I've been trolling again for the best buzz on 2010 Devoxx. Happily, there's plenty of food for thought - and the ideas are not half-baked.

Paris in Antwerp

Once again, Papo's Log, run by Java Champion Paris Apostolopoulos, provides a rich service with informed and insightful comments and observations about Devoxx happenings. Topics include:

* The Future Roadmap of Java EE
* Project Coin
* Cloudbees
* OpenJDK
* Activiti in Action
* Java Puzzlers
* Keynotes by Stephan Janssen, Mark Reinhold, Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith
* Reflection Madness by Dr. Heinz Kabutz
* Infinispan
* Josh Bloch on performance anxiety and system complexity
* HTML5 Websockets

Thanks once more, Paris!

Speaking of Paris, the Paris JUG team has now posted no fewer than 11 YouTube videos -- the next best thing to being there.

The void-main-args blog run by "anrizal" has worthwhile summaries of talks on Hadoop, Scala, caching, data management, modularity and other matters. It's a good place to gather ideas quickly and accessibly.

Java Asylum has very concise, clear daily notes on Devoxx sessions and keynotes. If you want "just the facts" check it out.

Floris' Blog offers an information-rich summary of Devoxx that is well worth a look.

Java Champion Adam Bien, who has a remarkable grasp of Java EE, gave a session, "Creating Lightweight Applications with Nothing but Vanilla Java EE 6". I was unable to cover a similar session at JavaOne. Here's the abstract:

"The combination of the Convention over Configuration and Dependency Injection principles, drastically simplifies the Java EE 6 development model. This session covers the approach for building lean, but still maintainable and scalable applications with nothing but plain Java EE 6 technologies. A (rich) JPA 2.0 domain object can be annotated with JSR-303 (Bean Validation) for validation purposes, EJB 3.1 Stateless / Stateful Session Bean provide the transactionality, remoting (JAX-RS / REST), concurrency. JSR-299 (CDI) enables the direct exposure to the JSF 2 view and extension points, as well as aspects. The interesting point: such minimalistic architecture still remains extensible and testable.

The pragmatic combination of EJB 3.1, JPA 2.0, Bean Validation, Context and Dependency Injection and JAX-RS (REST) will be covered from the real world angle and is especially interesting to Java (EE) developers and architects:

Pragmatic modularization and deployment of WARs / EARs
Stateful vs stateless architectures
Domain driven design vs. service oriented components
Component configuration with EJB 3.1, interceptors and CDI
incremental migration from J2EE"


Java developers are once again spreading information in the best tradition of Java.

 

The Duchess, a "Women in Java" organization, had a great one-hour Bird of a Feather (BoF) yesterday. In addition to having a great logo, the organization provides a platform for women to connect, learn about technology and build regional chapters. The session started with an overview of the Duchess organization and the Duchess France. The French chapter, a dynamic group, recounted over its impressive list of activities: creation of women events around JUG monthly meetings, the co-organization of conferences, organization of Java certification classes and the creation of new groups in France. All this in just the last 9 months since their creation!

Participants were mostly women, with one-third men. Both men and women expressed their options freely. Some of the topics were: the prejudices of women in IT at the workplace, in some countries women have trouble to join the workforce after a long maternity leave, women lack assertiveness to promote themselves and the change of dynamics in diverse teams. 

Learn more:

Duchess
Duchess France
Oracle Women in Tech Program 

To the delight of attendees, the Java Posse recorded their podcast live from Devoxx. Dick Wall, Carl Quinn, Joe Nuxoll and Tor Norbye staged a live survey. Java and Scala won the most cheers from the crowd for the most popular language on the JVM. They suggested a couple of names for the new JVM, resulting from Jrockit and Hotspot integration. "Bob" suggested by someone in the audience seems to have been the crowd's favorite. The audience shouted their favorite technologies and Devoxx sessions. The person with the most popular cowboy hat won a year's subscription for Parley's website. 

While I am not in Antwerp to take in Devoxx 2010 (November 15-19), I can at least tour the blogs of people who are there to get a taste of the proceedings. Here's some news from the first two days.

Papo's Log, run by developer Paris Apostolopoulos, provides an excellent summary of no fewer than 14 sessions, delving into such topics as Java EE, Agile ALM, Hibernate, Android, VisualVM and other matters. Thank you, Paris! He also includes a link to an entertaining YouTube video created by the Paris Jug Team that provides a feeling for what it's like to be there.

The void-main-args blog, run by a developer calling himself "anrizal," has a lot to report on Scala, Hazelcast, HBase, Hadoop, MongoDB, Spring Tools, Apache Mahout, Excel on JVM, and more. If these things interest you, it's worth checking out.

Oracle's Alexis Moussine-Pouchkine's reports that his first day was lively but exhausting. His "Java EE 6 Tutorial, Reloaded" session with its 15 demos was firing on all cylinders. As if the three-hour session was not enough, Alexis and his co-presenter, Antonio Goncalves, spent another three running a Hands-On lab where they had lots of good conversations comparing NetBeans to other IDEs, JSF to Struts, and CDI/EJB to Spring, among other things.

Java Champion Adam Bien seemed pleased with his session which was attended by some 110 developers. He reports that he, "prepared four slides, showed two and spent the rest of the time implementing an application suggested by one of the attendee - a Ticketing System (he had to build it afterwards in a real world project). We covered CDI with some  corner cases (building plugins, replacing JMS, qualifiers, stereotypes, configuration), EJB 3.1, unit tested and mocked out some EJB 3.1 without interfaces, Interceptors, JPA, Bean Validation, a bit JSF 2, discussed / implemented some REST applications and tested the load (3000 transactions / second for a GET-REST and two chained EJB 3.1). We focused more on 'best practices,' design and architectures."

All in all, there's a lot of useful technical information in the blogs coming out of Devoxx.

Java EE 6 was the star of these last 2 days, its first time at Devoxx! (Java EE 6 was released in December last year, after Devoxx.) Antonio Goncalves, senior software architect, and Alexis Moussine-Pouchkine, developer advocate, presented a Java EE 6 tutorial. They spoke about the power of the new Java EE 6 features. Ludovic Champenois presented a separate session on the latest development in Java EE 6 to accommodate NetBeans, Eclipse, Oracle OEPE, and Intellij development tools.
 
The conference for the next three days will have 3,000 attendees from 40 countries under the Metropolis* theater roof. Members of 70 Java user groups from all over Europe are converging on Antwerp as we speak. The atmosphere at the hotels downtown and at the conference is already festive and you meet groups of developers in passionate discussions.

*Now I know where the name Javapolis came from!

Learn more:
Oracle at Devoxx
Java EE 6 Technologies
Java EE 6 Downloads