Java Pavilion

I had lunch with my old college buddy and PHP guru Terry Chay. After lunch, we went to the JavaOne Pavillion. We checked out a few of the booths. One of the notable ones was Backbase. We checked out their widget system. One of their slick AJAX features is history/back button support. Terry quickly figured out how they were dealing with browser history and asked the booth rep. The rep didn't know how they were doing it, but a little investigation proved that Terry was right on. I found it amusing that he was teaching the Backbase rep how Backbase worked. Isn't it supposed to be the other way around?

Later, while I was at the JavaFX session, Terry checked out Krugle's booth. They were peddling enterprise code search appliances. My immediate thought was that in Java, Eclipse does a pretty good job of that. The strong typing of Java makes it ideal for search. The one thing that Krugle's appliance seemed to have going for it was that it integrated with your source control system and thus could turn up search results on "old" versions of code that were maybe gone now. I could see a new developer reading through an existing code base, looking at a class and saying "Fools! Why didn't they just use a priority queue to implement this thing." Maybe he could then do a search for a priority queue and find an old version that had done exactly.