CSS 2008 - Wednesday - the rest

Although the main focus of my day was RIAs, I actually started out the day with an interesting presentation on Groovy by Eric Schreiner. One great advantage of having a wireless connection in the conference centre is that I was able to download and install the Groovy Eclipse plugin as the presentation started, and then follow along with the more basic examples on my own computer.

As well as explaining the most basic feature of Groovy, and how to integrate scripting within Java, Eric also described how to use the MetaData features of Groovy to alter the behaviour of existing code.

The last presentation I attended today was Dustin Marx's second presentation, "Java Management Extensions (JMX) Circa 2008". After a short history of the JMX spec, Dustin gave a demo showing the improvements made to the JConsole tool in Java 6 - the most interesting features being the automatic detection of JMX managed applications and custom plug-in support.

Moving on to the MBeans themselves, he explained the differences between the various types of MBeans, and the advantages of defining MBeans using Spring.