As usual, JavaOne was a great networking opportunity, and I caught up with old friends, made new ones, and met up with people I had only ever known virtually. This year I was giving a session myself, so I didn’t get to as many sessions as I would have liked to. However, I did attend a few gems. Here are some of them: Neil Ford talked about a variety of unit testing tools in Unit Testing That Sucks Less: Small Things Make a Big Difference”>, going from JUnit-based techniques such as Hamcrest asserts, MockRunner, and Groovy as a unit-testing language, through to more exotic tools such as Infinitest (which seems to have made a lot of progress since I last looked at it), Jester, and the intriguingly-named Spock (an interesting BDD Groovy-based framework with a very concise and expressive DSL). Dave Klein spoke about Grails Integration Strategies, presenting an excellent case for the use of Grails in a broader enterprise context, and not just for small isolated and/or internal web applications. He showed a number of useful tricks such as how to configure a Grails app to talk to EJBs, to use JNDI resources, and to access legacy databases. I also caught an interesting session from the guys at LinkedIn called JDBC? We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ JDBC: How LinkedIn Scaled with memcached, SOA, and a Bit of SQL, which was about scaling apps using a combination of BASE and ACID. Although this mixture would usually produce only salty water, the folks at LinkedIn have managed to use a comibination of fast ACID updates when really required, and slower updates when you can get away with it to design a very highly scalable architecture.And the Groovy/Grails BOF was a lot of fun.Would have liked to have heard Kosuke on Hudson, but unfortunately I was giving my own presentation at that time – too bad! Anyway, another great JavaOne – looking forward to catching up with everyone at some of the other upcoming conferences (I’m thinking Agile2009 and Groovy, in particular), or at JavaOne next year!If anyone wants to catch me in London, I will be over that way between the 6th and 10th of July for the first London session of the Java Power Tools Bootcamp, that I am running with the folks from Skills Matter. There are still a few places left for this session, so if you want to come up to speed with the latest all-round development lifecycle tools and techniques, and learn how to set up a development infrastructure and build environment that kicks butt, come along!. On the 6th, I will also be speaking at the Skills Matter In-The-Brain evening session (6:30 – 8:00pm). Java