Duchess
Globally Connecting Women in Java Technology

At Devoxx 2008 I got to hear about new stuff and meet new people – everything I expected from the biggest independent Java conference in the world. From what I hear, it is a conference with more stuff and less fluff – even said by Sun employees in comparison with JavaOne. It is big enough so that you can move around between talks in the same slot and if you’re not going to talks, there are always other people to hang out with. Topics that are discussed at Devoxx usually become mainstream within a year or two in the Netherlands. Perhaps they become mainstream sooner in other countries. Devoxx is always interesting for consultants such as myself to keep track of the latest trend. Not everything however, become mainstream or relevant, so the trick is to pick out the right topics to dive into later.

Here are some highlights from Devoxx 2008:
Read the rest of this entry →

Today I took it easy. Due to going to bed late last night I was rather tired, so I decided to add some fun sessions. (As opposed to picking the sessions based on potential usefulness.)

I started off with the keynote sessions. As my mother always taught me that ‘by night a man, by day a man’. Which is of course in my case a woman, but most expressions don’t take that into account. The first keynote was Effective Java Reloaded by Joshua Bloch. This session contained some of the items that he has described in the newly released 2nd edition of Effective Java. And I’m very happy to say that we will have this book as part of our Duchess library. So as soon as I have finished both the book and the library application it wil be rotating among our members. (Those that show up at the meetings anyway.)

The second keynote was a Java 7 update by Mark Reinhold. Or at least that’s what the program said. But Devoxx being an Agile conference, the subject got partially changed as they have just announced that project JigSaw will be included in Java 7. Project JigSaw is the project that will cut Java up into modules, so the JDK won’t have to be so large anymore. After discussing that he did give us a short overview of some features that will go into Java 7, but I advise you to go visit his blog for those. Afterwards Stephan pointed out to us that we could prioritize some of the small language changes they are considering and that we would be taking seriously if 100 people or more would vote on them. I’m not sure that there were a 100 people who had scribbled their votes on the board by the end of the day, but if there weren’t  than it was only because the board was full and no more votes could be put onto it.

My first regular session was by Jonas Jacobi and John R. Fallows about HTML 5 and some of the features that will go into it when it will finally come out and how those features were already being implemented by browsers today. (And how Kaazing had already emulated them with their Kaazing Gateway, although this really was only in the last 15 minutes.) The features discussed were WebSockets (full duplex text communication), cross document messages, server-sent events, and one other item that I can’t remember. Very cool stuff!

My second session was “Don’t do it – common performance antipatterns” by Alois Reitbauer. A good presentation about some reasons why performance so often fails. The reasons were grouped into three categories: conceptual, organizational and technical. Reasons like people don’t want to overoptimize and therefore don’t think about performance at all (conceptual). People leave the pain until they feel it, leaving no time and budget to fix the performance problems until it is too late (organizational). Or there is nobody actually responsible for taking care of performance, so nobody is even testing for it because they all think somebody else will do that (technical).

Then I went to see the Javaposse. I didn’t have one of the Atlassian sponsored beers (as I was quite sleepy enough as it was), but I did enjoy myself immensely. And just like last year I want to find a way to listen to their podcasts. But probably, also like last year, I won’t find the time for it. Podcasts are just not something in my daily or weekly schedule.

Then there was the session about connectivity with OpenMQ by Linda Schneider. She started of with a lot of definitions of the concepts you need for messaging. Then she stressed that you have to think closely about how much performance you really need, as you usually don’t really need the five nines. And most certainly can’t afford it if you don’t really need it. Finally she showed some architectures that she had built.

And my final presentation of the day was about the next version of Parleys.com. After last year’s demo of Parleys v2, which was built with Adobe Flex and Air a lot of people felt compelled to try to build it with other techniques. Like JavaFX and the GWT for example. So they built it to prove that it could be done and showed the demos this year. There was also a demo of Parleys on the IPhone. All of those were very cool. But then came the really cool stuff: Parleys Publisher. A tool that will make the lives of Stephan and Valerie a whole lot easier, because up until now they had converted all those presentations on Parleys by hand. (Which was about 4 to 8 hours of work for a one hour video.) Once publisher is finished, it will take about twenty minutes or so to do it automatically. And that will allow us, the community, to join in and add even more content. So I’m really looking forward to that.

I didn’t attend the movie or any of the BOF’s, because by that time I was really tired. I really should have gone to bed sooner. Oh well, but at least this is the first year that I actually finished my recap. (Not that it is finished, I still have tomorrow to go. But I’m planning to only attend two meetings, so I have no doubt that I will finish it.)

Oh, and I handed out my last button today. So there were at least a hundred women at Devoxx!