Midwest Java Technology Days: Minneapolis

Here are my thoughts on the Midwest Java Technology Days: Minneapolis that I attended yesterday. (In order to get them out quickly I haven't refactored them.)

Free stuff: breakfast, lunch, networking snacks, t-shirts, pen (mine didn't work), and note pad. (the conference was also free.)

Tim Bray: Pretty interesting. Covered language and internet trends. Companies may not want to send their employees because he kept tellings us to quit our jobs and start a new business or get a better job. :-)

EJB 3.0 and Java Persistence API: I have never used EJB but I found it quite boring. Details were covered too much for the high-level overview I sought.

My work is only 7 blocks from the conference location so I skipped the next section to go back to work for a while.

An overview of the Java FX family, and Beyond: Very interesting and provided a good overview of what is coming. I look forward to trying the designer tool and Java FX Script when they are fully released. As a mostly server-side developer I think they will really help me make clients much faster and better. (Joshua Marinacci looked different than his weblog photo.)

Java SE 6 - Top 10 features: Too much dwelling on details and covering things from Java 1.5. (i.e. detailed demo of jconsole -- mostly on the features that were already present in Java 1.5).