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Sun Tech Days 2005/2006.

It is Day-One of the Sun Tech Day. Noooo, not Suntec Day... Sun_Tech_Day. By the way, it is held at the Raffles City Convention Centre, not Suntec. heh heh.

You can say I am a mountain beatle (shua-gu), but this is the first conference-seminar I am attending as a professional, and I'm truly enjoying it alot. Perhaps it is because I can understand the technology better than during the school days (I could never imagine I can be doing programming for living). Or perhaps it is because I am recovering from fatigue. It had been awful in the past couple of days. I am about 80% back, but not so much of shakey and light-headedness anymore. Yeah, it feels good!

So far the tracks had been really useful. Not too technical, but provided enough tips and info which we can bring back for our daily work.

The demo by Joey Shen and Kiran Patelon on Extreme GUI Makeover was really impressive! It completely dispelled the myth that Java applications are dull and slow! In fact I love the instant messaging program developed for the demo (if only we can get it to work on our development network =P, we already have in mind which avatar for who! heh heh). You gotta see it to believe it. Swing + Java 2D Rendering. But I think it is abit tedious to do lah, need some practice and time to learn how to do. heh heh.

The Netbean Matisse hands-on was really enjoyable too. The pace was just right. But best of all, the tool itself is sweet. It isn't flawless, and still alittle buggy (beta version mah), but it is very near what every Swing developer dreams of. Forget about the Layout managers, you can finally use the drag and drop, auto resizing, auto aligning, shortcuts, etc. (the features .Net and VB programmers had been enjoying all these times).

And it is easy to use! Something I'll need 30mins-1hr to do from scratch, or 20mins-30mins if I reuse the codes, I can now do it in 10mins or less if I don't screw up the my design.

We only tried the basic form design during the hands-on. The WYSIWYG preview feature is quite cool (no need to write a main class to view it). But the alignment can be abit off when you actually compile and run it. And the code auto-generated can be quite messy (I guess this can't be helped). However I think this is a fantastic tool, which anyone can use to design Swing applications. Will we be out of job soon???

The talk I enjoyed most was the one on Performance Tuning of Java SE Applications by Doris Chen. She is such a confident speaker, and exudes such charm which make it so easy to listen to her and understand what she is trying to convey. Her slides were really easy to follow. I particularly like the "best practices" in the slides. I think it is good to take a look once the presentation slides are available for download.

With the technical content aside, there are always the freebies and food that will make my day!

The two Duke mascots were great comic relief. With their big red nose and butt, they pranced around giving "Sun Bucks" which can be used to exchanged for more freebies. I am sure more than one person out there had the evil thoughts of pushing them over, and seeing them bounce back up!

Can't wait for Day-Two!

Oh and by the way, the colour of the free Sun bag is abit obiang leh. ha ha!

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