Devoxx day 1

    Participating at Devoxx brought me enough motivation to post my first blog entry. I am here for the first time and I am really impressed by how it is organized. There is record number of top speakers present. For me it is a problem choosing which presentations to attend. However thanks to the organizers all events will be available on Parleys in late December and participants will receive a free subscription. So there is nothing to regret if you did not choose the best presentation. The number of participants is also very impressive: 3350 from 60 different JUGs, from 40 countries. The only drawback to the event’s popularity is the shortage of wireless connections, only 800 IPs are available and the most participants have a laptop plus a smartphone. For me the Kindle saved the day with its free Internet connection but unfortunately for some speakers a few presentation demos did not work due to this.

    This year the main topics beside Java are: HTML5, new languages and Android. I will share a few ideas I picked today at presentations I attended.

Oracle opening keynote and JDK 7, 8, and 9 presention

• Oracle is committed to Java and wants to provide support for it on any device.
• JSE 7 for Mac will be released next week.
• Oracle would like Java developers to be envolved in JCP, to adopt a JSR and to attend local JUG meetings.
• JEE 7 will be released next year.
• JEE 7 is focused on cloud integration, some of the features are already implemented in glassfish 4 development branch.
• JSE 8 will be release in summer of 2013 due to “enterprise community request” as they cannot keep the pace with an 18-month release cycle.
• The main feartures included in JSE8 are lambda support, project Jigsaw, new Date/Time API, project Coin++ and adding support for sensors.
• JSE 9 probably will focus on some of these features:
• self tunning JVM
• improved native language integration
• processing enhancement for big data
• reification (adding runtime class type info for generic types)
• unification of primitive and corresponding object classes
• meta-object protocol in order to use type and methods define in other JVM languages
• multi-tenancy
• JVM resource management

Bleeding edge HTML5 by Paul Kinlan from Google

• Web application will be richer and more intelligent due to addition of new APIs like page Visibility API , WebIntends, WebRTC, WebAudio API.
• Visibility API determines if a page is visible, can verify online/offline connection status, pre-rendered pages.
• Browsers will have support WebIntents, these are custom apps, to handle specific types of actions, for example sharing an image to social network for these for example flikr can register by the user to handle these type of actions.
• WebRTC will make possible face-to-face communication possible without plugins.
• Web Audio API adds support for complex audio processing.

NoSQL for java developers by Chris Richardson from SpringSource

• The future application will have polyglot persistence for different type of data. Martin Fowler wrote an interesting article about this today.
• NoSQL solves many problems but has also limitation and careful thought has to be made in advance because changes will be costly.
• Queries not data model drives NoSQL database design model

Productivity enhancements in Spring 3.1 by Costin Leau from SpringSource

•  Spring 3.1 will  brings the following improvements:
• environmental abstraction, different types of beans/property files are activated with a profile setting like dev, test, prod.
• improved java based configuration with new annotations
• cache abstraction improvements, implementations are  pluggable by implementing a few interfaces.
• Spring MVC improvements, support for Servlet 3.0
• support for JSE7
• Hibernate 4.0 and Quartz 2.x support
• Next week will be released the RC2 and shortly followed by the GA.
• Spring 3.2 will be released in the third quarter of 2011.

Tomorrow will be another great day for Java in Antwerp. I will try to keep you posted with the notes I make during presentations. If you are also at Devoxx you can find me by looking for the guy with world renown Transylvania JUG shirt.