Third Day at Colorado Software Summit 2008

Today (Wednesday, 22 October 2008) was the third day of presentations at the Colorado Software Summit 2008. It had started snowing last night and there was snow on the roads this morning. It seemed to snow most of the day, though it had melted during the warm afternoon. However, the snow started sticking again as the weather cooled off. Today was the day of the conference in which I was scheduled to present each of my two presentations. For the rest of the week, I only had (Monday/Tuesday) or have (Thursday/Friday) one session each day.


Hermod Opstvedt - Pimp My Webapp (with Google Web Toolkit)

Google Web Toolkit is another one of those things which I have had a passing familiarity with having seen it presented at a Denver Java Users Group meeting and reading about it. Even though I doubted (and still doubt) that I'd choose to use GWT over Flex or OpenLaszlo, I was very interested in this presentation because I do think GWT has some attractive features and because so many people at the conference who attended Matt Raible's Appceleration presentation and Kelvin Lawrence's UI BOF seem to be using it. Hermod Opstvedt's presentation was far more in-depth than previous presentations that I have seen on GWT and I learned quite a few new things.

As Hermod was speaking about the advantages of GWT, I was reminded of how similar many of these advantages are to those of using Flex or OpenLaszlo. For example, GWT, Flex, and OpenLaszlo abstract browser-specific details from the developer and both GWT and Flex/ActionScript are arguably more friendly to Java developers than JavaScript. Hermod also covered using GWT with Hibernate and several other products.


Filip Hanik - Zero Latency HTTP — Using Comet with Apache Tomcat

I attended Filip Hanik's presentation on Bayeux the day before this and then attended the presentation Zero Latency HTTP — Using Comet with Apache Tomcat today. Filip is a Tomcat committer and I appreciated his brief historical background regarding Tomcat and HTTP (which Filip pointed out has been stagnant for several years since HTTP 1.1). I really appreciated Filip's coverage of Comet and feel like I have a significantly better understanding of where Comet implementations are at. It is discouraging that Comet implementations are still far from standard and differ for each server. I spoke with Filip after his presentation and determined that Bayeux might be the best best currently to play with Comet concepts.


Overall Comments for the Day

Because I presented twice today, I did not get to attend as many other sessions as I would have liked. However, I appreciated the greater exposure to Comet and Google Web Toolkit. I have been very impressed so far with the quality of the attendees of this conference. As a first-time speaker at Colorado Software Summit, I see a different side of the attendees than I have in the past. I have always known that the attendees of this conference are bright, inquisitive, experienced, and knowledgeable, but I have noticed this time that they ask particular insightful questions in the presentations and that they are very kind about telling me things they like about my presentations. I sat by an attendee at lunch today who is attending the conference for his ninth time. While this is impressive, there are two individuals who have attended all 17 editions of the conference and many who have attended ten or more times.

It has already been a great week and we still aren't done. I'm afraid, however, that I still have not won the daily raffle for an iPod Nano.