Went to the Rocky Mountain Software Symposium this weekend. First, some meta stuff:

• Favorite session: Dave Thomas' Ruby For Java Programmers. I'm interested in Ruby but figured that I'd never get around to looking at it, but Dave inspired me to download it today. I love the idea of blocks.
• 2nd Favorite Session: Stuart Halloway's session on ClassLoaders. I did Java development full time until the fall of 2000, then started doing Java again this past summer. After 2 years, things that used to work didn't. I couldn't figure out CLASSPATH anymore and Ant didn't work the way I remembered it. Now I know why.
• I did a poor job of picking sessions. What I realized is that you should pick sessions by speaker, not by what sounds interesting. I thought Stuart's session would be a dud, but it was great.

You could've gone to the conference and never talk about Java, practically. James Duncan Davidson did 4 sessions, none on Java (my biggest regret is not going to one of his sessions). The closest you'd have to get to Java is Stuart Halloway's 3 hour session on "XML Schema for Java Programmers". There were 4 sessions that discussed .NET, on on Objective C, plus Dave Thomas' Ruby session and his overall "try Ruby" mantra in the keynote and panel discussion. It's half scary, and half really cool. Really cool in that it's a gutsy thing to talk about the "competition", scary in that I felt like I might be looking at the future of Java - except that there was no Java, at least not as we know it today.

Dynamic typing seems to be much less controversial that I expected. It seemed like the goodness of dynamic typing was pretty much moot in the panel discussion. Talking to some other attendees, I'm not sure if the message sunk in though. Dave Thomas gave some great reasons why Java's type system isn't what it's commonly believed to be, though I still think that the best argument is that once code hits the network, all typing is dynamic.

SOAP seemed to get short shrift. Jason Hunter had a session that was mostly an overview of the Amazon and Google APIs. He pretty much dismissed UDDI, which I don't personally disagree with, though I'd really like to know what Don Box sees when he says he'd take UDDI over WSDL. Nobody's doing web services. When Jason asked who was doing them, only my hand went up, and Jason looked surprised. I think REST got it worse though: nobody seemed to get it. Jason left the "S" out of REST his explanation and Stuart seemed to equate REST with GET (though in fairness, Stuart was explicitly trying to avoid "REST vs. SOAP"). Nobody talked about SOAP headers. I picked up on a lot of cynicism about web services in general, which probably is fair given the hype.

Overall, a pretty good experience. The main downside was that I had a hard time choosing sessions (4-5 going on at once) and I ended up regretting some of my choices.

If NewsGator 1.2 gets me to allow MSN Messenger to come out of exile and Sam Ruby to load Outlook, then it may be the end of the world as we know it.