Lessons from JavaOne

Here are some things I have learned so far:

• If you're a Java geek, then being next to Rod Johnson, meeting Howard Lewis Ship, seeing the Java Posse interview the Cenqua team, are probably like most normal people seeing Julianne Moore at the grocery store. (I also ran into an architect from my last client and a manager from the client before that!)
  


• With static analysis (ie. FindBugs), you find errors that are not caught by the compiler. This is a lot like a document where you make a typo that is a correctly spelled word, so it doesn't get a red underline. It's nice to have a grammar checker for those situations. That's one way to think of static analysis. It was funny how Bill Pugh ripped on Josh Bloch's JVM code for having obvious typos. Apparently there isn't much underway to do this sort of analysis on scripting languages, but he thinks it's even more important there since the syntax is more relaxed.
  


• WS-Policy is completely un-fun and sounds like consultant-y BS


• Romain Guy is a true programmer rockstar because he has to beg for breakfast donations at the beginning of his talk due to being up till 4:30 am, trashed.


• Non-RESTful web services are tunneling through HTTP. I hadn't thought of it that way before. RESTful services, on the other hand, take advantage of all the infrastructure set up around HTTP since things like caches work at the protocol level.


• The proper way to distribute business rules to your running Drools (or other engine) instances is by publishing them to a content management system. JBoss Rules will soon be integrated with Apache Jackrabbit for this purpose.


• Closures are needed in Java, anonymous inner classes don't cut it. Many APIs and language constructs would be less awkward and verbose if we had them. Neal Gafter is very opinionated.


• A workflow engine can be useful for business intelligence if the history of workflows is data mined.