Back from Devoxx! Meanwhile I returned from my journey to Devoxx, the biggest and best independent Java conference in the world hosted in Antwerp, Belgium. After four days (traditionally I skip the Friday half-day chill-out) of university sessions, tools in action talks, BOFs, conference talks and 293827 chats (estimation) I'm pretty blown up with Java - even more than I'm already normally. Topics were well spread cross the whole stack more or less, the quality was again very good, I met a lot of old friends and got in touch with new interesting guys. Arriving on Sunday I finished preparation of my own talk I gave on Monday. I talked about the combination of TestNG, Fit and FEST for functional testing of Rich Clients and it was inspiring. Interesting a guy asking me afterwards if I see many projects testing their applications. :-) Actually, not many enough. With another guy I talked about running functional tests on a build server with the help of Xvfb.
The University session "Scrum in Practice" by Chery Sylvain and Yves Hanoulle was pretty good. Later I had some drinks with Aaron Houston, Antonio Goncalves and many others mainly French guys.
My highlight on Tuesday was Filthy Rich Clients: beyond Java by Romain Guy and Chet Haase. Later on I chatted with Mike Keith asking him if Oracle will by Sun. :-) Nice also was having a beer with Jason van Zyl, founder of Maven. He told me Sonatype will more focus on products than on services in the future. I asked Reggie from Sun for a special speaker for the JUG Cologne - secret who it is. ;-)
I also had long conversations with John Smart, author of the book "Java Power Tools". I managed to recruit him before to be assistant stage producer for the Agile 2009's Tooling track .. and he is such a nice guy!
Wednesday I had a nice "nice to see you again coffee" with Mike Wiesner after his session "Security Patterns revealed" and joined the session "Introduction to the SpringSource dm Server" by Sam Brannen. Actually the server is better than I thought the time they went live with it. A running gag was meeting Toni Epple and Sven Reimers from NetBeans DreamTeam doing some kind of IDE bashing. I really like NetBeans and tried NB 6.5 with the JavaFx bundle. To drag some basic visual types into my stage .. is this already the final version of functionality richness? Actually I told the two dream teams guys about the JetBrains MPS program which is in beta now. But Toni, I do not agree about the sizes of the companies and their team velocity. ;-) BTW, the JetBrains booth was one of the biggest this year (and I met a lot of JB and JB Academy guys), Eclipse had a small one niched. JUG Cologne speaker Frank Nimphius gave a talk about JDeveloper and JSF. In the night I was downtown with Rainer and Rene from the Struts PMC. Nice meeting you guys !!
Wednesday was also the JUG leaders BOF. About 20 up to 30 JUG leaders and some VIPs attended. We had some interesting topics especially a European JUG roadshow. But, honestly, here in Germany too many JUGs are too much isolated and only look on themselves. But there already is some kind of Roadshow approach here: If I manage to get world-class speakers to our JUG in Cologne, some other JUGs nearby ask those speakers to give a talk there too. That's of course unofficial and is not want the BOF wanted to achieve: a JUG Roadshow under a common branding where it is a giving and taking for all not only for some.
On Thursday I liked the "JavaFX: Building & Deploying JavaFX Applications" talk by Richard Bair and Joshua Marinacci very much. It was a nice contra talk to all those Flex and Android sessions. Afterwards the JavaPosse was some kind of disappointing. Is it only me or does the quality decreased over the months and years? Later on I drove back to Cologne .. did I mention that it is only two hours by car from Cologne to Antwerp? Very convenient!! Driving to Antwerp David, a guy from the JUG Cologne joined the journey ... we had some really nice discussions about what is going on in the Java ecosystem. Looking forward seeing you at the next JUGC regulars table.
A comprehensive report with details and valuations will be available soon in the JavaSPEKTRUM.
2 comments:
Hello Michael...Always a pleasure meeting up with you. This year's DEVOXX I felt was even more busier than last year. Too bad you missed the Friday sessions-lots of good talks...Simon Ritter's "Applied JavaFX" session was really well received and there was a mob around him after the talk...pics at https://java-champions.dev.java.net Anyways, hope to see you soon. Cheers from Antwerp!
Hi Aaron, yes, it was eaven more busier than last year. I absolutely believe Simon's talk was fantastic, I know him from his talk in Cologne. I think I attended half a dozen of JavaFX sessions, so there already was some kind of overflow error. :-) Hope to see you soon. Cheers from Cologne!
Post a Comment