I have nothing but good things to say about my experience at Impact today. Yeah the food continues to be bad but that's beside the point. I attended 3 labs today. 

The first lab was about performance improvements in WebSphere Process Server. The lab showed how to design the application and components within the application to achieve greater performance. The take away points are:

• Keep the BOs small because they are serialized to and deserialized from xml. Also, for a long running process they are persisted in the database. Finally, smaller BOs are easier to handle in the mediation

• Try to reduce number of interfaces. Consider one interface with multiple methods instead of several interfaces with one method. Do you have methods with similar signature? Consider consolidating them

• Finally, there are things you can do in the application server to improve the performance

The second lab Hacking 101, was an eye opener. It made me thinking, "may be I should stop going online." On the application design side, it discussed SQL injection, cross site scripting and more. The lab was very informative and gave the audience great pointers on how to design the application with security in mind. 

The third lab was about WAS clustering. It walked through the steps to create a vertical and horizontal cluster and manage the web server and nodes from the deployment manager. The lab was about clustering 101, which one could probably pick up from an article or a redbook but I thought it was a good focused exercise.

On day 3, I am going to attend some more technical sessions. Hopefully the lecture style sessions won't be boring.