We had so much fun in Vegas, we're bringing our love for enterprise Java to Europe. Join us in Prague, 18-20 June, for TheServerSide.com's 3rd annual Java Symposium-Europe. Some of the most popular sessions from Vegas will also be presented in Prague, including:

• Ted Neward's sessions: 'REST and SOAP: Arch Enemies or BFF?' and 'The Busy Java Developer's Guide to Scala'
• Jeff Dwyer's session: 'Real GWT Applications'
• John Davies' session: 'Extreme Transaction Processing, Low Latency and Performance'
• Kirk Pepperdine's session: 'Concurrency & High Performance'
• Jinesh Varia's session: 'Self-Scaling Java-Based Architecture in-the-Cloud'
• Holly Cummins' session: 'Java Performance Tooling' (and I'd like to offer a soft, perhaps weak, or maybe a phantom, reference: Holly was one of my favorite speakers from TSSJS Vegas.)

It'll be emceed by our very own Eugene Ciurana, who had sessions on LeapFrog.com's architecture, MapReduce, and other scalability technologies in Las Vegas - and he'll be doing some more of those sessions in Prague as well. Further, here's a sampling of what's all new for TSSJS-Europe: For starters, Stephan Janssen, founder and chairman of BEJUG, the Belgian Java Users Group, walks us through the ever-evolving and exciting rich internet application landscape in his keynote address, 'Supporting the RIA Space'. We'll also dive into what's new and cool in the upcoming Spring 3.0 with Juergen Hoeller, co-founder of the Spring Framework, and Spring-OSGi with Costin Leau of SpringSource. To tie to it together, Eberhard Wolff is presenting a case study on maximizing the power of the Spring Portfolio. Other TSSJS-Europe sessions include:

• What's New and Exciting in JPA 2.0
• What’s New in EJB 3.1
• How to Choose Your Java Web Framework
• Groovy in the Enterprise: Case Studies
• Simplifying Java EE Development with Grails
• Integrating JPA and Hibernate with Rich Internet Applications
• JRuby on Rails: Web Development Evolved
• Case Study: Performance Tuning a Web Shop with Open Source Tools
• Micro Design Patterns
• Comparing Dependency Injection Frameworks
• Kickstarting JCR: TheServerSide.com as a Content Application
• Asynchronous Messaging using XMLBeans and JMS
• Patterns in Mule
• Building Enterprise Applications Using Glassfish
• Portlets 2.0: Next Generation Portlet Applications
• SOA Using Service Component Architecture

Select any of the links above to read complete abstracts - and to browse the rest of the sessions we've confirmed. The complete conference agenda will be posted "at-a-glance" this week. I'm sure you'll be impressed - it's shaping up well. Remember, you must register by THIS FRIDAY to lock in the lowest price for TSSJS-Europe. See you there!

We'll also dive into what's new and cool in the upcoming Spring 3.0 with Juergen Hoeller, co-founder of the Spring Framework

Worthwhile just to go to ask Jürgen what is the logic behind switching from years of repeating the Mantra "Don't let the framework pollute your code" to "With Java5, we now use annotations to do configuration of AOP and DI". Why not be truthful an say "Hey guys, you will glue your applications to Spring 100% anyway, so you might as well put it in the code". Not a bad thing necessarily of course, but pretty much against everything the Spring advocates were advocating the last couple of years.

I welcome annotations. Spring not using annotations was a reason to not use spring for me at last. XML-programming is just a killer to maintain. As you say, you'll be depending on the framework anyhow. It's not like changing frameworks is a plug-and-play action.

Strange stuff from the conference website: "The Clarion Congress Hotel is a brand new, state-of-the-art conference facility conveniently located in the historical center of Prague" - Now then, I don't know about state of the art part, but I do know it is in Vysocanska - which is about as much the historical center of Prague as Queens is the historical center of New York City :-). Not bad to go where most tourists won't go though....