Tales from the Serverside Prague - Day III

Hurrah for Scala! Ted Neward showed us all the sheer joy of Scala this morning. I think I might be hooked. Yet now I am truly torn: to which language do I dedicate my spare cycles - jRuby, Groovy or Scala? The answer I think is all of them, for the sheer fun of it. The exotic part of me says jRuby first, but then the pragmatic part of me says Scala might be the way to go.

I've been dipping in and out of the day since then: I sat in on John Davies replay of his extreme transaction processing material. After his talk the feedback forms were glowing with positives like "the best material in the whole conference" Nice work John - just what we'd expect from an IONA employee ;)

Ola Bini from ThoughtWorks showed off couple of jRuby test frameworks; one of the nice side applications of this, apart from testing your jRuby code, is that you can use jRuby to test your Java code. As it turns out I spent most his talk down the back doing some Junit test cases for a project I'm working on at the moment; there is not doubt that Ola's tests in jRuby looked a hell-of-a-lot less verbose than my Java-bound test framework.

I attended the fireside chat on Architectural Patterns in Mule by Antoine Borg. He's doing a great job; that said, it's all the same as the stuff I covered in my own fireside chat yesterday! The EIPs supported by Mule directory are implemented in XML; while functionaly equivalent it's no where near as ergonomic as the Camel DSL, in my humble opinion. I've done XML-based EIP before, and you can get bogged down in XML. It is nice to see that Mule 2.0 is using Spring Schemas to simplify the XML configuration.

Off home in a few hours to Dublin. This year's TSSJS in Prague was a really high quality event; hats off to the speakers, and a big thank you to the tech target team!