TheServerSide Java Symposium - Las Vegas

TheServerSide Java Symposium was
in Las Vegas on March 21-23.
This
year was my first to speak (and attend, for that matter). It was
a well-organized conference with some top-notch content. The
sessions that I enjoyed the most were:

• The Enterprise Service Bus: Do We Really Need It? By
  Mark Richards of IBM. Mark is an excellent and
  entertaining speaker. This presentation was similar (but
  not identical) to a
  presentation of his that is posted out
  on InfoQ. The answer to the question in the title of the
  presentation is, not surprisingly, "it depends" on your needs.
  One of the real values of the presentation is Mark's deciphering
  of the various vendors' descriptions of what an Enterprise
  Service Bus actually is.




• Measuring Up Performance by
  Kirk Pepperdine. This presentation
  is drawn from Kirk's consulting experience. He discussed performance
  tuning anti-patterns. In other words, things that people do wrong
  when they are attempting to solve performance problems. I recognized
  my behavior in one of the anti-patterns that he described. I discussed
  it the following day
  during my presentation: Memory Leaks in Java Applications:
  Different Tools for Different Types of Leaks.




• Glassbox: Open Source Monitoring and Troubleshooting
  by Ron Bodkin. I had heard of Glassbox
  but had not had a chance to study it. Ron included some very nicely done
  demos which helped highlight the value that Glassbox provides. I could see
  using it to help do an initial narrowing-down of performance problems on a web
  application.




• Effective Concurrent Java
  and Java Performance Myths: "How do JVMs Really Work?" by
  Brian Goetz. I had exchanged
  emails with Brian, but had never met him before. He's an excellent
  public speaker. Through a scheduling quirk, he ended up doing both his
  talks on the same day - and he did the performance myths
  talk twice. He was still going strong at the end of the day which was impressive.
  Anyway, of all the material in the performance myths talk the most important
  is this: advice on how to write Java code that performs well is short-lived because
  the JVM keeps improving all the time. So
  if someone gives you a tip, double-check to make sure it is still valid.




• JRuby: Ruby-Tinted Classes
  by Charles Nutter and
  Thomas Enebo.
  I don't know much about Ruby -
  although I have
  read some books about it.
  To me there were two things that were really interesting about this presentation.
  First, they started by doing a poll on usage of Ruby and a lot more hands
  went up than a year ago (according to the presenters). Second, they included
  a demo of the
  Ruby support available in
  the NetBeans IDE. For those of you
  who have an interest in that Ruby support, be sure to come to NetBeans Day
  on May 7 (it's free, but you do have to
  register, more info.
  here).

Next up for TheServerSide Java Symposium: Barcelona in June. Necssito diccionari anglès-català. :-)