is now
Last week Antwerp (devoxx) was the place to be for sensing the pulse of the Java community. The annual great European Java-developers-feast was again a joyful get-together of Java-enthusiasts, great speakers, and other smart people. The formula and the venue (great speakers, even greater screens) has proven itself over time, but the organizers keep having an eye for trying out new and innovative ways (sure enough tweets, but loads of whiteboards as well!) to foster the thought exchange and hackerish tinkering.
Sure enough there is side-tracks and comments on how Oracle is translating its "ownership" into "stewardship", but mostly the conference is just about the techy stuff, some showing off, and quite some well-deserved awe.
We got the floor for two sessions during the conference focussing more on the
REST (kauri) side of our activities.
For those who missed the slides or want to rehash them, see below.
The first slides on the "wonderful web machine" are there to invite the audience
into thinking about "the web" as a single-person-invention. An enormous design
and clever architecture of a vast successfully interoperating massively
distributed computing system. No less! :) In my mind mankind really has
surpassed himself on this one. Getting carried away in my enthusiasm I even
encouraged people to
contemplate
about this wonder at least once a week. Joking aside, "the wonder view"
serves as my motivation for advocating REST as in "going with the web grain":
follow the techniques for making your web application an integral part of this
link-in wonder, rather then a stand-alone island in this digital universe.
Overall it was great to see how much air-time (too much according to some) this conference has been giving to REST. Mostly thanks to the great presentations of Paul Sandoz on Jax-RS and the plans for 2.0. Other important 'trend' to watch was the obvious attention to the BigData/Cloud/NoSQL track. Credits to the fine line-up of speakers there of course.
My two biggest takeaways of the week finally: "Java Modules" and "CDI" (and how they relate to the future of kauri) deserve their own blogposts. (promise!)
Here are the slides from the talks we gave: