There were are 3 days full of Java and other technologies as well. Here is my review of the day.
Opening keynote(s)
The first part of the opening was about Devoxx. The creator Stephan Jansen and some of his colleagues went through the updates regarding the ‘Devoxx’ ecosystem of conferences that is now booming. London, Paris, Krakow, Casablanca are now hosting Devoxx conferences with more than 1000 attendees most of them. Voxxed, the ‘side’ project of Devoxx , is increasing it’s unique visitor number and is eventually bringing more mini Devoxx days all around Europe. I can still remember my first time visiting ‘Javapolis’ the original name of the conference, you could feel it that this conference would eventually spawn more stuff out of it! And there it is, it is spreading, so well done to all the people for their hard work and the Belgian JUG.
A big announcement is that Parleys is starting to phase out and most of it’s content is moving to Youtube and Vimeo. What is more exciting is that you can actually watch the sessions (yes today) from your home/office. So the talks from today will be published tomorrow, the first 2 days are already available. Here is the Youtube channel of Devox 2015 – enjoy!
The second part of the keynote, was an introduction by Mark Reinhold (Chief Architect of Java) to the new stuff coming in Java 9 and specifically Project Jigsaw. His talk was very similar to the one he gave a couple of weeks ago in Java One.
The third part was one of the sessions to remember. On stage we had a famous theoretical physicist, Professor Lawrence M. Krauss, giving a speech about our journey to discover the origins of the universe. Really funny and inspiring talk, about our insignificance in the universe, and the universe (or many of the – multiverse) as the speaker point out. Great idea to fuse into a hard core developer conference such a talk! Really worth watching it when it is released tomorrow.
Async programming in Java 8, using the Completable Future
Jose Paumard as I have written a lot of times, he is one of my favorite core java speakers. I follow his presentations from various conferences and on Plurarsight. This one was about the newly introduced CompletableFuture and how we can eventually apply async programming principles and async method chaining. I still find the overall API over-complicated and it seems that related libs and work, for example RxJava really make more sense. I hope the API designers get this kind of feedback and iterate on the features, mostly simplify stuff.
JSF with Primefaces, from ugly duckling to beautiful swan
I’ve done JSF work in the past 2 years (not full time but enough) to eventually believe that JSF 2.0 is still relevant and Primefaces is the best component library out there. We had the chance to actually meet in person Cagatay Civici (aka Optimus_Prime) and thank him for the amazing work he and his team does. I really liked the addition of the signature component (where you can actually hand write your signature on a widget). Yes banks are gonna love this one I guess. I also note that now by using Bean Validation annotations on your beans, you can do both client and of course server side validation, with no extra elements on the xhtml forms or so! This is really a killer feature and simplifies a lot the xhmtl overloading, especially with heavy validation components.
Distributed load testing with kubernetes
Kubernetes is one of my fav research and work topics lately. Very solid talk covering some of the basic concepts around kubernetes and then going through the process on spawning with the help of kubernetes and ‘cluster’ of Locust workers in order to form a load testing ‘swarm’ for your end application. I have not used Locust before, so personal note to give it a try and evaulate it.
The Java Council
The council aims to continue the legacy of the Java Posse. An entertaining and technical session at the same time. It is always a pleasure to see on stage one of the most interesting guys in the Java (not only) world, the Martijn Verburg , (aka the Diabolical developer)
Wildfly Community BOF
As a JavaEE and JBoss/Wildfly die hard I could not miss this BOF, in this last late slot. Hosted by D.Andreadis, we had a short intro to what is coming with almost final Wildfly 10. The first Alpha of EAP 7 is just released by the way. During the session there were also some discussions about the importance and relevance of solutions like (Wildfly-swarm) and how they correlated with current needs on big customers and deployments. It seems that a lot of people agree that fat jars do not always feel very flexible. One a side note, I have actually proposed that they should consider finding a new name for the project since it is conflicting with Docker Swarm. Yet again this year (I will keep doing this for ever ), I have expressed my request so that Wildfly has built in support for LogBack, in it’s logging subsystem. Great session after, great to have Antonio Goncalves, along.
So
Well this is it. Eventually I would like to collect some more stickers for my new laptop, but it seems this year there are not too many stickers or maybe not too many vendors that I like with stickers. It was a full and busy day. Stay tuned on the youtube channel to get all the new talks. Go Devoxx!
| Reference: | Devoxx Belgium 2015 – Conference Day 1 #devoxx from our JCG partner Paris Apostolopoulos at the Papo’s log blog. |
