JavaOne 2008 Day 2
The second day was really busy for me and therefore I could only attend a single session, namely “Closures Cookbook” by Neil Gafter. He is a really good presenter (often performing together with Josh Bloch) and I enjoyed the session. Most of it revolved around timing an operation and how to accomplish this in Java using closures. This was a great example for demonstrating the purpose of closures (reducing lots of boilerplate code) and also how complex closures can become when returning values or dealing with exceptions. I am still not a big fan of the closure syntax and I continue to keep fond memories of how elegant the Smalltalk syntax was.
Last year the conference was buzzing with everything about AJAX. This year it looks to me that this has cooled off quite a bit. On the one hand AJAX is now somehow established, on the other hand people realized that AJAX only addresses some of the user interface challenges of Web applications. We had a considerable number of visitors at our booth who complained about AJAX and they are looking for alternatives. This primarily holds true for business applications and is also started to get noticed by analysts, e.g. Forrester.
