I've spent the last several days attending the Twin Cities Software Symposium (a.k.a. No Fluff Just Stuff). Overall it has been a very good conference. I had attended it twice in Denver previously and thought it was an excellent conference, particularly given the price and the fact that the conference travels to you.
I just attended Charles Nutter's JRuby presentation. The presentation was a little dry, but very exciting stuff. It sounds like they've accomplished a ton with JRuby, but still have a long ways to go. I appreciated the fact that Charles didn't attempt to hide anything and was very straight-forward related to JRuby's current shortcomings. JRuby (and dynamic languages on the JVM) definitely hold quite a bit of promise!
Yesterday afternoon I attended two Google Web Toolkit (GWT) talks by David Geary. I was fairly impressed, but am going to reserve my final opinion until I've had a chance to take an in-depth look at GWT, to ensure it's not just hype. I personally hate the tedium of developing html-based applications, and GWT may be a game changer. David has a very good sense of humor and definitely kept the talk exciting. He mentioned that GWT is the single most exciting framework he's ever seen. This says alot given that he's been in the industry for quite some time, including being the second Struts contributor and playing a large role in evangelizing JSF.
I'm off to a talk by Howard Lewis Ship about TestNG and EasyMock.
