One thing I’m curious about is Scala. I’ve been working with a research group lately on a project using Intelligent Agents, and through that was introduced to the idea of Functional Programming. Somehow I missed seeing this in my undergraduate days, though I remember my peers complaining about Scheme in one of the senior-level computer science courses.

Some of the talks on Groovy and Grails seem interesting, too. The Ruby on Rails movement has certainly sparked some innovation in the Web Development community, and I like seeing those ideas cross-ported into the technologies I have more of an affinity for, such as Java and ColdFusion. Having recently built a somewhat painful full-scale Java application, there may be something useful here.

The main conference was bookended by two excellent keynotes: Jared Spool from UIE and Kimberly Blessing from PayPal and the Web Standards Project. They both hilighted aspects of the Read/Write Web from the podium — Jared by Photoblogging to Flickr and Kimberly by Podcasting. It’s nice to see people who get it.

I also had the pleasure of taking in an excellent presentation on Day 2 by Dan Frommelt on Universal Design. I’ve got some reading to do.