Devoxx day 2

Today it is day two at Devoxx. What I didn't put in my last post is the BOF I went to last night. BOFs here are great - there are only a couple of people in the room, it is really different than at JavaOne where there are a lot more people. So yesterday I had a BOF with the JSF spec leads (well the 3 key persons: Dan Allen, Peter Muir and Andy Schwartz) and we could in a very relaxed setting ask them some questions about the JSF 2 spec. So we could find out how and why they made some decisions. The question I asked them: "Why is JSF 2 not more focused on components so that I can mix and match components of 3rd party providers?". The answer was that they are looking into that and that a lot of problems one has with that right now is how resources are loaded: all 3rd parties made something on their own. So now all the AJAX stuff needs to be gathered and then they will look into that. Good answer, I'm glad that they are aware of what lives in the community.

My first session of today is a session about JEE6. They are talking about and demo-ing everything that is new in the spec. Antonio Goncalves a French Java Rockstar has a lot of humor and a nice presenting style. JSF 2.0 is kind of confusing, because it could run on servlet 2.5 but also on 3.0 but then less needs to be configured. Yesterday the expert group also talked about this that they communicate better what is now the "preferred" way of doing things. This is difficult when you make a spec. You can't remove things, because it needs to be backwards compatible. This is also the case for EJB3 - there is now a EJB3.1 lite edition where all old stuff is removed. According to them there are some containers being built that only support this spec.

JavaFX is what my next talk is about. This is hyped a lot by Sun and now with the takeover by Oracle also Oracle will continue with JavaFX. The last changes around JavaFX involved a lot of tooling at this year's JavaOne. Tor Norbye presented a tool for designers that they can layout an application for mobile and desktop. Stephen ChinEmmanuel Bernard is also a guru of the Hibernate team and here at Devoxx he is talking about integrating Lucene into Hibernate as an alternative query API. So the bridge they have built for Hibernate is really cool. In the past we did this on ourselves, have a Lucene index to search on and then load entities when needed. But with the Hibernate search query API we can do it "automatically".

During the lunch I talked to Ceki Gülcü who is also from Switzerland and giving a talk about logback, the continuation of the dead log4j project, tomorrow. He would make a nice speaker on the JUGS.

Now it's time for tools in action again, first up is Gradle. Hans Dockter is the project lead and he gives an introduction about Gradle. Gradle is a build tool that uses CoC and has a DSL to configure your build. Yet another build tool, but this time is using groovy DSL to make a build file. I also blogged that Maven3 is also going to provide this. I don't know what Hans is trying to explain to me or how this is better than Maven3, but he is a bit chaotic. After a while there is a new speaker that is even worse. I think there are some good options in Gradle, but these are not the guys to explain it to me. One thing I did get from the presentation that you could fork your test over more threads, which is cool.

Next up is Scala Actors that will be a good one. You all know of course that ScalaFrank Sommers gave us a concrete example of how Actors can be used in Scala. It's great, a lot of stuff you get for free. Of course the concept of Actors is not bound to Scala, but there are things that Scala offers that make Scala a good language to use with Actors. For instance types in Scala are immutable by default. Great talk and when I'm going to type synchronized in code again I must remember this talk.

That is it for day number 2, it was a fun packed day and I look forward to tomorrow. One more thing I noticed today if you want to present on Devoxx you'll need a Mac and IntelliJ IDEA.