Sunday, December 03, 2006

The Open Source Community... Loony or Enlightened?

I attended the Lightweight Java seminar with a colleague last week. The seminar was hosted by Virtuas. Virtuas is a services company specializing in open source software. Their stated mission is to assist their clients in becoming self-sufficient users of open-source software. More on this is a minute, but first a quick overview of the seminar itself, which was composed of four talks.

The first talk covered the Java Persistence Architecture, or JPA, which is part of EJB3. A simple description of JPA is annotation support for persistent objects. The JPA is defined in JSR 220 and represents an attempt to simplify J2EE. Since I'm not an "enterprisey" guy, I can't discuss how well it addresses this need. I do have some experience with JPA, as it is implemented in Hibernate. I will be giving a talk of my own on JPA use with Hibernate in January at the Boulder JUG. I will be focusing on the use of annotations in Hibernate without the use of XML configuration, so definately an anti-enterprise spin. I will post the preso after the JUG. At this talk, the speaker had a great example of persistence using a snake object that eats rabbit objects. Call me twisted, but I liked it!

The second talk covered Spring 2.0. Spring, in keeping with the "lightweight" theme of the seminar, provides a lightweight container environment that simplifies the use of other open source components including Hibernate, AOP, web services, LDAP, ACEGI security, an MVC controller, and more. Of course, "simple" is relative. In the case of Spring, this means that while you write less code, you substitute large XML configuration files. Anymore, every time I am told "less code through configuration", I feel like I am at a timeshare sales presentation. Caveat emptor! Even with the configuration overhead, I do think that Spring brings a lot to the table. It is definitely on the list of things to get up to speed on.

The third talk covered AJAX and JSF along with the DOJO library (word of advice, 4.0 is buggy, us 3.1 for now). These are tools that make some great web interfaces. Added to the list.

Finally, a talk on the AppFuse 2.0 framework. This framework ties all of the other pieces together when developing web apps. Since I don't do much web development at this point, some of the talk was lost on me. Probably the biggest take from the talk is that Maven is getting bigger and is now on the LOTTD (yeah, it's a long list).

Prior to the seminar, we weren't sure what to expect. We halfway expected to be subjected to a non-stop flood of markitecture. On top of that, the weather was really crappy. We really debated attending. Fortunately, we decided to go. It was definitely worth braving the weather. When we first arrived, we found that we were getting an amazing "goodie bag", which included three great technical books (on Java, Spring, and Eclipse) and a nice day-planner. The goodies were courtesy of SourceBeat. Want to impress a geek? Give them tech books! And it just got better from there. After a very short (less than 10 minutes) introduction of the company, they jumped right into the presos. Not only no markitecture, Virtuas took the soft sell to the extreme... almost a no sell? The great goodies, excellent talks, and lack of sales pressure all contributed to the inspiration of this blogs title. Can a company, which depends upon revenue from consulting on products that are free, be successful when using a marketing tool such as this seminar? I hope so.

As a way to say thanks, I started thinking about what I could do to help them. I'm not really in a position right now where I need their help, but I will keep them in mind for future issues. In the meantime, I am hoping that by blogging about them, I can help is some small way to get the word out about this enlightened (as opposed to loony) company.

2 comments:

Demian L. Neidetcher said...

Spot on, the half day Virtuas seminar was great. Very impressive guys, great topics.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the nice comments. I'm glad somebody out there has a sense of humor similar to mine... regarding the snake/rabbit example that is. I can't take credit for it though... it was 100% stolen in the true spirit of open source from OpenJPA's tutorials.