Last September 18th, 2007, another JUG Genova meeting was held at DIST (Dipartimento di Informatica, Sistemistica e Telematica) of the University of Genova. It featured a very interesting presentation by Carlo Bonamico and Corrado Alesso on the Spring framework.
First off, I must say DIST is where I did my master thesis and took my degree, so there’s quite a bunch of nice memories from when I was a young engineering student. Coming back there after some 8-9 years, was pleasing and awkward at the same time: this reminded me of when I was hanging around the labs or “chasing” the teachers for answers, or even struggling with all the equipment.
Well, that’s enough ranting about the good (?) ol’ times. The presentation by Carlo and Corrado shed some light on quite a few strengths, such as dependeny injection. It’s a framework mainly targeted at enterprise application: however, it can be used also as a stand-alone library (e.g. recall the AOP features discussed in a previous JUG meeting). Indeed, I hope I will be using Spring someday 🙂
The audience was also good, as you can see from the above shot. What strikes me as weird, however, is that despite the meeting was held at a university department (with its main focus on computing-related topics and research fields), no student whatsoever showed up (except for Corrado, of course, who is not really the average student for sure!). Either there was some flaw in the advertisement, or really today’s student are really not interested in complementing their theoretical work with some valuable hands-on experience. Anyway, This meeting really proved this JUG thing is alive and well!
Next meeting is scheduled for November 20th. Stay tuned!