I still didn't make it to all of the sessions I would have liked, and more of the value (for me) was talking to people.

Hibernate 3 - This was boring. I already knew what was presented. Everyone else was excited. Oddly Gavin seemed to state that there would not be a Hibernate 4, more like 3.1, 3.2, etc. He thinks they're about done with everything that can be done. I was reminded of this:

 

“Everything that can be invented has been invented.”

 

-- Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899

Of course there is some question about the quote actually being real, but that doesn't really matter because its a good story. BTW I had to sit on the floor against the front wall. People even took the nose bleed seats that you couldn't see the slides from (podium in the way) and whoa there were too many people in that room.

To me the most interesting thing in Hibernate 3 is "filters". Add filters + AOP and JBoss's security framework and you have the killer security app (not covered in the session). Consider adding stuff like rules engines and you have pure unadulterated evil security! Meaning I could set up advice based on the logged in users (applied not with annotations but to all objects along a certain vertical aka matching certain pointcut expressions). It would dink a filter and I wouldn't get back anything I couldn't see (the trick is setting up an association in the DB with what is essentially an access control list...yeah thats kinda yucky but I can't think of anything else). Then add per-instance annotations that gives you further security constraints on what you can do with what you *can* see. What's cool is you could do this without most of the developers being completely oblivious to it being there.

I also went to the JCA presentation. JCA is now becoming clear to me. This is good because I will need to write a JCA adapter. I cannot say that any part of it was interesting to me....it was tedious and boring. This is not the speakers fault. JCA is tedious and boring.

However, the best thing was making contact with the MySQL guy. We talked about my issues in JBoss Mail Server (and secondly JBossMQ) with simulated blob support in the MySQL driver. He showed me another technique which we can use for our new Blob "MailStore" stuff. (The theory -- that won't work completely due to DB driver support in most DBs -- is that we immediately redirect the stream from the DATA command to a blob in the DB so that we consume as little heap as possible as well as the opposite for POP/IMAP). As cool as that is, we can't really do it because most database drivers don't have real blob stream support (MySQL being no exception). However, after talking to the MySQL guy I see how I can work around this. Not the ideal solution but still accomplishing most of it. Still sucks that I have to do this for just about each database differently.

I also went to Mladen Turk's discussion on the new AJP 1.4 and recombination of mod_jk into mod_proxy. I'm glad this is finally going to be done well. Lots of features but you can watch it later on Syscon.

Next, I had a great chance to talk to the guys from Hewlett-Packard. We got to talking about benchmarks and other forms of deception. I told him some stuff I had discovered in the field about garbage collection and how certain other vendors like to cheat on benchmarks by disabling the garbage collector while running their benchmark on their appserver and how utterly pointless that is. He told me about some of their findings on different hardware platforms and about some of their high end x86/64 hardware (AMD/Intel). Also cool was just how those boxes are put together. I knew pretty much nothing about this stuff and what the performance differences were because I've dealt more with stuff like the PA-RISC, and SPARC. The folks doing Linux stuff generally aren't on as high end hardware -- this is changing -- but it was really good to get educated on this stuff. I look forward to working with these guys, they are smart people. Please send me a sample quad-opteron :-) -- I will test/benchmark JBoss Mail Server on it!

I also talked with the Apple guys. They were really interested in our increasing powerbook population. I have to admit, most folks here are Windows. A few use Linux (my servers are Linux...but not on the client!); however, there is an increasing number of people who are right-thinking and use powerbooks. I told him that the biggest thing that gave me pause was that they still don't have JDK 5.0 and they don't give any real info out about when its coming. This is really annoying as a developer. However, for all the other reasons -- Powerbooks are what a good consultant should have. I was kind of disappointed that they are still distributing a rather old version of JBoss (3.2.2rc1) and encouraged them to move forward.

Later I talked to Bill Burke about installing Gentoo if you want to completely optimize for hardware (it compiles all packages specifically for your hardware). I told him that Gentoo was great, the packaging was easier and that if you want to install something it doesn't all end up depending on X because of the massive dependency tree. Gentoo gives you only what you ask for and has optional dependencies. I told him that the downside was that "Installing Gentoo feels like being raped by a large elephant, but once you get past that everything is really easy". However, its not something I tell customers because most don't have a big enough pool of hardcore Linux admins to pull this off, but you can create a pretty optimized Linux-box (minus the JDK itself -- that should be open sourced ;-) ) and actually secure!

All-in-all this was the first useful tech conference I'd been to in awhile. It was just about equally who I talked to outside the sessions that made it worthwhile. So yeah, I couldn't say anything particularly negative about it in the company blog. However, I travel so much and do so many tech conferences that I really didn't want to come....I did so because I'm an employee of the company and it was important to the company that I be there. However, I'm glad they made me come. I got a lot out of it! I actually will ASK to come next year.