Devoxx day 1

Devoxx is probably the largest European Java Conference. As it always takes place at the end of the year and approximately half a year later than big brother JavaOne, it's a good time to get the stuff again that has been announced at JavaOne and to see how the news and forecasts have been adopted in the meanwhile.

When I think of Belgium I think of beer, bars, chocolate, hospitality and cosiness. But when I arrived and saw my hotel all these feelings went away. The location of my hotel and the conference is in an industrial part of Antwerp. There is nothing here but harbours and sea containers. So there is absolutely nothing distracting me from attending the sessions :D

So my first session of the day was about jBpm 4 and that was very impressive, I've used jBpm in the past together with Seam. I wish that I could use it with my last project. They changed a lot the API making deployment and testing easier. The console is now rewritten in GWT, and there is a web app that business people can use to create and modify processes. Also creating screens for tasks now works!

So with the new version they really focused on working together and fixing the issues with regards to configuration. So I'm definitely trying that out.

Strange thing about this fist day that I haven't seen any companies yet. Maybe they will only setup their stuff when The conference days are starting. OK update on this: they are building up their stuff now.

Another important note... I already have my 2 t-shirts and one of them is a limited edition!

Next up is Architecting Robust Applications for Amazon EC2 , let's see what they have there.

This one was not interesting at all, if I want to know how the webservices of amazon work I'll look it up myself. So I switched to a talk from a SUN guy who is clicking stuff together in Netbeans. What he is talking about is interesting. But his demos don't go further than the wizard screens of Netbeans and he is looking all the time to his webpage.

So after the break it was "Tools in Action" time, these sessions are shorter and focused on tools, hence the name. The first one I saw was about Introducing Scimpi a framework rather than an actual tool, build on Naked Objects, but the concept is a bit old and Scimpi is sort of redefining it. I've used metawidget for similar things but I think this gives me more control over the output than Scimpi and also has more powerful components that I can use.

So now the last one of day one NoSQL with Cassandra and Hadoop. That was a nice introduction and they presented a nice usecase when to throw out the relational database. But I want to know more about it. Let's see if I can find some more talks.

All in all it was a very interesting day and let's see what tomorrow brings.