The next talk I attended was presented by Kito Mann from Virtua and went over the new items that are expected in the next major release. JSF2.0 will be part of Java Enterprise Edition 6, and the official JSR is 314.

Kito has a professional grasp of all the new aspects of JavaServer Faces 2.0, and gave a great presentation with lots of detailed information. One of the things the community designing the spec had as their vision was to: Listen, Prioritize, and Implement. While the next major release of JSF won’t be final until sometime in June, it does help to silence a lot of the current problems that exist in JavaServer Faces.

Here are some of the highlights:

• Page Description Language (PDL) - The community members took a technology like Facelets that evolved out of the pain caused by the earlier JSP-only versions of JSF, and decided it better be in the next version. I'm still not convinced that the lengths to which JSF goes to shave this yak will prove worth it. A Facelet template looks as convoluted and disgustingly difficult to read as JSP, and looks more cryptic. At least JSP looks vaguely like HTML.
• New Scopes - They've added a View scope, a Flash scope, and a Conversation scope facilitated by using WebBeans (JSR299).
• Resource Handling
• AJAX Support
• Composite Components
• Navigation Rules

And with that, we find out what IBM^HSun and the community members have in store for us with JavaServer Faces 2.0. It’s a noble effort, and I know that it will be endlessly praised for the great leaps forward it has made. They’ve obviously taken a lot of great ideas from Facelets, Seam, and other efforts by the community to put lipstick on JavaServer Faces 1.x. LIke it or not, JavaServer Faces is “The Standard” and receives the lions share of vendor attention. If you’d like to actually enjoy coding the frontend though…

Be sure to check out our talk on Apache Wicket on Friday at 3pm in Breakout Room 1 - If you liked 5 Days of Wicket, you’ll love this in-depth hour and drop us a line if your company needs training in wicket: trainings@mysticcoders.com

The conference was kicked off with a great keynote speech by Neal Ford. The presentation was “Productive Programmer: On the Lam from the Furniture Police” and was a subject near and dear to many developers who have ever worked in a cube farm, and wanted to squeeze more productivity out of your day. As “knowledge workers” we’re all expected to have enough focus to write useful code to get our projects to completion.

To that end, Neal’s talk moved through the topic’s range and discussed brain theory, the zone, and creating a healthy workspace.

A good portion of the talk was dedicated to the difference between the right brain and the left brain, and how both are useful in the task of software engineering. While most programmers have a fairly clear idea on how to get their left brain engaged in a task, the right brain, the creative brain, is somewhat of a mystery to most. I’ve done lots of work studying the mind and concur with the strategies laid out in Neal’s talk. The aim in the first section was getting out of the right brain, those insights that hit us when we’re focused on something else.

The following were discussed as good methods of distraction to receive your “A Ha!” moment, note they are repetitive tasks:

• Mowing the lawn
• Playing a puzzle-based game video/real
• Cooking
• Pair Programming - the driver is engaging in left brain activity, the navigator is engaging in right brain activity

The other issue with the right brain, is thoughts are fleeting, and you need some way to keep them from running off. Here’s where a “Trusted System” to use a GTD term comes into play. Whatever this is, the key is to use it, get it out of your brain, and engage with the data later. Examples of “Trusted Systems” include: Moleskin notebook, PIM, (insert anything that captures your thoughts here).

Another area touched on which inhabits purely right brain activity was the idea of a Mind Map. Tony Buzan created this concept which basically consists of a brainstorm-like diagram with color, drawing, and linkage with single descriptive words. It simply maps the way a memory is already created in the mind. XMind or MindManager are popular tools to lay these out on a computer.

The final major area touched on was the idea of “Flow”. Getting into “The Zone”. Too often in our daily activity, the constant notifications and other applications vying for our attention distract us and pull us out of flow. A couple of applications discussed during the talk to help dim out any distractions:

• doodim for mac
• jedi concentrate for windows

Other suggestions talked about for keeping in the zone: automating repetitive tasks, kill environmental distractions, good chair, minimum of 2 monitors, and a VERY fast desktop. Neal put on a great keynote presentation, and I felt it was a great kickoff for this years symposium.

Be sure to check out our talk on Apache Wicket on Friday at 3pm in Breakout Room 1 - If you liked 5 Days of Wicket, you’ll love this in-depth hour and drop us a line if your company needs training in wicket: trainings@mysticcoders.com

Mystic will be in attendance in Vegas for The Server Side Java Symposium this year, as we’ve mentioned. We’ll be doing regular updates and reviews of the sessions we attend, and what was learned by the presenters. As we are also giving a talk on Friday, we know how hard each speaker has worked to put together their presentations and applaud them all in advance. If you’re coming to the conference, stop by on Friday at 3PM for our talk on Apache Wicket!

Reviewing the schedule this year, a theme of main topics seems to have emerged: SOA, Groovy, and tools to ramp up on X framework.

Sessions we’ll definitely be attending:

• The keynotes (Neal Ford, Rod Johnson, Jon Kern)
• Mission-Critical Cloud/Enterprise Hybrid Applications Case Study - Eugene Ciurana
• The Rules of SOA - A Road to a Successful SOA Implementation - Jeff Genender
• Navigating the SOA Mine Field: Optimized Application Architectures - Heath Kesler
• Rapid, Large-scale SOA - Connected Products at LeapFrog Enterprises - Jason Whaley
• Architecting Applications Using Apache Wicket - Andrew Lombardi

If we’ve missed any that you guys think might be great, let me know … there are many time slots in the agenda that are a toss up right now. Check out the agenda here.