Occasional Thoughts

Yesterday I and a couple of colleagues held a couple of Pecha Kucha sessions. Pecha Kucha is a presentation methodology that limits the presentation to 20 slides where the next slide is displayed after 20 seconds automatically. During the preparation and for the presentation session we felt the lack for a decent timer that counts down from 20 to1 for each slide and gives a clearly visible feedback before the time for the current slide ends.

As I already wrote I have visited the JAX conference last year. Two of the best sessions have been repeated at the W-Jax in Munich and are available online (both in German language):

• Angewandte Architekturkommunikation, Dr. Gernot Starke
• Java Programmierung im Multicorezeitalter, Angelika Langer
  

...and brought many new ideas home. JAX 2008 was a great event, but also very exhausting. There were a total of 211 sessions from which to choose from starting at 08:30 in the morning with session until the late evening.

Main themes as I have collected them where:

• Dynamic Languages
• Spring
• SOA
• Eclipse
• Architectures
• Web frameworks and RIAs
• Complexity of the classic JEE offers. I would even say that I heard of a severe crisis of JEE and I doubt that a radically simplified EJB 3.1 will change peoples mind on that.

I used FreeMind to collect notes and here are the unedited notes I took during some of the sessions:

General Notes abut JAX 2008

In general JAX 2008 had more than 2000 participants - a record in the history of this conference. There where 211 sessions, 22 workshops and 10 short talks presented by 178 speakers. In my opinion JAX 2009 should rather try to reduce the amount of sessions and given the presenters more time. Most talks had to rush through the content as the time was limited to an hour and there was so much to say.

Here is the list of sessions from the time planer that I plan to attend:

JAX 2008 is held in Wiesbaden from April 21st to 25th. I will be there for the three main conference days plus the workshop day on Friday. I already fear the need to choose between several talks that sound very interesting but are running in parallel. I guess I'll need a magic time turner like Hermine had in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Askaban.