First, an observation - today, I decided to stop lugging my laptop around, and left it at the hotel - I’m fully dependent on the SunRay terminals today - the wireless connectivity left a lot to be desired yesterday, anyway I’m sure that the virtualization network is under maximum load right now, lunchtime at the peak of the conference. I tried several times, but could not find a free Ubuntu instance in the virtualization pool, so opted for Windows 7 - of course, one was available immediately. So, not surprisingly, this group apparently prefers Linux to Windows (or was there just a smaller pool of Ubuntu instances?) Also, interestingly, OpenSolaris wasn’t even a choice on the menu today…hmmmm….

This morning, I skipped the general session - it looked like it was going to be a big ad for a wireless provider, and that was confirmed by several people that talked to who did attend, and wished that they had also skipped it.

I attended two sessions:

“Getting Serious About Build Automation: Using Maven in the Real World” was presented by John ferguson Smart from Wakaleo Consulting, in New Zealand. The session was very well attended, and very informative. John talked about advanced dependency management techniques, POM inheritance and refactoring, multi-module projects, and other “advanced” techniques. He also showed Eclipse’s very nice Maven support through the use of the m2eclipse plugin, and demonsrated the use of the maven release plugin. John finished up with a discussion of deployment automation based on maven and nexus. Check out John’s blog at weblogs.java.net/blog/johnsmart/

Oh, and by the way, Windows 7 locked up on me while I was editing that link, and had to be rebooted - did I mention that I despise Windows? Thank goodness that WordPress auto-saves drafts, and I didn’t lose anything.

The second session that I attended was “Ajax Performance Tuning and Best Practices” by Doris Chen from Sun and Greg Murray from NetFlix (and formerly Sun). There was too much good information to list here, but most of the best practices have been implemented (by Greg) in an open-source project named “ProtoRabbit”. All I can say is, it looks like an excellent tool - check out http://wiki.github.com/gmurray/protorabbit