Day three of Devoxx was the best day so far: a very good presentation by Stefan Tilkov on REST patterns and anti-patterns. After reading some discussions on REST, especially some comments by Roy Fielding, i was curious to know what the correct way of applying REST was. Turns out i was close in my applications but i’ll need to add links between resources. Anyway, excellent presentation by Stefan. You can find his presentation on his blog: Devoxx 08 talk.
The day started with a surprise: JavaFX looks better than expected. I was impressed by nine videos running at the same time, and the fact that you can simply drag an applet from the browser and run it as a desktop application. Data binding certainly is an improvement over swing, so i can imagine using JavaFX for all things that you would normally use swing for; not just for creating RIAs. Also, the plugin for Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator seems usefull. All RIAs framework vendors seem to agree on the fact that look and feel is very important for RIAs, and that the graphic designers should be included in the development process.
And that is Oracle ADFs biggest disadvantage: limited skinning options. The ADF demo was pretty impressive: A very rich web application without coding java. You have to wonder though what oracle is doing here. A room full of Java coders, and oracle’s message basically is: we dont need you anymore. Not a good message in the current economy, with everybody already afraid of their jobs…
Another interesting talk was the talk about Spring DM: the OSGi based Spring Application server. Now that almost all application servers are moving to OSGi, it seems that OSGi will have a big impact on application developers. It offers a whole new perspective on SOA: all the benefits of services, but without the distracting WS-* standards.
