Easter Break
By Dr Chris P. Jobling
Here in the UK, Universities typically send students off on holiday for the four weeks around the period in March-April when Easter falls. At the University of Wales Swansea (or Swansea University as it prefers to call itself [for marketing purposes)]) our Easter break is right in the middle of the teaching period. There are still three weeks of lecturing to go after Easter, and quite a lot of course preparation, marking, exam setting, course reviews and other admin stuff, but nonetheless it’s still a period for taking a breather, catching up on interesting stuff and adding stuff to this Blog. I started a day or two early having discovered via a Blog entry (forget whose, sorry!) that JavaLobby.com had recorded most of the presentations from last year’s JavaPolis conference keynotes, presentations and demos and made them available free and on demand with a streaming audio soundtrack. There’s lots to keep me entertained.
Already I’ve watched:
- Dion Almaer and James Strachan’s “Pragmatic Groovy” presentation which is very relevant as I stole great chunks of this very PowerPoint presentation (which you’ll find on-line in the articles collection at groovy.codehaus.org/Articles) and used them in a set of lectures on Groovy which I’ve just completed in the “introduction to scripting languages” part of my Software Applications course.
- Vincent Massol’s presentation and demo of Maven. Also highly relevant as I used Maven to create the project web site for this year’s Software Applications Project. And it’s really great (if only I could get ViewCVS to show me the repository!).
I also started to watch Erich Gamma’s presentation on Eclipse and am about to watch Tim Bray’s keynote on dynamic languages for Java. Check back for more!