Duchess
Globally Connecting Women in Java Technology

Day 3, the first day of conference sessions. A schedule loaded with interesting presentations, offering lots of hard choices.

First of all there was the keynote. Since we were there early we managed to make it into the actual keynote room. Stephan once again proudly gave some stats about Devoxx, and rightly so, cause it really is something to be proud about. 3200 people, 6 conference rooms and 160 speakers. Then he introduced RoxorLoops who introduced us to beatboxing. I’d heard about it before of course, but I had never seen an actual beatboxing performance. And I was totally overwhelmed. I never believed that that guy from police academy could actually make all those sounds, but after seeing RoxorLoops perform, it’s suddenly a bit less hard to believe. I heard him actually make three different kinds of noises at the same time and he really, really sounded like a drumset with special effects mixed in.

Then came a keynote by Sun about the top ten of great on why JavaFX is great (presented by Danny Coward). And it really did look great. Flashy demos on films split into puzzle pieces with the individual pieces moving, a plugin for Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop to create animations that you can use in FX, a multi-media cloud that you could access from both a desktop and your mobile phone, and probably one or two that I can’t remember right now. (It’s past midnight, so I have an excuse other than my lousy memory.)

Third was a keynote by IBM on the RFID tags that they put on our entrance badges and how they were being used to track which sessions were popular and which sessions sent people running out again. And also to make our life easier at some of the booths by just scanning our tags instead of having us fill in forms. Of course there are still plenty of forms left to fill in, but still… (One of the presenters was Robin Mulkers)

After the break that followed I went to a presentation about Hippo CMS by Arjé Cahn. A cool content management system that I need to check out as well. Not only do they offer a CMS complete with front end admin tool and repository, they also offer a portal application. And they also have something called facets, where you can define search queries on certain aspects of your content. They compared it to the CNet site and how you can search their reviews on vendors and price and the like. (And where you can also see how many results are in each category.)

Next was a presentation about DataPower by Bill Hines from IBM. It was a hardware solution to security issues with XML. It’s a nice product, but basically a sales pitch. Even if it was given by a technical guy who claimed that it wasn’t. I understand that he loves the product, and there’s nothing wrong with a sales pitch, all presenters do it basically. (Even if they are ‘selling’ OpenSource.) But it just rubs me the wrong way when you claim that it’s not a sales pitch, just because you’re not a marketing guy.

The fourth of the parallel sessions I followed was about EasyB by John Ferguson Smart. Yet another cool tool that I really need to look into. I might be on the bench for the next few weeks, but I think I’m going to be a lot more busy than I would have been on an assigment! It’s a tool where you can specify your requirements in natural language and then implement them in Groovy.

My final session of the day was a presentation by Dmitry Jemerov and Ilya Sergey about IntelliJ Idea and how they had integrated support for Python, Scala, Groovy and Ruby. The demo’s were cool, though parts of the presentation were a bit hard to follow due to accent and the speed of talking. I can’t wait to play around with Idea. It’s already on my desktop, I just haven’t had a chance to play with it yet.

Then I met up with Clara to discuss the last bits of our presentation and to wait in line for the French fries. Unfortunately those were half an hour later than was in the program, but I was still in time for the Juglead BOF.

Which was in turn followed by our own BOF. It went pretty well. We even had at least 30 women in the room and also a couple of men. Clara’s part of the presentation had grown a bit since the last time we gave the presentation so we didn’t have much time left for discussion. Of course that was also due to the usual technical problems of hooking up a laptop to a beamer. In the end we borrowed Stephan’s laptop, because he did know how to hook that one up. So thank you Stephan, and also for having us! If you were there, please give us some feedback on what you thought of the presentation. We’re ever trying to improve it.