by Ivan St. Ivanov

So, devoxx 2010 is over now. Tweets are tweeted, reports are written (even mine) and everyone is speculating about what happened, what we saw, what we missed and what we want to see next year. In this post I would like to make kind of a retrospection of what I felt about this year’s biggest European Java event.

Some info

The city of Antwerp is mostly known in Bulgaria with its football team (loved by some and hated by others ). But in the Java world everybody connects it with devoxx – Europe’s JavaOne so to say. It is held in a big cinema complex – Metropolis and this year it reached its maximum capacity – 3000 attendees (or Javaholics). There were more than 100 presenters and more than 120 sessions. Among them: Adam Bien, Brian Goetz, Dan Allen, Emmanuel Bernard, Heinz Kabutz, JavaPosse, Joe Darcy, John Smart, Josh Bloch, Juergen Hoeller, Mark Reinhold, Martin Odersky, Romain Guy, Stephen Colebourne, Bill Pugh and many many other great speakers (here is the complete list).

In the cinema’s ground floor there were booths, where different companies presented their products, answered geeks questions, gave away some free stuff (including beer) and organized ballots with fantastic prizes (Kindles, iPods, iPad…). Oracle, JBoss, Spring Framework, JetBrains (most known with InteliJ IDEA), Terracotta, Zero Turnaround (JRebel authors), Adobe, even Microsoft (I surely have missed some). There was even a bookstore, where people could buy their favorite books and even get them signed if the author happened to be on the conference (I saw at least Josh Bloch, Antonio Goncalves and Josh Long there).

Noteworthy things

Last year devoxx was famous for the announcement of closures in Java 7. Well, the closure were postponed for the next Java release, but it got in the tweets anyway. This edition did not bring any breaking news, but it had its headlines worth to mention.

During the conference it was announced that Java SE 7 has already its JSR. It came along with three others – for Java SE 8, for project Coin (small changes in the Java language) and project Lambda (or closures). It is big relief especially for Java 7. Another news was that it was finally stated (semi)officially that Harmony is not going to get the TCK license, so it will never become official Java implementation.

When speaking about OSGi (one of my points of interest in my job) most of the people (including presenters) were just smiling and asking something of the sort: “What is OSGi?”. And in the same time most of the companies (including Oracle) are heavily using it. There was nobody from Eclipse by the way. And Mark Reinhold spent all his energy to tell us how good the modularization in Java SE 8 will be. Well, we’ll wait until 2012 at earliest to find whether he is right. And until then we’ll stick to OSGi.

Android was another hot topic. Most of the audience was claiming it as the future of the mobile Java. From Oracle we got nothing but the good old modularization story and the promise that it will make Java SE suitable for the smart phones.

Something that stayed away from most of the comments about the conference (or maybe I misinterpreted it) is the effort from JBoss to finally merge both worlds – EJB and CDI. These technologies work fine together now in Java EE 6, but who knows whether it will be the same in the future releases.

My focus

I had actually three areas of interest at this year’s devoxx: Java EE, web frameworks and popular people, whose blogs/podcasts/newsletters I follow.

In the web frameworks topic I found particularly interesting the Vaadin talk. It was a great session: introduction to web application development, then to Vaadin, then create an application from scratch and some more details about the framework. On Vaadin’s booth they gave for free the Book of Vaadin. I managed to get one, read part of it on the plain and found it interesting. I’m not sure yet how big is the issue with the fact that it is server side framework and the user session is bigger.

I already shared my speculation about the CDI and EJB merge ideas of JBoss. I also managed to see a fairly interesting comparison between the existing web frameworks (on the JVM and not only). Ease of development is everything today – as short development cycles as possible. ZeroTurnaround and JRebel claim to (and really do)  help developers in that area.

From the people whose session I expected with greatest passion, I would list three: JavaPosse, Adam Bien and Heinz Kabutz. I listen to the JavaPosse podcast for more than two hundred episodes and I finally managed to see and even participate in their show (listen to Episode 330 and you’ll hear me shouting “Bulgaria” at 07:08 ). I enjoy Adam Bien’s no-soft-skill style of giving presentations – only a few slides and the rest is interaction with the IDE and the app server. His session this time was even more interesting as he shared some thoughts on Java EE design patters besides just coding. I follow Heinz’s Java specialist newsletter, though I barely have the time to try what he talks about in the various installments. And writing the examples by yourself is necessary for understanding the matter that he is writing about. Well, at devoxx Heinz did that for us in the area was Java reflection.

Besides the above trio, I cannot help to mention the great Java Puzzlers show from Josh Bloch and Bill Pugh.

What I missed

Devoxx was a big great conference. All the time there were six sessions running in parallel (well, only the keynotes were privileged to be alone in their time frame). So it was merely impossible to visit everything that one is interested in. As already mentioned, I focused on Java EE, web application development and VIP presenters. However there were some slots, which I had big problem when deciding where to go.

First of all, for various reasons I missed all the test driven development and continuous integration talks. And John Smart was among the speakers in this area. I like very much his work, his newsletter and his Java Power Tools book. His topic was automated build pipelines with Maven, Nexus and Hudson – something where I have professional interest. But Josh Bloch’s Java Puzzlers seemed more attractive at that time. Another interesting session in this area was Steve Freeman’s talk on applying test driven development in all levels of development process.

I also missed everything about Scala (Martin Odersky, Bill Venners and Dick Wall were giving talks this devoxx), NoSQL, cloud and project Lambda (Brian Goetz had talk on the first day). So no fancy functional stuff this year for me. I also skipped Neal Ford’s talk on emergent design – an agile technique that avoids big upfront designs. Wow, again something that I really need in my job. Well, Bill Pugh’s Defective Java was more interesting.

I also didn’t go to a single BOF. I just appeared for 10 minutes at Linda’s one on JPA 2.1. It is very interesting forum for everyone expressing their opinion on the topics of discussions, but this year I did not prepare mine.

My plans for next year

Speaking about opinions on the topics of discussion, this year I missed the greatest opportunity that such events give: the networking. I had not prepared a single question before going to Antwerp. However, devoxx was my biggest chance to address all the important people in the industry. There were long breaks, which I only used for walking around. And just after the conference I remembered that I actually had some very concrete questions to the JBoss team about Arquillian. But it was already too late. So my take away (and advice to all of the readers) is that we should be prepared for such conferences with questions upfront. If you have really big issue with a product or library that you are reluctant to post in a forum, feel free to write it down and show it on the booth of the company that provides this library or product. They will be very happy to help you and will explain you much more than you would get in an ordinary forum.

I think that on next year’s conferences Java SE will be the big topic. Not only Java 7, which hopefully will be shipped then, but also Java 8. So going to sessions about modularization and closures should be a must for next year’s conference attendees. We should try even now Java 7 by downloading the latest NetBeans beta. So that we are prepared for the new features coming there.

I wonder what will be the situation with alternative languages on the JVM and especially with Scala. Will Stephen Colebourne find the next big JVM language until the next devoxx?

I expect something big from Spring and JBoss. Spring are flying in the clouds right now and are cleaning up the XML bloat from their framework. They are also working on caching and enterprise integration. Should we expect revolutionary statements from them the next year? Maybe yes, but not on devoxx. JBoss are trying to make Seam3 the next generation Java EE. We should follow the CDI extension group for the development in this area.

And last, but not least, I expect the JavaPosse, but this time all four of them!

Conclusion

The greatest news is that there are just 51 weeks to go until the next devoxx (last week there were 52). See you again in Antwerp next year!