Barcelona
Well, I finished the show and made it home. On the last day, the crowd was mostly into the tech talks and not interested in the vendors so much. I talked with a few of the people there, like the Azul guys. I also talked with the IceFaces guys about maybe doing a demo together. Appistry could be the back end hosting some business logic and they could be the front end gui. It would be the merger of AJAX and grids. That could be really cool. The future of Java looks really fragmented. There is no denying the influence of the Spring and Ruby communities in the enterprise software world. SOA looks non-existant. There are a ton of web frameworks now. I hope that shakes out a little. Java is starting to show its age a bit. People have been predicting the death of JEE for some time and judging by the shows I’ve been to I think it’s already happened. Who’s writing new software for JEE? Nobody, as far as I can see. Its all about Spring/Hibernate apps with AJAX front ends. Some variations exist here and there, but that’s pretty much the de facto.
After the show was over, I managed to hike around Barcelona for a couple of days before coming home. I saw some great sights but I started wishing I knew more Spanish. I went to have lunch in a small place that looked tourist-friendly. They were off the beaten path, but it looked like thier menu was translated into English so I thought I was safe. But when I sat down and asked the waitress, "Habla Ingles?" She replied, "No, cero." Which means, "You stupid American tourist, there’s no way I’m going to make this easy for you." So I then decided to try to describe a sandwich by miming two pieces of bread with my hands and saying, "Pan con carne?" She said, "No," and showed me a hand written spanish menu with 5 items on the top and 5 items on the bottom. I recognized "spaghetti" so I pointed at that. Then she wanted me to pick something from the bottom list also and said something about "carne" so I figured it was the meat course or something. I pointed blindly at something on the list and hoped for the best. She went to the next table and sat down with them, I heard them repeat the two things I ordered and laugh. That’s always a good sign when you’re in a foreign country. But it turned out I just ordered a sausage. It was pretty good.
All in all, I’d say Barcelona is a great place to visit. I’d highly recommend it. It was no coincidence though that the first night I was back home we went to CheeburgerCheeburger and I ordered a quarter pound burger with a milkshake.
-jasen
