Yesterday I attended a NLJUG university session at Sun Amersfoort. Topic was Glassfish v3 which is coming soon. Glassfish is Sun's open source application server.
While most of the technical details went too deep for me (I'm not using this stuff on a daily basis) I tried to grasp the main line. For me it's the focus on the two stakeholders: developers and system managers. For the system managers clustering is pretty easy now and they also demo'd SNMP support. For the developers it's very handy that you can fix a bug, save the file and then test your webpage again without restarting the appserver and needing to recreate the testsituation. You just refresh the page and it all works, your entire session is kept intact.
But Java EE development is still pretty complex. How much emphasis should we put on all the tools and technical details as opposed to logic and creating maintainable applications?

Use cases

Committing yourself to giving a presentation on a new subject is a great way to learn. You put yourself under pressure, work hard for the presentation, learn a lot and create new material for later use.
Unfortunately my presentation on use cases at the RDW was scheduled quite close on my NIOC presentation. This meant working the entire Easter holidays on the presentation, which included a screening of the use of Use Cases in a particular project. My most relevant find was that they were keeping track of requirements (functional and non-functional), scenarios, use cases (twice, with slightly different titles) and all the mappings between them. Of course it's all useful information but in the end it looked a bit too much overhead to me.

The presentation itself left me with mixed feelings. My public was attentive enough but didn't really react at the end. However, later that day I was at the UMCG and came into contact with a lady who works as a functional designer. We immediately connected on the subject of use cases and I could give her my handouts which were still in my pocket. I felt like I still got some reward for my efforts.