". My take on the configuration file-issue is to have it as executable as possible. A project I'm working with on and off in purview of Ologix will use Common Lisp and judicious use of macros to create the configuration information. The nifty thing about this is that I haven't yet decided what the main language will be. It could be Lisp, it could be Ruby or it could be Java. But whatever I choose it will still be fairly easy for me to handle the configuration issue. In Lisp I can just read-eval it, in Ruby it's very easy to parse and in Java I could use Jatha and expand the macros to calls into the Java structure. Not very efficient, maybe, but configuration is not performance. Flexibility is king.

Hope to see you in San Francisco.