Last week was the JAX 2008 in Wiesbaden, Germany. In a previous post I wrote about my impressions on the first. Let’s review day two and three: The first day was half exciting/half boring. On my second day I booked the Dynamic Languages Day, what a mistake. Most of the sessions were for newcomers who never heard/programmed about Groovy, Ruby, … The sessions covered syntax, Java integration, and so on, but they only scratched the surface. Most of the information can be found on the Internet. However, one useful session was “Design Patterns in Dynamic Languages”. The speaker Neal Ford was really good and gave good examples which patterns are obsolete in DL’s and how easy some can be implemented. Maybe, I will do later a more detailed post about it. Like I wrote, the rest of the sessions wasn’t to interesting, therefore, I will just skip them. My mood changed on Thursday because of some really good sessions.I like simple things, simple design, simple to use, simple to program, etc., because I think that can achieve more powerful things when you try to keep them simple. Of course, sometimes you need a certain level of complexity, but often it is only artificially introduced. One of the best examples for are Web Services. Ok, I have to admit I am definitely not an expert in Web Services (WS). Why? Because I like simple things. I used them sometimes, but I never like them. In Rails everything is about REST. I did some smaller/fun things with Rails/REST. However, I never thought about using REST for real projects with Java. The session “JSR 311 - Java API for RESTful Web Services” opened my eyes. Speaker was Stefan Tilkov and he was really good. He works on the JSR 311 and has a strong background in WS/Web/REST. Right after the session I tried Jersey, the reference implementation of the JSR. The interfaces look clear and simple (annotations are used) and the simple concept of REST does the rest (omg I am dying for that wordplay). I will further investigate Jersey and will look forward to the final. Another interesting session was held by Sun’s Java FOSS Ambassador Dalibor Topic: “OpenJDK and the Future of Open Source Java on GNU/Linux”. It looks like the OSS strategy of Sun is becoming more and more accepted. Dalibor is well-known in the OSS community and I hope his reputation will help to form a large community around the Java ecosystem. I will spare you the rest of the session. If there is interest, I can do some follow-up-posts about single sessions. One last thing I have to mention is the JAX Innovation Award. DynaTrace, a company in my home city, won the price. Congratulations! I am always happy to see that good quality code and innovation can also be done in a small city in Austria.