I think I’ve got a mental hangover (not a literal one) from the NFJS weekend. In all, I had a great time and look forward to attending again. I posted yesterday about the Groovy talks I attended and I also thoroughly enjoyed Ted Neward’s talks on threading and concurrency and Michael Nygard’s talk on designing for operations. Michael’s talk reminded me of a lot of stuff I’ve seen in the wild, and put some nice conceptual boxes around it for future processing. Definitely food for thought when designing systems and understanding how to help those that will run those systems on a daily basis.

It was also great to meet so many people like Michael Easter, Jeff Brown, Jay Zimmerman, Ted Neward, and so many others I will now forget to name.

For me, this was the first time I’ve attended NFJS as a presenter, not just an attendee. Over all, I can’t say that made it much different; I just spent (a lot) more time preparing. I spoke on Sunday morning about using Terracotta and Hibernate together to make a high-performance, high-scale, high-availability clustered cache. This presentation was based on a Terracotta webinar that you can watch here if you missed it and were interested or you can grab the code here on our forge. If you have even a greater thirst for knowledge about Terracotta and distributed caching there is another webinar here and code here.

On Sunday afternoon I spoke about the Java Collections API with a focus on the new stuff that has been added in Java 5 and 6. I had a lot of slides and wasn’t sure I could fit it into 90 minutes but I think it just about right. If I give this talk again in the future I would like to slim it down somehow (maybe be less exhaustive with the implementations) and cover the use of generics with collections and look at some code examples, particularly concurrent examples. If you’re interested in the slides, you can get them in PDF here. There are a lot of helpful diagrams and tables in the slides that you may find useful as a reference.

And also on the collections topic, Google just released their own alpha release of the Google Collections library, which might have something you’re interested in as well.

Thanks to everyone for attending my talks and thanks to all the speakers and especially Jay Zimmerman for putting on a great show.