SpringOne 2GX 2010 in Chicago

Last week I attended our annual SpringOne 2GX developer conference and I saw many excellent presentations by many different folks. As is common at a developer conference, there were numerous times where I was torn by the decision to attend one talk and not another due to time scheduling. Probably the most intriguing talk I attended was a Technical deep-dive of hypervisors and virtualization for developers by Richard McDougall. I learned a lot about virtualization that I didn't know and, as always, Richard's depth of knowledge on this topic is completely impressive! But my favorite talk was one delivered by my friends Dave Syer and Mark Fisher titled Concurrent and Distributed Applications with Spring.

I always enjoy discussions, books, articles, etc. on the topic of Java concurrency, but Dave and Mark's session was different. In the same vein as the Java Concurrency in Practice book, Dave and Mark brought a practicality to the topic that really scored a goal with the attendees. When I go to conferences I tend to judge sessions not solely based on my own opinion, but moreso on the opinion of other attendees. Not only was this session completely packed, but it stayed packed the entire time, i.e., people were not walking out early. This was due to the way that Dave and Mark delivered a difficult topic in a way that all Java developers can understand. What many of the conference sessions, books, articles, etc. have in common when presenting Java concurrency is that they don't seek to simplify the content and present it in a way that makes it easier to understand. Dave and Mark really tore down most of the complexity with Java concurrency and presented it in a way that makes it seem approachable. In fact, I saw more people taking notes in this session than in any other that I attended. They also provided hands-on examples that were simplified and to the point. I think that they could have gone on discussing this topic for another 90 minutes and people would have stayed. Now, aren't you jealous that you weren't there?!

Other excellent sessions included:

• Gaining visibility into enterprise Spring applications with tc server Spring Edition by Steve Mayzak
• Clustering and load-balancing with tc Server and httpd by Mark Thomas
• Mastering MVC 3 by Keith Donald
• Developer Tools to push your Productivity by Andy Clement and Christian Dupuis
• What's new in Spring Integration 2.0? by Mark Fisher and Oleg Zhurakousky
• Diagnosing Performance Issues, with Spring Insight, Before it's a Problem by Scott Andrews and Jon Travis
• Spring and Java EE 6 by Juergen Hoeller
• Payments in one API by John Davies and Rossen Stoyanchev
• How to build business applications using Google Web Toolkit and Spring Roo by Amit Manjhi
• Harnessing the power of HTML5 by Scott Andrews and Jeremy Grelle
• Case Study: EMC Next-Generation ERP Integration Architecture by Brian Dussault and Tom McCuch
• Case Study: Migrating Hyperic HQ from EJB to Spring by Jennifer Hickey
• Monitoring Spring Batch and Spring Integration with SpringSource Hyperic by Dave Syer

There were also tons of really great Groovy and Grails talks such as:

• Transforming to Groovy by Venkat Subramaniam
• GORM Inside And Out by Jeff Brown
• Improving your Groovy Code Quality by Venkat Subramaniam
• Tuning Grails applications by Peter Ledbrook
• Unit and Functional Testing using Groovy by Venkat Subramaniam
• Groovy and Concurrency by Paul King
• Tomorrow's Tech Today: HTML 5 + Grails by Scott Davis

So if you didn't make it to SpringOne this year, now you have just a taste of what you missed. And hopefully you have good reason to consider attending next year. Any guesses on where the conference might take place next year? Of course, I'm rooting for Boulder, CO. Adam? Are you listening? ;-)