Day 2 started off with a really cold morning but turned out a really nice day in the end. The General Session this morning was a blatant marketing mouthpiece for Oracle and all their Enterprise Applications… yawn. It wasn’t very full either and most people walked about about half way, we have better things to do than be talked at about products we don’t care about.

Anyway, after that I went to a quick session about some Sun developers who tried to make a hardware application server appliance (like a wireless router appliance) that you just connect to the network and it just works, all in about 4 weeks. Some important lessons were learnt. I then went to a session about Web Beans which kindof went over my head as he started assuming we all knew what they were. It seems like a framework built on annotations to help with compile-time validation of beans and attributes and stuff. It is being looked at at the moment to be integrated into Spring.

The main event today was a hands on lab using the Woodstock Ajax library and that seems really cool and nice and easy. Really good support from NetBeans IDE as well. Then a packed session about how to get the most out of DBUnit which I really should know more about. Then another packed session with a few developers from Sun who are creating the new Media API so Java has much better video and sound support. Currently it has a few cross platform codecs (such as ogg/theora) but otherwise uses the native codecs for each platform. It has been made into a Swing JComponent so it is really easy to embed in any JFrame you happen to have lying around. I expect to see big things come out of this.

I am waiting to go to another ajax session, this time using jMaki which seems to do the same thing as WoodStock, but it will be interesting to see what the differences are. Im in the big hangout space and The Matrix is playing on a big screen so everyone is standing around watching that ;)

No photos today sorry, there wasn’t anything new that you hadn’t seen before.

Catchya tomorrow ;)