Devoxx Day 3

The network at devoxx is letting me down a bit, so this post is a little bit late. This day is the first conference day, the university days are over. That means that there are a lot more people here than yesterday. Oracle (Steven Harris) had a long keynote talk in which interesting upcoming details have been presented with what is coming with future WebLogic releases. What they demo-ed was kinda cool. A modular WebLogic based on OSGi (often referred as mSA aka Micro Service Architecture) that you can assemble using a GUI tool. That you can also run in a virtual machine without adding an OS.

Next keynote was presented by Roberto Chinnici from SUN, he is the spec lead for JavaEE6 and gave a quick overview what is new in EE6. As I already had a 2 hours talk about that topic during the university days there was nothing new to me but all in all it well covered all aspects for people hearing about it for the first time. One of the cool things in Java EE 6 I like most is the modularity of the web.xml being part of the Servlet 3.0 spec. Using 3rd party frameworks only requires to add a library, instead of also adding a servlet or servlet filter in your web.xml.

Also announced in the keynote is that everything presented at Devoxx is going to be released on parleys.com (currently upgraded to version 3!! ). That is great as all the presentations I've visited can be watched again including comments by other visitors etc.

During the break I ran into a lot of people I know from previous companies I worked for. It is always nice to hear what they are doing now and what other sessions they have seen and to tell them if they ever want to work for a nice company in Switzerland, I would know a good one :D

Now an update on where JDK7 is right now by Mark Reinhold. Great talk about what is important and where the focus for making Java move forward is going to lay. Talking about Project Jigsaw this is the first time ever I have seen some implementation how this could/would work. The shame is that there is no JSR for Java SE 7 so all development will not progress as long as this is the case. What was very surprising is that Mark wants Closures in, but in a very simple form, but that is great news for a lot of things Closures will make my code look nice.

In the keynote Apple gets a lot of criticism about being slow accepting apps in the store and the kind of feedback Apple provides when apps are disallowed.

Lunch break: Bumping into a lot of people again that I know; Talking to someone from JBoss about their community, now I have a nice CD to give away.

James Gosling is talking about the Java Store and I hope he is going to tell us that we here in Europe can use it now. So he is talking that we should provide him with feedback on the stuff they made, but as of now the Java Store is still not accessible for us. That makes his whole talk a bit pointless. Yes, I would love to have a platform I can sell my hobby projects with, but no need to tell me about how great it is when I still can't use it. There are a couple of countries being added in the near future, but Switzerland is not one of them.

Cameron Purdy tells us how we should change our programming paradigms if we want to use multi core, multi node programs. So the answer to all our problems is to use partitioning? I'm a bit puzzled how I could use this. I think this presentation could have been a bit more concrete. He presents all theoretical ways to do parallel distributed computing. At the very end I know why everything was so vague, if you want an implementation of all of what he talked about than you'll need to buy Coherence a bit of an anticlimax.

Doug Tidwell will now tell us a little about how to extract a way from implementations of cloud computing. He is from IBM an I hope this is not another product plug and it turns out that it's not, he is funny and a good speaker. What he is trying to tell us is that we need a standard for doing cloud computing, an API to talk to different clouds. The problem is that the services that clouds provide now are so diverse that one API to rule them all makes no sense. That is a bit what I miss, nobody is talking about how using a cloud will impact my design.

Then one of the creators of the Android platform Romain Guy will talk about animation. Romain Guy is really famous in the Java world so his presentation will be good. It's about animating GUI using the cartoon rules. There are some basic cartoon rules for doing animation he shows us how they apply to GUI animation.