Thoughts on the core developers training

As I mentioned earlier I attended the Core Developers J2EE web tier training in sydney. I figured I’d post my thoughts here as feedback for the guys. Executive summary: very good.

The course was over three days rather than the original five, while I’d have preferred the longer course, obviously market conditions required the reduction. The result was that the course was focused on the servlet spec, its implementation in jetty and tomcat. Rather than on other open source technologies like struts, cocoon, webwork etc.

This was extremely useful, and probably a good thing. Rather than looking at what these web app frameworks did, we looked at how frameworks work in general. My understanding of struts and tiles increased a lot.

One discussion about HTTP range requests helped me squash a long outstanding production defect (look for an entry on that soonish). Similarly the detailed coverage of servlet filters and chaining helped with my design of the security filters for a proof of concept I’m working on.

I found the discussion on clustering an interesting academic exercise, as a bank, we have a mainframe which is always the final arbiter. So database replications, hot swappable web servers etc. are nice, but not used at present. I did find the Session replication very interesting, presently users session are not replicated between our production and DR environments, though I’m still not convinced it’s entirely necessary in our situation.

On the whole it was a great course and if it sounds like something you may enjoy, you probably will. My employer paid for this course for me. If they won’t pay for others in the future, I’ll probably shell out myself. In the interests of keeping my first derivative nice and healthy