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by andyhot on java

Interviewed for platform.netbeans.org + Greek JUG + Geertjan

Interview

I was recently interviewed by Geertjan – mostly relating to Netbeans5.5 and the Tapestry support module. It was an interesting talk, go ahead and read it.
BTW, here’s the latest screenshot of the module’s autocomplete capabilities:

Greek JUG

So, anyway, i then ( on Dec 02 ) attended our local JUG (its schedule in greek), where i finally met those 2 Netbeans guys: Roman Strobl and Geertjan Wielenga
Their presentations were excellent and it was clear that everyone in the audience enjoyed them! I can say the exact same thing for the other 2 presentations, from T.Varias and D.Andreadis.
All in all, the event was a success – here are the photos! So, I’m already looking forward for the next one.

Geertjan

Geertjan is a very interesting and pleasant guy. We arranged for some team coding in my house where we came up with the error-annotation support for the tapestry module. Here it is in action:

We had to call it a day quite early though, cause i was once more sleepless (+ a bit sick) ! I must have been coding with my eyes closed during the last half-hour : ) So, anyway, we’ll probably meet again next week, when i’ll be at Prague… should be fun!

by andyhot on java

Java Hellenic User Group

Today, I attended an event organized by our local JUG and I must say I had a really good time. Saw plenty of familiar faces, met some new ones and heard lots of interesting stuff.

The event started with lots of coffee : ) I think it was 4 cups but they were needed – I was up all night coding more AJAX goodies for TACOS and TAPESTRY.

Anyway, after the coffee we heard a quick intro on the history of the JUG and the first presentation was on ‘JBoss Status Update, Business Model, Products and Roadmaps’ by Dimitris Andreadis. It was a short and pleasant intro on the JBoss company, its model, its products and its future. I liked it, but I was also shocked by a few questions from the audience. It seems, some people are still afraid of open source – they think there’s a trap somewhere. Could it be the “not built here” syndrome, or the “it’s free it’s crap” one?

Well, there followed an ‘Introduction to Java Data Objects (JDO 2)’ by G.Kostaras. I must say I didn’t enjoy this one – at least for me it was useless. There wasn’t even a comparision with Hibernate, apart from some marketing stuff. But again, judging from the audience, it seems that many people simply do not get ORM tools. It must be the same syndromes again. We really need more training + be more open-minded…

Then, there was ‘Practical Iterative Development’ by K.Flokos. Due to my fatigue, I was planning to take a nap on this, but I simply couldn’t. Mr Flokos is an excellent presenter and knows his stuff thoroughtly. I’m sure the material presented stems from personal experience as well as general knowledge, and I’d sure like to download it when it gets available. It would also be very interesting and educating ( I believe for both of us ) to work together, but there’s no way I’m going to Belgium : )

Finally, we had ‘The clustering architecture of JBoss’ again by Mr Andreadis and again an excellent and thought-provoking presentation. I’ve never needed to really use JBoss, but I’m downloading it right now to witness its clustering capabilities. And I know that TAPESTRY is a really cluster-friendly web framework.

All in all, it was a nice Saturday morning. I hope there’ll be more of this, and perhaps I can arrange to present TAPESTRY as well as some AJAX magic there…