I was excited to see Brian Button announced the second annual St. Louis Code Camp today. I spoke last year on XQuery and had a great time. I’m definitely looking forward to attending and speaking again.

I’m oscillating on a few possible speaking topics, so I’ll just open up my list for you, great Internet, to provide me feedback. Which of these topics sounds interesting?

• SCA – this is a subject I’m really close to right now that may have some interest around it.
• Java 7 – my Java 7 page puts me in a good position to cover possible Java 7 features and language changes and maybe talk about what we would want. It would also be possible to do more focused versions around key items like closures or java modularity.
• Implementing an extensible command-processing framework – I wrote a series of articles in January on getting started with Antlr that is actually a chunk of a bigger set of code I have that implements an extensible command-processing framework that can work from either a command shell or a test script environment. I think this could make a really fun code talk. Regardless, I’ll be writing another round of blogs on the rest of this framework eventually.
• Scala – Lots of buzz around this functional/OO language that compiles to byte code and integrates well with Java. I know basically nothing about it, so this would be an excuse for me to learn it myself.

Last year I was inspired by Kyle Cordes and his no-slides talk on Lua. I’d love to do something very code or example focused like that instead of working from slides. Or at least something different than your traditional powerpoint talk. I think the command processing idea would be perfect for a code talk and the Java 7 idea would be great for an entry into a lot of possible discussions.

Let me know what you think!!