NFJS Day 2
Two of the three NFJS sessions that I attended yesterday were great, for different reasons.
One of these was "Testing with dependencies", presented by Venkat Subramaniam. It was great because it was a useful talk, well done, one that might actually help me in my work. The focus was on using mock objects in your tests so that you don't have to rely on external resources (like the file system, or database connections) to run them. He explained why you might not want to rely on such resources, gave some nice concrete stories to illustrate how he had used mock objects on real projects, and knuckled down with some code examples. He did the coding live, during the presentation. Normally I think this is a mistake - it takes too long, and too many things can go wrong. But he handled it very smoothly and quickly, so it turned into a plus. He made the point that you can "hand toss" your own mock objects - the talk focused mainly on this kind. So you don't have to work with a framework such as EasyMock or Mockito if you don't want to. He wound up by showing a simple example from EasyMock.
The other great talk was Ted Neward's "The Busy Java Developer's Guide to Java7". The talk is probably not going to be useful to me, except if I go on an interview where they ask about exotic identifiers. However, since I'm usually buried in work, I don't spend much time keeping up with the latest developments. This was a nice review of what's to come. On top of that, I find Ted's talks very entertaining - he's not shy about expressing his opinion, and I like his sense of humor.
In addition, I attended Craig Walls' talk about Spring 3.0. This talk was not up to snuff when compared with the others I'd attended. I think it had more to do with the way he presented things than anything else. The other speakers had a vibrant enthusiasm for the information that they were dispensing. With Craig, I got the feeling that he was either tired or not very interested. It may have been the former; he mentioned that he had arrived at 5 am that morning, which couldn't have helped. So I wouldn't write him off as a speaker based on this experience.
The last session I attended was the Birds of a Feather (BoF) session. There were two this time, "Architecture" and "Languages". I chose the "Languages" session, with Scott Davis and Ted Neward, mainly because it was the end of the day and I knew that I'd find Ted Neward entertaining, no matter how tired I was. And I was right. After sitting in on this session, I may even give Scala a try.
One of these was "Testing with dependencies", presented by Venkat Subramaniam. It was great because it was a useful talk, well done, one that might actually help me in my work. The focus was on using mock objects in your tests so that you don't have to rely on external resources (like the file system, or database connections) to run them. He explained why you might not want to rely on such resources, gave some nice concrete stories to illustrate how he had used mock objects on real projects, and knuckled down with some code examples. He did the coding live, during the presentation. Normally I think this is a mistake - it takes too long, and too many things can go wrong. But he handled it very smoothly and quickly, so it turned into a plus. He made the point that you can "hand toss" your own mock objects - the talk focused mainly on this kind. So you don't have to work with a framework such as EasyMock or Mockito if you don't want to. He wound up by showing a simple example from EasyMock.
The other great talk was Ted Neward's "The Busy Java Developer's Guide to Java7". The talk is probably not going to be useful to me, except if I go on an interview where they ask about exotic identifiers. However, since I'm usually buried in work, I don't spend much time keeping up with the latest developments. This was a nice review of what's to come. On top of that, I find Ted's talks very entertaining - he's not shy about expressing his opinion, and I like his sense of humor.
In addition, I attended Craig Walls' talk about Spring 3.0. This talk was not up to snuff when compared with the others I'd attended. I think it had more to do with the way he presented things than anything else. The other speakers had a vibrant enthusiasm for the information that they were dispensing. With Craig, I got the feeling that he was either tired or not very interested. It may have been the former; he mentioned that he had arrived at 5 am that morning, which couldn't have helped. So I wouldn't write him off as a speaker based on this experience.
The last session I attended was the Birds of a Feather (BoF) session. There were two this time, "Architecture" and "Languages". I chose the "Languages" session, with Scott Davis and Ted Neward, mainly because it was the end of the day and I knew that I'd find Ted Neward entertaining, no matter how tired I was. And I was right. After sitting in on this session, I may even give Scala a try.
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posted by md at 4:16 AM
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