How many people work with databases? (Everybody raises their hand except me.)

How many people don't work with databases? (Just little old me. So what was I doing there? Just trying to see how the other half lives.)

I did learn quite a lot at this talk. Perhaps of the most interest to me (as part of the JDK team) was the fact that JPA needs Byte Code Instrumentation, in particular to support lazy loading. This can be via either -javaagent or magic ClassLoaders that modify the byte code of classes as they are loaded. The latter approach is called "Load-Time Weaving" (LTW).

At the keynote speech last night, Rod Johnson (the Father of Spring) enumerated the impressively long list of places where Spring is being used, among them the Voca system, used for nearly all inter-bank transfers in the UK, and the system that allows French taxpayers (like me) to consult their tax status. Of course Rod was preaching to the converted, since presumably everybody here is a Spring user. Except me.

One other thing I picked up is that BEA is using Spring as a core part of their forthcoming Java EE 5 app server.

Rod said a whole lot of other things during this keynote, but I was zoning out a bit since I'd been up for almost 24 hours at that stage, 24 hours that included a transatlantic flight preceded by a stop-off in Airport Purgatory.

Another theme that's showing up strongly is dynamic languages. In particular the notion of automatically refreshing the copy of a script being used by a live application, for example running in a web container. You modify the script in your IDE and save the file. The Spring container can be configured to poll for script file modifications and switch automatically to the modified version for new requests. This means you can modify a script and see the results of your modification in your web browser immediately, without having to redeploy the app.

I expect to be writing more later. My own speech is tomorrow!