The developers’ voice

As you all (should) know, begin this month, there was the event of the year for Java developers, Devoxx. This year they changed their name from JavaPolis to Devoxx to strengthen the voice for Java developers. But I don’t think that the name changed any of its popularity. Instead, they had more attendees compared to last year.

As a rookie, I had the privilege to go to Devoxx and explore the Java world, looking at the new and shiny technologies that will conquer the world! The first university day, I was very interested in the web development sessions I had the chance to attend sessions about JPA and Flex. Each session lasted for 3 hours (although some people didn’t wait that long :) ). The day ended with a very interested JSF on Rails session, presented by Lucas Jellema.

On the second university day, I had the chance to look at Seam in action. The author of the book (with the same title), Dan Allen, presented in a very detailed way the possibilities of Seam. Sometimes he went too far in details that some of my fellow attendees began to dream of Seam (with their eyes closed). After an energetic lunch, I went to the Filthy Rich Clients session by Romain Guy and Chet Haase. It was a very interesting session given in a very entertaining way. Both speakers really knew how to catch the audience’s attention. They explained us how we can improve the look and feel of our applications so that both user and developer can really enjoy themselves when using/building an application.

After the performance of a beatboxer that surely woke us up, the third and most astonishing day began! First, Stephan Janssen (the man behind Devoxx), gave us a brief summary of the previous days and passed the microphone to the Java FX team. This team presented a state of the art new technology and showed it to the crowd in an amazing demo! They made a video puzzle where the player had to put the pieces back in the right order, with the video still playing! Magnificent!

As the people of this beautiful presentation of JavaFx (www.javafx.com) ended, the people of IBM were the next ones in line to tell us more about these strange portals at every entry. It was an RFID-project so that the Devoxx team was able to register statistics throughout the entire week. So next year, the speakers with the least amount of attendees will be removed from the list :)

At the end of a 10-minute break, it was our turn again. I went to a session about Software estimation presented by a passionate Italian, Giovanni Asproni. He was really able to keep everyone’s attention with his live examples and his enthusiasm. After a hacking session (by Sebastian Deleersnyder of OWASP) and the feel of Scala there was Oracle’s Frank Nimphius who presented the latest features of JDeveloper 11g in combination with Oracle’s ADF.

These three days were to most amazing days for me as a rookie Java developer. I could never imagine that there were so many different products on the market that are all Java based. A special thanks to the whole Devoxx team! If you have any interest in Java development, I hope to see you next year @ Devoxx!

Bjorn Ongenae
iAdvise consultant