d-ross.org
CFUNITED ColdSpring slides, thoughts
Well, yesterday was an interesting and exciting day to say the least. To be given the oppurtunity to speak to a large number of people about somthing I'm so passionate about is an honor. I told several folks I'd post the slides from the talk so there they are. Also, you can download a zip of those simple samples I posted, but I'd really rather you study the example apps withing the ColdSpring distro, as they are more "real-world" ("out-of-this-world" or over-simplified examples have tripped up my understanding and adoption of other technologies ).
I know that I may have tried to cover too much material in too little amount of time. One reason for this was that several people had asked me the day before to try to make the talk as advanced, in-depth, and hands-on as possible. The problem was there are many concepts that don't sink in right away (they didn't for me), and trying to pack them into a slide, or even a single bullet point, is difficult. I truly appreciate the questions during a talk they allow me to refocus and think about how my material is actually getting across.
To Rick Mason - who confronted me 2 steps from the podium with an accusation that "Ruby on Rails is a popular framework which does Inversion-of-Control and doesn't use xml" (I made the insinuation that there were none during my talk) - you are wrong. Rails doesn't do IoC - you can however use Needle, an IoC container, in conjunction with Rails. I'm not sure how popular Needle is, but I haven't much chatter about it at all. The interesting thing is yes, Needle doesn't use xml, but you do have to write code to "register" your components with Needle. So in this case it isn't "convention over configuration" that all the Rails zealots chant as the reason to dump java (or any other "heavier" language). Personally, in this context, I don't understand the pushback against xml configuration - it's very well-suited to declarative programming and complex configuration, which is often what you are doing with ColdSpring/Spring. You can always turn on autowiring and simply list your components and nothing else, and then let the method signatures of your components dictate which dependencies are resolved (this is closer to "convention" than anything else). You can also programatically register your components with ColdSpring, just like Needle, by generating the xml and passing it in on the fly - see BeanFactory.loadBeansFromXmlRaw(...). So I really don't feel like I'm making a big mistake adopting xml as a configuration tool. Maybe someday we'll add a true API to adding components to a ColdSpring beanFactory and expressing their dependencies - but $10 says no one uses it (especially because it will be much more difficult to learn).
Well - I'm gonna go get some coffee and see what sessions are happening - I was up late with the patio beer crew but for some reason my room doesn't have curtains that close all the way, so of course after 4 hours of sleep I'm rudely awakened - I really sympathize with Dracula this morning.
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