My IT-blog

Devoxx University 2009

Devoxx is one of the largest Java Conferences in Europe. The first 2 days consists of Universitytalks and the other 3 days are conferences.
Since I live in Belgium, approximately 30km of Devoxx, and have a great interest in Java, I was able to attend the 2 Universitydays.

When I’ve entered the room on Monday morning, the first thing I’ve noticed was that there where no stands with Java-companies or products. We all got a bag with a T-shirt which is really cool

The first event of the day in which I’ve attended was an introduction to Java Generics by Prof. Eric Steegmans. He explained during this 3 hours class all about Java Generics. He started with a very basic example used in in ArrayList and build his presentation up to more advanced features like generics in classes, generics with wildcards,…
He explained everything very well but the example in his demo was not really good. He was trying to show us a class which used generics but he implemented like 6 other classes which made the example a little bit to difficult to follow.

Next on the menu was another 3 hours class about JSF2 by Dan Allen, Peter Muir and Andy Schwartz. The course was divided into 3 sections: View(Andy), Controller (Dan) and Model (Peter). What I liked about there presentation style was the fact that they showed how something was in JSF 1.x, how they improved it in JSF2.0 en what they should improve in JSF 2.next.
The presentation given by Peter Muir was the best of the 3. He was very enthusiastic and explained why JSF shouldn’t concern (very much) about the model.
I’ve learned a lot in this presentation.

Next was a presentation about Hades by Oliver Gierke. It was a short presentation about implementing data access layers with JPA which is a lot easier with Hades.
I’m not quite sure if I will ever use Hades but it looked promising.

Last presentation of the day was about NoSQL with Cassandra and Hadoop by Steven Noels. He told us that his company developed a CMS which had some problems with scaling if it was deployed at big companies. As a solution they threw out the rational databases and went to another way of working. He explained which frameworks they compared (Googles Bigtables, Cassandra,Hades,..) and why they ultimately choosed Hades above Cassandra.
I like this way of thinking and will look to it in the (near) future.

It was a very interesting day.

The second day when I’ve entered the building, I’ve saw that the stands have arrived: Time to get me some nice goodies!!!
The big companies where all present (IBM,Oracle,Adobe,Springsource,..) and also a few minor companies (Atlassian, Jetbrains,..). There was one company absent…Sun, which is in my opinion a little bit strange since they don’t belong to Oracle yet.

The first presentation was again a 3 hours during class about the Java EE6 platform by Antonio Goncalves and Alexis Moussine-Pouchkine. I was in doubt if I would follow this course at first because a colleague of mine said he once saw a presentation by Antonia Goncalves which was kinda boring. Not this time!! It was the best presentation I’ve seen on Devoxx this year. They explained most of the new features in EE6 (validation, jsf, EJB3.1,EJB Lite, JSF2.0, Servlet3.0,JAX-RS 1.1,JPA2.0,..) and gave an example for each feature.
I’m very excited about JavaEE6. It’s a lot easier and has a lot of cool features.
They told us that Java EE6 (and GlassfishV3) will be released in December. I can’t wait.

The next course I’ve attented was about SOA in practice by Nicolai Josuttis. I had heard a few things about SOA but wasn’t very sure what it was so I was very curious about this presentation.
Nicolai explained how and when a company should setup a SOA architecture. It was very clear explained and what I’ve liked was the fact that the speaker wasn’t someone who would use SOA always. He explained that it isn’t necessary for many companies. A really good presentation which gave me the insights into SOA which I didn’t had before.

After that, there was a short presentation about a year of monitoring with Java-Monitor by Kees Jan Koster. He explained a few different techniques how you can monitor your JVM and how to detect and fix some issues. The presentation was a little bit to short but was very interesting.

The last course I’ve attended was about lookup, a new OSGi Service Registry. I have no experience with OSGi and this course was sadly a little bit to abstract for me.

The conclusion of these 2 days at Devoxx is that I’ve learned a lot and there will come some exciting times for Java in the near future. I wish I could also attend the 3 other days but sadly that’s not the case. I’ve enjoyed the Devoxx-time and hope to attend again next year!!