Installfest

[Doug.Palmer at csiro.au]

> I concour that a general talk on Open Source would be good - 
> Yesterday I met
> with final semester students about their "big project", and 
> more than half
> of them wanted make VB / MS Access systems.

How big is "big"? Would they be able to run to Ant/JBoss/MySQL and,
possibly, JBuilder for an IDE?

Pros: Develop a real scalable enterprise-style componentised system using an
application server, just like the Real World(tm). JBoss and MySQL are
open-source and the design patterns in JBoss are first-rate. (I know my
group doesn't rate JBoss as highly as some of the commercial appservers for
performance, but I doubt that your students are going to need 1000s of
transactions per second throughput :-))

Cons: Getting up to speed with EJBs, JSPs, etc can be a bit of a learning
curve, paticularly for those not already steeped in OO. JBoss is a
relatively programmer-friendly appserver, but they'll still need to learn to
package and deploy components using raw XML.