Thoughts on Devoxx

Wow! What an intense 3 days Devoxx is. Between the conference and the traveling and (of course!) those famous Belgian beers, it was an action-packed trip.

We enjoyed the conference a lot. It was professionally organised, had good speakers and had great food too. They even managed to keep the wireless network more-or-less functional with over 3000 bandwidth-hungry developers trying to use it all at once.

Unsurprisingly, the talks reflected the current themes in the Java world. There was a large focus on RIA (Rich Internet Application) technologies, dynamic languages and modularization.

JavaFX and Flex grabbed all the attention in the RIA category at the expense of some of the more traditional UI Technologies (JSF 2.0 and Dojo/DWR). I personally was quite disappointed with the standard of the JavaFX presentations, especially since it was one of the topics I was most interested in learning about. Inevitably JavaFX as a technology is going to be compared against Flex but I feel I didn’t even see enough code or information to make a comparison. The Flex presentations were of a considerably higher standard.

The second day opened with a keynote from Mark Reinhold about Java 7 in general and, more specifically, the project to modularize the JDK - Project Jigsaw. Later Alex Buckley gave us more details on the possible Java language changes to support modularization. Modularization was also heavily in evidence in the Springsource DM Server presentations that we attended. It’s been obvious for a while now that this is the way forward for Java.

Talk of the conference probably went to Joshua Bloch who gave an interesting and dynamic keynote on Effective Java that taught us a thing or two that we didn’t know about Java. The man was just a bundle of enthusiasm and energy on the stage.

Other talks that caught our attention were ones on Scala, REST and JAX-RS. Scala because we’d not had a chance to take a look at the language and the REST/JAX-RS talks because they summed up the technologies in such a way that they became clearer and easier to understand.

Finally, we’d like to mention the talk given by Ari Zilka on Terracotta as a great example, based on their Examinator web reference application, of a presentation on the usage of a technology in the real world - something that is sadly lacking sometimes at conferences such as these which are, understandably, focussed on promoting new technologies via simple ‘hello world’ examples.

That’s all for now. In the coming days, we’ll write in more detail about some of the more interesting things that we saw….