POJO validation is a bit of a hassle, especially if you are trying to protect your objects state by beeing restrictive on the get/set methods. Often you have to open up the object because of needs from webframeworks etc. At the JavaBin forums I came across OVal which tries to solve validation problems through annotations and aspects. Looks interesting and I’ll have to take a look at it whenever I get lucky enough to develop on a Java 5 project. 😉
JavaZone in Oslo is a really good conference, and I’ve been there 3 times now. The last two years I’ve only been able to attend one day, but it’s been good anyhow.
You can find slides/podcasts/videos from the sessions here.
One of the sessions I attended that provided the most hands on info I can use in my daily work was Jonathan Purdys presentation on The Top Ten Ways to Botch an Enterprise Java Application.
Setting up XRadar these days. Should probably complement it with some of these tools too.