Thoughts on JavaOne
I spend last week up at the JavaOne conference in San Francisco, my schedule was pretty full but I did at least manage to touch base with some old acquaintances and catch up with a few friends.
I the end I only managed (keynotes aside) to get to three sessions, one on the semantic Web, once on Engineers as an endangered species and most importantly the JSF 2.0 specification.
The former sessions where pretty good and thought provoking, so certainly a good use of time. The JSF session, however, was, how shall I put this, disappointing...
Disappointing on two levels I have to point out, first of all the presentation itself was not at all well rehearsed or timed and much as I might admire Ed Burns and Roger Kitan from a technical perspective, the session and demos failed to impress.
However, I can be really forgiving on presentation, it's bread and butter to me so I'm probably overcritical. However the big let down was the content of the specification itself. This really worries me.
The theme of the release to borrow Ed's phrasing is "Sow and Harvest", basically the strategy of seeing how the wider JSF community takes the existing infrastructure and invents on top of it and then taking that invention and standardizing this in the Spec.
Now that's a good approach, but it really looks like too little has been harvested in this round, most things seem to be catchup with JSF 1.0 tweaks like Shale, not stuff building on top of 1.2 like ADF. For example, although there is mention of a new memory scope, there was no mention of addressing the inadequacies in the controller itself. How you can do one without the other?
Apparently we'll get a preview of the 2.0 specification document shortly, maybe there will be more nuggets of gold in there to cheer me up, I can only wish...