Just got back from the NFJS Dessert Southwest Software Symposium or NFJS DSSS from now. I attended David Geary’s Introduction to JSF and two presentations by Dave Thomas on Ruby and Ruby on Rails. I had seen a presentation on JSF from a sales-engineer in the past so I had some curiosity about this framework. It is certainly something exciting but I certainly have to give it some more research time and attention.

Both presentations by Dave Thomas on Ruby were great, his style and personality help as well to get the point across. A little interesting note is the fact that not only is Dave presenting Ruby at a Java conference, but the fact that the room is full is even more impressive. Some people left before the RoR presentation but I am sure they walked away interested enough to give Ruby a look in the future. His RoR presentation ran out of time but he made his point and it was loud and clear: RoR will have a place in the IT shop in the not so distant future.

He asked to get together with him to look over his testing approach or any other questions we might have. I took him up on it and we are going to take a look at his approach to test-driven development on Rails. I might also ask him about his thoughts on how to best take an already developed application and migrate it to RoR. I would be really interested in his thoughts in doing so.

Overall it was a good first day, I wish I could’ve attended the intro to AOP with AspectJ presentations but hopefully I can pick up that material from the presentations. Tomorrow (7/30) morning I am planing on checking out the unit testing with Jython from Stuart Halloway and Killer Web UIs from David Geary. The afternoon is still up on the air for now. More updates tomorrow!