The general session this morning was not quite the same as yesterday morning’s, which I suppose is understandable, but it was still pretty informative. Today Oracle showed off its developer tools, which are interesting, but being mainly JSF, not very appealing for my own use.

My favorite session of the day had to be Groovy, the Red Pill: Metaprogramming — How to Blow the Mind of Developers on the Java Platform presented by Scott Davis. This session was incredible. Scott speaks like a televangelist and by the end of the presentation seemed to have half the audience ready to stand, shout AMEN, and follow him as a new religious leader. I now have absolutely no doubt in my mind that Groovy is an amazing and powerful language and that I’m going to try my hardest to make it part of some project I’m doing in the near future.

My second favorite presentation was definately Creating a Compelling User Experience presented by Ben Galbraith. It wasn’t anything groundbreaking or new for me, but it was a very well-done presentation on design for the typical Java engineer. Ben made a variety of good points, including my personal favorite, pay attention to users goals but don’t let them design software.

Third runner-up for favorite goes to How to Implement Your Own OpenSocial Container on the Java Platform by Chris Schalk and Paul Lindner. This session basically covered Apache Shindig, which I did not even know existed. Also mentioned in the presentation were Guice and Enunciate, which I will definitely be investigating further.

Not much shwag today, and I didn’t win anything from any of the drawings (despite wearing my Swing Application Platform shirt), but overall a good day. Although if I can request anything from the JavaOne gods, how about a little variety for lunch, or at least a different kind of pasta salad with the sandwiches!