I've been attending Sun Tech Days in Darling Harbour. I attended the "Enterprise Track", but wanted to go to the "Desktop Track" at around 12:20 to check out "Java SE 6 Top 10 Features and Java SE 7", but it was full. It turned out that I was not the only one planning to do such a thing. I met some colleagues and ex-colleagues and had a time to catch up during lunch. The afternoon sessions were, I have to say, more useful to me, as there were practical examples and demos that I can relate to.
A few attendees asked an interesting question during the last session. The question was something like "If I was to create a java application with RDBMS back end, which framework should I use?". This is definitely one of the questions that I had always wanted to ask. It was a very good question, I thought, given the vast amount of frameworks that java developers can use in order to create an application. Well, there was no definite answer. Each framework has its own advantage/disadvantage. Spring's advantage, for example, is its ability to unit test business logic outside the container, and also AOP is useful. It is also interesting to note that Glassfish server now almost matches Tomcat in terms of startup time. I did notice that when the presenter started the server using NetBeans, it was pretty quick.
Anyway, I had fun in the event, and we had free lunch, dinner, and drinks, both alcoholic and non alcoholic..
