Architect or Cobbler?
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A strange day

Friday, September 16, 2005
You may not have guessed it, seeing as there's no Java code on my blog, but I'm actually a Java developer. If truth be told, I'm actually an Ada developer by choice, but there aren't too many real opportunities out there for Ada developers, certainly not in the training arena. I'm also pretty much a "man in the middle", this doesn't mean I sit around waiting to hijack you, but that I enjoy coding in the server sphere, and I'm really excited by technologies like remote communication and web services. So today there hasn't been a great deal of focus on the areas I enjoy, so it's been pretty slim picking for me. I did get to see SimonGuest and Kirill Gavrylyuk do a very entertaining seesion on .NET/J2EE interop, and although it was great to see that Simon gets nervous like us mere mortals, it didn't really add to the sum total of the interop story. What Simon was saying was that the J2EE vendors are getting behind WS* specs and that Indigo is already there, so if you use these specs you'll interoperate. And while I agree with that statement, I think we're some way off yet. Most of the big Java toolkits haven't built the MTOM (Message Transmission Optimasation Mechanism) bindings that will allow for interoperable transmission of attachments yet. So my advice is that interop is nearly here for complex cases, but is probably 6 months off. I also went to a talk on tips for writing Indigo applications, and I thought I wqas going to get some great design tips, instead what I got were some tips for using Indigo bindings. Stuff I need to know, but I sure wish Microsoft would give their sessions better names, as that's pretty much all you have to go on to decide which session to attend. So what have I done for the rest of the day. Well I haven't had to nurse a hangover, Miller Light is not my beer of choice, I have discovered. I have had the opportunity to do plenty of hands on labs. Now as a trainer, I can tell you writing good labs is an art form. You need clear instructions, without making a delegate feel as if they're being mollycodddled. In the main, the labs I've done today have been there or thereabouts, and I've certainly got to play with cool new technologies (for instance I wrote my first Linq app, although that wasn't what I was supposed to be doing :-)) Anyway I never thought I'd be at a PDC and see Eclipse, Java code, emacs and Perl, but it's all been out there in open view today. Now I'm off to go and bend Simon Guest's ear.

# posted by James @ 2:11 AM   0 comments Comments: Post a Comment

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