The Ancient Art of Programming

Some time ago, I have heard a developer say something like:

You know, when developing an application, I really don’t care whether I am exposing services as EJB, SOAP, CORBA, REST, JMS, or any other infrastructure. It should just be a matter of configuration.

To which I replied:

Yeah, these things tend to look the same from up high in an Ivory Tower.

For an extra laugh, note the alt tag on the image.

(Via xkcd.com.)

I just came back from JavaZone. Good fun, just like last year. I did two talks: one together with Jürgen Höller about managing large code bases, and one by myself about WS-DuckTyping.

I’ve you missed me in Oslo, not to worry! I have a few more talks coming up:

• On the 18th of September 2007 (yes, that’s tomorrow), I will be talking with Alef about Spring 2.5 and OSGi at the Cap Gemini Java Night.
• On the 9th of October 2007, I will be talking about Spring Web Services at the BeJUG SOA Event.
• From the 15th till the 18th of October 2007 I will be speaking at Expo-C. This is a small conference in the south of Sweden, which apparently brings good quality audience and speakers (which makes me wonder why they asked me ). I will be talking about WS-DuckTyping, and Effective Framework Design, which is going to be a “lessons learned when we built Spring”-sorta session.
• From the 13th till the 15th of November 2007, I will be speaking at Øredev about the architecture of large open source frameworks. Also, I will be giving an AOP course while I’m there.
• Last but not least, from December 12th till 15th 2007, I will be talking at The Spring Experience. I had a great time there last year, and if this year’s version is only half as good, it will be worth it. I will do three sessions on Spring Web Services (WS-DuckTyping, REST, and a basic introduction).

All in all quite a busy schedule. Hope to see you at one of these sessions!

After last years success, we decided to do it again:

I will giving two talks: WS-DuckTyping with Spring Web Services, which is a following up to my blog post where give some practical tips to make your web services less strict, and more liberal. The other talk is titled Pragmatic SOA, where I try to find some substance in the hype that surrounds SOA, including the WS-* space, REST, etc.

So register now!

Whenever somebody says that XML, XSD, SOAP, or WSDL sucks, I am always remember of my high school days.

Here, in the Netherlands, it is not uncommon that pupils learn a third learn a third language, next to Dutch and English. Typically, one chooses either French or German. Most pupils choose French, since German is considered an “ugly” and uncool language. I used to think the same way, until I spent six months in Germany during university, and learned to appreciate the language more.

Learning beautiful words like “feuerzeug” (lit. fire-thing, i.e. lighter), and reading Goethe and Kant in their native language changed my mind, however. German is a beautiful language, and can be much more subtle than French or English.

After all, it’s not about the language, but about the thoughts that you express in it.