Duchess
Globally Connecting Women in Java Technology

The first session I attended was The Scala Experience by Bill Venners and Ted Neward. In three hours they showed us a lot of the stuff you can do in Scala. Scala is a combination of imperative programming, like we are used with Java, and functional programming. It is strongly typed, but does use type inference. So it allows for code that is a lot more concise than Java. Later on in the week they’ll also give a shorter presentation with an overview of Scala, and I haven’t read the program yet, but I might visit that as well.

Then it was time for lunch. Lunch was a nice sandwich with a cup of pea soup. I have never before seen pea soup that was that thin. But it tasted good once you got over the unusual texture. Upstairs I met Aaron Houston from Sun. We talked for a bit and he asked me if Duchess had already gotten a SunSpot. When I said that we didn’t he gave me one on the spot. So now we really need to come up with cool projects for it!

The second university session was Java Power Tools by John Ferguson Smart. He gave a lot of demos from his own development suite. For some people it might have been nothing new, but for people like me who have never gotten the opportunity to work with all the cool toys it really was very interesting to learn how it could work. He showed samples from mainly Maven2 (building the application) and Hudson (continuous integration). But he also talked about and showed some Bamboo, test tools like PMD, CheckStyle and Cobertura. So he gave me a lot of ideas to try out and investigate.

After the university sessions there were some short (half hour) presentations about Tools in Action. The first one I visited was about Hibernate Search by Emmanuel Bernard from JBoss. I had met him before at the JBoss UG meeting earlier this year. He gave some nice examples about full text search, and also combined with stemming and n-grams. Very useful and I think I will definitely investigate Hibernate Search and Lucene.

My last session of the day was about 10 reasons why Java EE development doesn’t have to be painful by Alexis Moussine-Pouchkine. I can’t remember all of them anymore, but the summary was that we’re not in 2002 anymore. I do still remember the first reason, which was that there are good application servers out there now that support Java EE 5.

Finally during the day I met lots of new women. I handed out at least ten of our shiny new buttons. So hopefully we’ll get an influx of new women soon. I met at least one lady from France, one from Estonia, and two from Russia.