[series of entries regarding my trip to JIA]

Keith Donald's introduction to Spring was a presentation I had hoped would shed some light on the one framework that I'm truly interested in aside from RIFE and maybe JSF. Unfortunately this presentation had some good initial information but mired by, in my opinion, uninteresting slides and a problem with showing the entire ballroom Spring bean declaration XML for 30+ mins.

Spring certainly sounds interesting and I'm going to give it another look later this week at Matt Raible's Comparing Java Web Frameworks: JSF, Struts, Spring, Tapestry, and WebWork.

The thing that could've really perked this up was to show example code, and then show what it does in a browser. Back and forth. Coding... Browser... Really highlight the features, the best parts. Not trying to be unbiased and showing everything in just a factual way. If you're giving a presentation the audience expects that you have a fervent love or at least a mild passion about what you're presenting. I'm certainly not saying that Keith Donald himself doesn't have any interest in Spring, just that his presentation style suggested that.

Tragically, I was so uninterested in the style of presentation that I didn't actually learn what I wanted from the presentation. I've seen (and heard of) a few posts on JavaBlogs about the presentation and they had good things to say, perhaps it just wasn't made for my user group.