Technologies to look into

I've recently resigned from my job, so will have some time on my hands to investigate technologies - in between applying for jobs, responding to calls from recruiters, preparing for interviews and attending interviews.

This is a sort of "note to self" on some areas of interest, in no particular order:

• Scala
• Spring 3
• Tomcat 7
• Hybris 4.2 (if I decide to stick with E-Commerce)
• Hibernate
• JQuery
• IntelliJ
• PostgreSQL 9

Looking back, I should be able to combine most of these technologies to produce some kind of hobby application.

I'm curious about the transport situation in London, so I might dream up an innovative visualisation of the bike stations status, or something along those lines.

Watch this space!

S2G Forum London

A couple of months ago I booked today off work to attend the Spring Source S2G forum.

Unfortunately due to a looming deadline and issues arising back at the office, I felt compelled to miss the last couple of sessions but I still felt that I learnt enough from the day to make it worthwhile.

Mark Thomas did a good job of outlining some of the new features to be expected in Apache Tomcat 7.0.

Rod Johnson was good value with some self-deprecating humour when his live demonstration of Roo struck a couple of hiccups.

I was impressed with Roo's approach to round-trip code generation via AspectJ.

The main disappointment from the day was the thought that my currently planned projects are dependent on a third party - so I can't simply pick up Spring 3.0, Roo and Tomcat 7 for the next green-ish field development.