Phil Zoio, an open source and Java developer, introduced his Impala framework. He showed an impressive framework that can offer the modularisation and deployment control of OSGi without the pain of OSGi. While Impala does not implement all OSGi execution environment’s features, it is an excellent choice for developers who cannot use an OSGi EE and must stick with a traditional Java EE application server.
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Russ Miles, a senior consultant for SpringSource, gave talk on Spring .NET and Spring Extensions. He stirred the putrid waters of Java developers (not really, you Java developers are all right) by showing us that Spring Framework works just as well in .NET as it does in Java. Interestingly, because of .NET’s web application architecture, even individual components of .NET web pages can be Spring .NET objects.
He also explained the Spring Extensions, which is a SpringSource-sponsored programme, where your own code can become officially supported by SpringSource and possibly make it to the code Spring Portfolio.
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Andrew Chalkley of Cake Solutions gave an interesting talk on jQuery at the last Spring User Group meeting. Even though jQuery is a JavaScript library and has nothing to do with the Spring Framework, it quickly became apparent that most Spring developers face difficulties when they have to leave the comfortable world of Java and start writing (X)HTML and JavaScript to give their web applications a bit of flair.
Andrew gave practical examples of how to separate the behaviour from presentation using jQuery. The code he showed was simple and the results gave hope to all Spring web developers in the room.
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