Devoxx day 4/5

Day 4 was really great we had some very good keynote sessions. Ivar Jacobson is the father of components and UML. In his presentation he told us about the work he is doing to standardise the methodologies. Now a lot of companies make their own flavour of a methodology or create an entirely new one but "steal" from others. He want to create reuse so that people don't have to relearn the entire thing but just have to learn the new parts. It's food for thought, that is for sure and if it works out we'll have to wait and see.

After that, another great keynote from Robert Martin a.k.a Uncle Bob he is the founder of fitnesse and very focused on TDD (Test driven development). His talk was about "Filling The Professionalism Gap" by being Craftsmen. What it comes down to, is to make more IT projects succeed, developers must see themselves more as craftsmen. That means that developers should have a more "ethic" approach in delivering things and only create software that is clean tested and that really works. This is what we already do at CTP but I think a lot of developers can learn from this.

There were also some big announcements made at this Devoxx:

1. Closures are in JDK7
2. More new components in JavaFx 1.3

Big stuff and cool to hear that closures are going to make it in JDK7, that is a huge thing.

Also I had some fun of this day at devoxx, I went to the presentation of the JavaPosse. And when you hear the recording you can probably hear me shout: "Switzerland" :-). Of course they had their beer sponsor Atlassian so we had some nice Belgium beer (Duvel). A cool side effect of conferences is the fact that they are normally hosted inside a movie theatre: So at Devoxx they showed the new movie '2012', a very nice movie with lots of effects.

And then it is already the last day and I didn't notice this before, but it's only half a day. So I had some good sessions today one from Andy Wilkinson about Modular Web Applications with OSGi. He uses Spring DM (that's an application server, but not a Java EE certified one) to be able to split his web application vertically and/or horizontally in different OSGi bundles. That could be really good to manage big applications. Also he had some news, they are working on a version that does not require Spring DM, so that is definitely something we must keep an eye on.

That is it from Antwerp, Devoxx 2009!
So let's see what will happen with all the announcements made here in the next year...