SpringSource University in Denver

On Tuesday morning I had just returned from a run at about 9:35am and was checking my messages before I showered and began working for the day. As I was reading various messages, dripping sweat and sipping on some water, I was pinged by my friend and colleague Filip Hanik on IRC. He told me that he was sitting in a classroom in Denver for the SpringSource University Core Spring Training. Here's how the conversation went:

Filip: hey
Bruce: hey, what's up?
Filip: sitting at Core Spring in Denver, but there is no trainer
Bruce: whoops
Bruce: sorry to hear that, is there anything I can do to help?
Filip: yeah, you can come down here and teach this course :)
Bruce: are you serious?
Filip: yes
Bruce: headed for the shower now, see you about 11

By 11am I was in Denver and teaching the first day of the course.

Lucky for me, Chris Beams, a stellar consultant/engineer/trainer at SpringSource, was en route to deliver the rest of the course. Chris arrived later Tuesday evening and taught the course for the rest of the week through Friday and I was lucky enough to sit in. Chris went the extra mile to arrive early and stay late for the rest of the week and even wound up finishing on time on Friday afternoon, a testament to his talents, for sure.

Using Maven? You Should Be Using m2eclipse

If you use Maven for your Java projects, then you should take a look at m2eclipse plugin for Eclipse. After all, there's now a whole book on m2eclipse instead of just a single chapter!

Enterprise Integration Patterns in Practice at JavaOne 2009

Last week I was in San Francisco to speak at JavaOne 2009 to deliver a talk named Enterprise Integration Patterns in Practice where I co-presented with Andreas Egloff from Sun.

We talked about implementing EIP patterns using Apache Camel and Sun's Fuji. I used ActiveMQ in my demo which was rather short but worked well (yay! the demo gods smiled on me last week :-) ) and Andreas showed off Sun's web-based EIP editor. Although this editor looks very cool and Andreas showed how to edit scripting code in each component on the diagram, it left me wondering how it interfaces with Java code. After our demos, my laptop would not flip back to the presentation at the end (which presented an abrupt ending) but still we received a lot of complements throughout the rest of the week.

Beyond the talk, I got to see tons of friends who I don't see that often throughout the year including Debbie, Guillaume, Hiram and Rob, as well as many new SpringSource colleagues (since the acquisition of Hyperic). I also met many, many new folks including Colin and Jamie. I was also lucky enough to eat Thai food twice (love the yellow curry) and sushi once during the week - mmmmmmmmmmm.

If you would like a copy of the presentation, just drop me an email and I'll send it your way (bruce DOT snyder AT gmail DOT com). I'm not sure how much sense the slides will make without the delivery, but it seems like folks are always requesting my presentations after the fact.