SpringOne 2006 - Antwerp, BE

this year's SpringOne conference was fun to visit and speak at, especially as the conference was full of Spring enthusiasts!! This made it much more focussed than e.g. JavaOne were you get a bit of everything - but nothing really that detailed so that it can be immediately applied ;_)

I was there to give a case-study on the work I had done at the European Patent Office within the scope of my project espacenet ®
As we are fairly unknown to the non-patent internet audience, think of us as being a kind of google ® for patents, making the job easy for people who are interested in patents to see what is already out there. If you've never done this, try an advanced search with e.g. apple ® as the applicant.

Sadly though, it seemed that patents weren't really on the agenda of the SpringOne attendees - especially when Spring portlets and Christian's talk on the Spring IDE were parallel tracks ! For future presentations I will definitely have to pimp-up-my-presentation-title to include at least 6 buzzwords - just as Gregor Hohpe so correctly pointed out in the abstract of his talk ;-)
To add insult to injury my MacBookPro CRASHED during my presentation just when I wanted to demo the system. (Thank God these machines reboot fast).
I had prepared quite a number of demos to show in between source code snippets and presentation slides in order to really show a production system in action - because normally case-studies just show a very high level abstraction of what the system really does (plus a load of static screenshots) - and after the reboot I managed to squeeze at least a few code samples in and show the live system. (You have to have confidence in your own stuff !) What nearly all people are unaware of though is the volume of data and requests we are processing within esp@cenet. Well over 1.000.000 requests per hour make this a system far from being bored! Spring scales wonderfully here - having no negative effect whatsoever. In fact, because Spring by default is working on a singleton base (e.g. Controllers), scaling a Spring-based application is something I would consider a best-practice.

For quite some time now I have been pushing the usage of Spring in possible layers of application infrastructure - and it seems that I have embarked on a kind of crusade - showing people how they can abstract and simplify application construction from application development. Just by looking at the snapshot picture from SpringOne above you can see what I was - and still am ! - confronted with at times ;-)
With Spring 2.0 now moving from RC1 to the final version, it was nice to see how many different people were using Spring and benefiting from 2.0 additions. Here at esp@cenet - we are using almost all of the Spring stack out there, especially the web MVC, JMX, acegi and web-flow support, throwing in the casual aspect where necessary.
Conferences are out there to actively meet people involved in the same topics - and not just to attend in the classic sense, so I very much enjoyed talking to other Spring users e.g. Brendan and Yagiiz from DeCare in Ireland about their usage of Spring - while in parallel talking World Cup strategy patterns on how the Dutch football team could improve their score on friday evening.
We can in general be seen as very early adopters of the Spring stack and have been brave enough to push many of our applications into production before the official QA-releases. If I look at e.g. spring web-flow, we have long released our application on a PR5-release, simply because the functionality we used was safely tested and certified. The same thing goes for the Spring 2.0 release. Testing proved that the 2.0 M3 release was stable enough to make it into production - so why wait ? This is one of the great things I like about the Spring framework: the quality of releases. Keep it up guys !!!

In terms of things to come/do with Spring I will some time during the summer perform the transition to the Spring web-flow SWF 1.0 final and also tidy up the spring beans XML files, applying namespaces and configuration changes where applicable to ease the flood of XML slowly creeping in. For anyone out there not yet on a 1.0 release of web-flow, some naming/packaging and interfacing has changed since then, meaning that we will have to manually migrate all flows to 1.0 and verify they work correctly. Keith and Erwin have offered to support us with this transition by offering an intermediary jar-release that has the new signatures etc. so thanks for that ! I will get back to you two sometime later to catch up on this. For anyone out there in a similar situation I recommend getting in touch with Keith or Erwin.

To close this entry, I am currently setting up a portlet MVC version of the esp@cenet application and also very excited about applying Spring Web Services to another application I am responsible for : The Open Patent Services. This publically available web service has been out there ever since web services became usable ;-) and is now more than ready for a face-lift. It is already Spring-enabled (of course!) and now is being beta-tested using the great new stack of features available in Spring web services. Arjen, should you be reading this, I will be getting in touch with you shortly as this web service also gets hammered with peaks of 1.000.000 requests per day !

Thanks to BeJug and i21 for organising this event and it would be great to get the chance to present what I am doing again if possible next time.