This weekend, i'm at the No Fluff Just Stuff conference in beautiful 'Millwaukee'. This whole conference seems to be very Jave development oriented and showcases several brilliant developers of Java and Java-like technologies. There is also a huge focus on thw web services side of Java development, which makes this conference right up my own alley, as well as, Widen's alley.
It's pretty much like any convention except the people speaking are actual experts rather than amatuer fans of the product. Case in point, the three speakers I attended today were actually developers of the framework they showcased. David Gaery showcased JSF, Venkat Subramaniam showcased Grails, and Scott Davis showcased Atom, though Davis isn't really responsible for Atom. It is really amazing to listen to these heavyweights of the Java community talk about their passion.
Atom certainly caught my eye today, but what i'm really shopping around for is a web framework I can use and implement for theschlock.com.
JSF was kinda fun, but it felt rather heavy duty for what I wish to accomplish. Grails is simply amazing, but it seemed difficult to customize.
What I want to do with theschlock.com is quite simply. I want to make it a navigatable portfolio of all my old art and other random crations i've had over the years. An end all resource of all the crap I've done.
I want to use one of these crazy new technologies because it'll give me the experience of playing around with something new and cool, as well as demonstrate my proficency of applying said technology.
After thinking about a few things though: what I want to do is quite simply. A ton of entries sorted by date and possibly by category. This is easily accomplished using technologies i've been using for the past couple of years. Hell, just build a javascript 'database' type file and have page javascript load and render all those elements and huzzah.. i've got my website. :shrugs: I guess I could do it that way. why make things more complicated then they have to be.
Maybe i'll just search for a technology to develop a beautiful photo navigator for all the 15,000 pictures i've taken over these last four years.
Anyways, Grails is pretty amazing. I wouldn't mind playing around with that. Much like its' initial model: rails, it utilizes Convention over Configuration, which means you do everything a specific way rather than write up a bunch of config files to tell he framework what the hell you are doing. This type of framework lends itself extremely well to Agile development, since you can write code fast, rather than spending time configuring everything.
The highlight of the evening was Scott Davis' keynote speach, which confronted the question of choice... basically.
ugh... I'm typing this up on my phone and getting rather bored. i'll finish this up later.