Cocoon GetTogether
November 19th, 2002
Well, the GetTogether is over (for me at least, I guess the evening event attendees are still eating and drinking right now). It was quite a full day. Driving to Nazareth was nice (I'm used to drive to Brussels nowadays), but it still took me about an hour. A quick coffee and a roll, and we were driven into the auditorium by Steven. Matthew introduced us to the things we already knew, but I was amazed to hear questions that clearly stated the opposite -- the GetTogether seems to have even reached other people than "hard-core fans".
Sylvain has given a nice presentation about embedded Cocoon. Although it's not my business area, I think it would be very refreshing to work in a space-restrained environment one time. The greatest works of art are created due to lack of ressources. Lack of ressources forces you to use your creativity, and this gives creative works. Q.E.D. :-) In any case, Sylvain succeeded in giving a different view on things, and that's always interesting.
Carsten gave a nice overview of the portal framework in Cocoon. I've never looked at it, but I now have the feeling that (a) I should have, and (b) it is cleanly done.
Ovidiu, the HP guy with the MacOS X laptop, gave a nice presentation of the flow control in Cocoon. I finally see what's the intention here, and I hope to play around with it once. The only drawback is that I don't like XSP :-s. Anyway, according to Steven, Ovidiu put this presentation together just for the GetTogether, so all other things even, the GetTogether managed to generate documentation for Cocoon, which makes the effort worthwile already :-) Which reminds me to buy the Cocoon book from Carsten and Matthew (I waited till today in case I should've won it ;-))
Torsten seemed a very intelligent guy to me. Alas, I don't think he has given many presentations yet. You could feel his nerves in the back of the room. It's strange that smart people get nervous to talk about something they know inside out to people who have travelled several countries to hear them. I think this is some sort of misplaced modesty.
Last on stage was Marc (the guy who once hired me, and thus is one of the many causes I know the word "blogging" now, but that's another story) to tell the obliged "marketing speak of the organization". Sad that this wasn't perceived as such by most people, until he presented it as being so. As always, Marc tended to think that all people share his view on the world, and forgot to tell what the purpose of xReporter truly was about. We learnt a lot about its architecture though. He also made an effort to make some advertising for wings, which I thank him for :-) It already got me one reaction: "why do you use jCharts, and not JFreeChart?" Well.
So the day is over. I enjoyed it very much, not in the least for finally being able to put faces on email addresses. Lessons learnt:
Sylvain has given a nice presentation about embedded Cocoon. Although it's not my business area, I think it would be very refreshing to work in a space-restrained environment one time. The greatest works of art are created due to lack of ressources. Lack of ressources forces you to use your creativity, and this gives creative works. Q.E.D. :-) In any case, Sylvain succeeded in giving a different view on things, and that's always interesting.
Carsten gave a nice overview of the portal framework in Cocoon. I've never looked at it, but I now have the feeling that (a) I should have, and (b) it is cleanly done.
Ovidiu, the HP guy with the MacOS X laptop, gave a nice presentation of the flow control in Cocoon. I finally see what's the intention here, and I hope to play around with it once. The only drawback is that I don't like XSP :-s. Anyway, according to Steven, Ovidiu put this presentation together just for the GetTogether, so all other things even, the GetTogether managed to generate documentation for Cocoon, which makes the effort worthwile already :-) Which reminds me to buy the Cocoon book from Carsten and Matthew (I waited till today in case I should've won it ;-))
Torsten seemed a very intelligent guy to me. Alas, I don't think he has given many presentations yet. You could feel his nerves in the back of the room. It's strange that smart people get nervous to talk about something they know inside out to people who have travelled several countries to hear them. I think this is some sort of misplaced modesty.
Last on stage was Marc (the guy who once hired me, and thus is one of the many causes I know the word "blogging" now, but that's another story) to tell the obliged "marketing speak of the organization". Sad that this wasn't perceived as such by most people, until he presented it as being so. As always, Marc tended to think that all people share his view on the world, and forgot to tell what the purpose of xReporter truly was about. We learnt a lot about its architecture though. He also made an effort to make some advertising for wings, which I thank him for :-) It already got me one reaction: "why do you use jCharts, and not JFreeChart?" Well.
So the day is over. I enjoyed it very much, not in the least for finally being able to put faces on email addresses. Lessons learnt:
- Not all highways are traffic jammed in Belgium in the morning.
- It is possible to organize a seminar that doesn't run out of sandwiches at lunch time
- Smart people are modest. Bloggers aren't.
- If all speakers keep up to their promises, we can expect tons of documentation on the short term.
- When in doubt, always take your laptop with wi-fi with you. It might be that a geek seminar provides wi-fi access. Saves you an hour of typing in the evening.
- One stubborn guy can get 100 people together
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