I went to my first Denver JUG meeting last night. I must have been sitting next to Matt Raible and not known it, I remember looking at his nifty cell phone/digital camera because I was thinking about buying the same one for my wife's birthday. Matt has a few pictures up. Pretty neat stuff, I wonder how it would work with Radio and MailEdit.

I didn't make the presentation on TINI, but I was mainly interested in learning about XDoclet anyway. I knew a bit about what the idea behind it was, but had no practical experience. Erik started by asking how many people were doing EJB (lots) and how many were using XDoclet (not many). Erik did a good job of outlining the benefits, which I didn't need any convincing of. In general, it's the same idea as attributes in .NET, except that the information isn't available at runtime, so the effect is more like a preprocessor than attributes. Looking at some of the examples, I was also concerned that the Struts examples might have the effect of just moving the problems of redundancy around. One possible benefit to having XDoclet as comments might be that it'll encourage developers to keep their javadoc current, since the build process now depends on it. I'm not holding out much hope, though.

Overall, I was pretty impressed that DJUG is attracting great quality speakers. I'm really looking forward to the Rocky Mountain Software Symposium now. On another note, I ran out of the hall to get to my car because I was over the 2 hr limit on street parking. Unfortunately I was 3 minutes too late to avoid a $20 parking ticket. One big disadvantage of meeting downtown. Next time, I'll take the bus.