Archive for December 12th, 2005
Closing thoughts on TSE 2005
A little late, but here are my closing thoughts on The Spring Experience 2005. The last session that I attended was my own, the Symantec case study. This session focused on our call center case tracking application and how it has evolved over time while making use of Spring. As Jim Moore mentioned, the project that was discussed during the Accenture case study had many similarities to ours, including:
- infrastructure, such as JBoss, Tomcat, Oracle 9i
- multiple Spring configuration files, swapped out for testing and production
- extensive unit testing of all layers outside of the container
- migration from hard coded dependencies to dependency injection, which makes all of this testing possible
In our case study we cover the evolution of our application from client/server to multi-tier, the issues that we ran into when creating a middle tier, and how Spring helped us along the way. A reoccurring theme throughout the conference was how non invasive Spring is and how easy it is to use bits and pieces at a time instead of having to migrate to DI, AOP, DAO, security and everything else Spring has to offer all at once. This was the case with our middle tier, where we adopted pieces of Spring as time went on. Before we knew it, we had a very flexible and stable solution that was portable to any J2EE container.
We had a small crowd, but had some good questions and dialog about our experiences. I look forward to the JavaLobby guys putting session audio (and hopefully video) on their site in the coming weeks. For those interested, we have posted our slides.
I must say that TSE was one of the best conferences that I have attended, if not the best. When filling out my survey, one of the questions asked which speaker(s) were the best. My honest answer was all of them, because I was able to learn something at each of the talks that I attended. The speakers and attendees alike were very intelligent and articulate; clearly these folks are the leaders of our industry. The accommodations and location were excellent, and to repeat what has already been said by others, Jay Zimmerman and Keith Donald pulled this conference off to perfection. I look forward to returning next year.
