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I participated in the Fusion Middleware Best Pracatices Symposion all of Sunday. Paul Dorsey, Duncan Mills and others spoke on developling Fusion applications. Conclusion: It’s big, hard, complicated and easy to get wrong. But developing JEE apps without using Fusion is harder. No wonder there were more people attending the APEX track.

Eric Marcoux of the University of Laval spoke about the big university system they are building with pretty much the whole Oracle stack (Identity Management, Provisioning, etc) - and WebCenter. They’ll have a website for every course and are using the WebCenter Composer to let each teacher build his own course page. Composer is cool, but this is the first realistic usecase I’ve seem where someone would actually need it. But they are not going with WebCenter 10g - they are building with 11g for their anticipated release date of 2009. So I still haven’t found a real, running site using WebCenter 10g.

The most interesting presentation of the day was hearing David Schleis of the Wisconsin State Laboratory of Hygiene speak on Groovy. I had written off Groovy in the “cool-new-programming-language-of-the-month” category, but I’ll have to revisit that. Groovys point is that a lot of the verbose Java code doesn’t really need to be written - the Groovy compiler can work things out (for example there are implicit setters and gettings in Groovy - you don’t have to write them). And the compiler builds bytecode that’ll run in your JVM alongside your Java. Groovy, man!

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