Cor blimey day 2 was technical! And Steve’s session was easily the most in depth of any I saw over the two days.
Long polling is pretty well established as a technique and the use of BlazeDS to handle the connection is something that everyone talks about doing but very few actually implement.
In a great preso, Steve ran through the basic of the concept and quickly jumped into code to setup the BlazeDS configuration, the Event Gateway to wire it all together and the basic AJAX / jQuery client to send the messages.
I’ll be frank and say that a lot of the configuration was lost on me – it’s the kind of thing I’ll always have to look up in the docs as I’m never going to be doing it regularly but the actual concepts were neatly outlined.
Some of the gotchas were also well worth hearing about: the blocking IO model in BlazeDS, the need to separate out onto a different server to prevent long polled requests exhausting your app server thread pool.
I was also really impressed to see a very technical demo, running on Ubuntu and pretty much live coded (a fair whack of copy and paste but built up over the hour) – all of this from a guy who could barely stand for the 2 days of the conference!
Scores (out of 10)
Direct Professional Value: 6
Ongoing General Value: 8
Contention / Debate: 5
Style: 8
Overall: 6.75
