Just arrived in Antwerp, Belgium, for the JavaPolis 2006 conference which starts tomorrow morning. Same venue (Metropolis, where I stopped on the way to pick up this year’s goodies bag), same hotel (Astrid–yeah I know it has a tacky name but it’s really not that cheap). Fortunately, the state of Antwerp’s wireless networking has advanced in a year’s time; I now have free wifi in my hotel room as well as at the JavaPolis venue. Allowing me to write this short blog entry.
And so I won’t be accused of blogging just for the sake of it, just because I can blog, I will list the university sessions that I’ll be attending tomorrow.

• First off is Eric Evans, talking about domain-driven design. This promises to be not only a theoretical introduction to the subject, but also an interactive domain modeling session. I’ve been looking forward to hear more about ddd since visiting Sogyo’s evening session two weeks ago. Especially as that session has left me confused whether Rails might be seen as a domain-driven development framework. I’m still not convinced; maybe tomorrow’s session will bring some clarification–and new arguments!
• In the afternoon, I’ll be at room 4 for the Dynamic Languages session. More in particular, for the JRuby part of that one. Originally, this session was scheduled as an all-JRuby university session; but somehow, the Groovy guys have managed to squeeze their way in as well. I really don’t see the point of Groovy, other than proving that Java can be as cool as Ruby if only we mutilate the language enough and make it dynamic. I promise I’ll keep an open mind during their session tomorrow, though I don’t think I’ll be able to take in anything after seeing Charles and Tom perform the miracle of Rails-in-a-war-on-Glassfish.

The all new JavaPolis 2006 bag