The ninth annual FISL conference was April 17-19 in the city of Porto Alegre, which is the capital city of the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul. I was fortunate enough to have my memory leaks talk selected, so I asked my co-worker Bruno Souza if he could set up some user group meetings and/or university visits in the days immediately before the conference.

This is sort of like asking if it would be possible to get another slice of grilled meat at a churrascaria; his answer was: "Of course!" :-)

In Brazil, everyone who knows Java knows Bruno - and even people who don't know Java know Bruno, including the president, as shown in this photo.

So Bruno said to me: "How busy do you want to be?" I responded: "Very." I'll think twice before I say that to him again.... :-D

I did presentations for the following Java users groups: SouJava, Java Noroeste, Java do Sertão, and ceJug. And I did a presentation at Universidade Católica de Brasília. The end result: within my first few days in the country, I traveled almost as many miles within Brazil as I had flown to get to Brazil.

But it was worth it. The food was excellent, the events were well-attended, and the best part (as usual) was getting to meet so many nice people. I was very well cared for in Brazil.

One of my goals was to show folks some of the new features coming in NetBeans IDE 6.1 (which is due out this week). One of the most important new features is powerful support for JavaScript. The support is built on what was put into the 6.0 release to support Ruby. As a result, powerful code-completion is included.

Now I'm not a JavaScript guru and have only played around with it a bit. Luckily, my co-worker Brian Leonard put together a very nice demo script that highlights the most important features. So I had been using that and had even managed to impress some hardcore JavaScript users with the editor's features at the first couple of events.

In Sertão, however, the code completion support did not work. Anyone who does as many live software demos as I do has been in this situation before - all the sudden, everything that worked great just moments before stops working:

I was stumped. Since it was the end of the final presentation of a long day, I went ahead and kept going and wrapped up my presentation without continuing that demo.

Immediately after I finished, one of the attendees rushed up to me and asked: "How can the editor provide JavaScript support outside of a <script> tag?" That's when it hit me like a ton of bricks: "Doh! I was adding JavaScript code into an .html file without a <script> tag. No wonder the editor did not work!"

So this is one of the few instances where one of my demos failed because of the presenter, instead of the software. In my defense, over the previous 80 hours I had only had about 12 hours of sleep, so I was a little off-balance. Nevertheless, the question made me realize what I was doing wrong, so I did the demo for a small group of folks who crowded around my laptop; the first feature of which is to show one of the flavors of code completion:

Photos from the Java Noroeste, Java do Sertão, and ceJug events are below.