Wednesday afternoon, JavaPolis really got into gear for me. I saw short ‘quicky’ sessions on Unitils (don’t like the name but some of the features (assertion through reflection!) could be very useful to me, as I’m writing tests on a daily basis) and Strecks (Struts extensions that can easily be used in an existing Struts environment–all the more pity it requires Java 5; won’t most existing Struts-based applications still be using Java 1.4, like the project I’m on right now?).

Next, I did a lab on NetBeans and Matisse, the NetBeans gui design tool. It really brought back memories of my Delphi days. I must say, NetBeans feels slick and fast and stable. Add to that the Ruby support that Tor Norbye is working on, and this might well become my next IDE of choice. We got a small sample of that in Charles’ and Tom’s conference session on JRuby, which was next. Charles showed things like usage highlighting and local rename. It might not be spectacular for a crowd of Java-with-(probably mostly)-Eclipse coders, but you’ve gotta start somewhere! (But on the other hand, Eclipse so often gets it ‘just right’–like in 3.3, the local rename got enhanced to operate locally within inner loops; such a small thing but something that happens often enough).

By the way, if the JavaPolis team is listening: those labs could do with some more publicity. Only four people out of 2800+ showed up. Maybe because the labs are somewhere in the back of the conference guide; I just found out myself a few minutes before it started. Maybe because the location is a very dark corner of MetroPolis. Worse, there was a loudspeaker directly above the lab location, blurting out advertising for MetroPolis at a very high volume (every 2 minutes Eddy Murphy shouting “Show me the candy!”, argh!).

I liked Brian Goetz’ session last year, and this year he was just as enthusiastic, showing us the reality about some Java performance myths. I know now that object allocation is normally not slow, and synchronization isn’t always slow either. Best myth however was “Clever code is faster code”. It turns out that, in normal situations, the best performing code is cleanly written code, following standard guidelines. Java is not a one-liner language.

It had already been a long day when we sat down for Geert Bevin’s session on continuations–in Java. This is definitely a fascinating concept; for using it in web applications however, it just might be too different from the way we ‘normally’ do things. It requires nothing less then a paradigm shift in web app development. More info on continuations can be found on the RIFE site.