Day two of TSSJS was for me mainly a Spring and Oracle experience.

Floyd started the day by mentioning that the approach of inviting the same speakers who contribute to J2EE is "by Design". After a few more polls: 65% is not using or plan to use AOP, only 20% can introduce freely open-source API's, other have a committee to review this, it was time to Spring. (al wie da nie springt, al wie da nie springt, is ...) Rod Johnson dominates the symposium with 4 sessions!!

During lunch Ted Farrell from Oracle gave a fun keynote on "Does J2EE matter ?" with some nice demo's of EJB3 (an early draft implementation can already be downloaded from Oracle) and JSF. I wonder when Oracle will also make the switch to Eclipse ?

When JavaPolis 2005 takes place (by the way that's December 12th till 16th) migrating to EJB3 will be The Hot Topic! Hopefully by then every application server will support it... This is why I attended Mike's Keith talk to see if he could do a similar talk "How to migrate to EJB3" at JavaPolis, which he will Maybe we should again invite Gavin King for a talk on "Migrating Hibernate3 to EJB3", I'll check out his talk today and ask him if it makes sense and if he's interested.

Frank Cohen was sitting next to me during lunch, I knew him of the BEA Technical Director emails and told me he spends a lot of time with Java Communities around the Bay area. We exchanged cards so we could keep in touch on speakers, topics and other related Java stuff that might be of interested for both SIGs.

During that keynote, Floyd pointed out to me that they're using a "monitor" to count the number of minutes the speaker still has available. The application starts blinking when the time is over and I was just waiting to see if it would explode if the speaker exceeds his limit Great idea for JavaPolis. Floyd told me that during next years Symposium, he'll release a DVD of all the talks on it. This is great, the inspiration works both ways, now he stills needs to reduce his entry fee to 300 dollars

Peter Zadrozny said hello while I was in the process of gluing MyFaces with Spring, he confirmed that Oracle Corp. will again support our conference initiative, Great !! That reminds me, I need to get hold of the MacroMedia guys here in the US...

The last session I followed was a BOF from John Rizzo on JavaBlackBelt. I really like the initiative and idea but I was a bit disappointed that during the presentation Null Pointer Exceptions were still thrown Murphy was definitely present because he also turned of the lights for a few seconds.

So today I want to see Dain Sundstrom from Geronimo, Cameron Purdy, Gavin King and Jason Hunter in action and then it's back to Belgium...