Got the chance from my company to visit Devoxx 2011 in Antwerp again this year. Attended only two first conference days, but overall, I had a good feeling about my time spent.
Wednesday (day one)
Keynote on Java SE and EE by Oracle people: some technical information about upcoming changes in SE and EE. Learned a few small things, no big surprises.
Continuous Delivery
Useful ideas, and main point: agile not on development level only but commit to deliver end result to user as soon as possible. The end user does NOT care about all the intermediate development, QA, operations stuff, he just wants the fix running in production. Maybe should buy/read the full book.
JRuby
A little too technical, no clear overview or idea. Also strange that presenter doesn't program on day to day basis, but works on another area.
NoSQL for Java
Couldn't help feeling that Chris Richardson was a little bored himself. I exited the room halfway when the "Spring Data" slide popped up for some basic "Hello world" like example, which I don't associate with the so called advantages on NoSQL (huge volumes and speed). Preferred the pragmatic, realistic "Hadoop and NoSQL at Twitter" talk from Devoxx 2010 much more.
HTML5 mobile
Entered presentation halfway, but happily listened to the enthusiastic James Pearce, who challenged us to explore the HTML5 possibilities on mobile devices. Short comparison of native versus HTML5 based web applications, with points to remember: good mobile support in HTML5 is barely starting, but already interesting to experiment with, and there is not always clear cut between native and browser context, often something in between can work fine as well.
JAX-RS 2.0
Spec lead for JAX-RS presents upcoming 2.0 version from the Java REST interface, including some clear examples, often with simple annotations. Looks promising, and sounds good they will try to avoid putting too many useless bells and whistles or unfinished pieces into the release. Definite worth a look with you need a HTTP based web service across Java applications. Looking forward for a good comparison to Spring HttpInvoker.
Thursday (day two)
Starting the day with a "sexy" Android development publicity keynote. 1 million Android device activation per 2 days sounds impressive, but how to earn something in this huge and fierce marketplace, will be probably much harder to tackle for individual developers/teams. Oh yes, new Devoxx in Paris upcoming, might be an opportunity to train my French again .. :-)
Cloud is such stuff as dreams are made on
Three people with "equal" time slices pushed into a single slot, was probably not a best idea. Enjoyed first piece about growing "platform as a service" infrastructure, slowly maturing opposed to the wild ideas from previous year. Following pieces about the Google appengine and Laforge's toy Gaelyk project weren't telling me much new.
What's in store for Scala?
Martin Odersky clearly listed the major, technical achievements in the latest Scala 2.9 release. Although some slides from previous year returned, along the focus on parallel programming, he kindly added some extras, including Scala's more extensive reflection library. Personally, I haven't done much since last year on Scala beside reading "Programming in Scala", but the talk at least intrigued me once more to continue experimenting.
HTML5 with Play/Scala, CoffeeScript and Jade
After my disappointment around Matt Raible's talk last year, I want to give him a second chance. No luck: after 10 minutes, I only foresee a quickly assembled list of experiments, tossing different new technologies together, making me leave the room and head for more interesting lessons.
JBoss AS 7 on OpenShift
Missed the first 15 minutes, but having seen Pete's descent technical presentations before, I guess it probably won't harm. Surprisingly, this was not a slick, or unrealistic advertising - typical partner slot - presentation, but a long "risky" demo of deploying and managing a basic application on the RedHat's own cloud platform. Tools still look a little rough and unfinished, but usable. Speed and performance is probably a blocker for using it as fast build and deploy development platform. Nevertheless, it seems to contain a few good ideas, including git based configuration and running Jenkins CI on the cloud. Hopefully polished well enough soon, and also open sourced which may counter VMWare CloudFoundry.
Cloud Foundry and Spring, a marriage made in heaven
Unfortunately Patrick Chanezon repeated some pieces of the cloud talk in the morning, but we also saw interesting integration between Spring and the flexible CloudFoundry structure. Using or wiring services in the cloud should become as easy as wiring regular Java POJOs in your application context. Shown sample configuration looked alright, next thing to wonder about: will it be as easy in a real world project? Major plus for me: choice between public, private and mixed cloud. Should be interesting to try out on a small cluster, and find which pieces of the puzzle are still incomplete.
DVCS For Agile Teams
Mainly sharing positive git usage experience. Also including pieces of suggested workflows. Not much new, but happy that my positive feeling around git, currently only used in own, small/personal projects, is confirmed by others.
