JavaOne 2015 – Voting

JavaOne 2015 is shaping up to be an excellent conference. This year I was invited to participate as a member of the selection committee for the Java EE track. This involves reviewing and voting on every submission and providing a written reason for each vote. Since there were hundreds of submissions this was an enormous amount of work. It was made harder with the quality of the submissions – I have no idea how the voting results will be distilled into such a small number of sessions for the conference.

The submissions ranged from presentations on existing server-side Java technologies to what’s coming in Java EE 8. I learned new things reading the proposals (and spent tons of times investigating really neat new open source projects). Java EE is a huge community with developers doing interesting projects all over the world. Not just interesting projects, projects that are products and services used by millions of people and which generate real money. If you have any doubt about the reach and impact of Java EE you need to attend JavaOne.

There were many impressive proposals on everything from JAX-RS to JPA, JSF, MVC (Java EE 8 web stuff), to Java EE + Angular and JavaScript web frameworks. Whether you are more server-side or web-UI, there will definitely be many days worth of content pertinent to your job. I have a list of sessions I am hoping make the final cut – seriously there are some I cannot wait to see.

Start making plans for JavaOne – convince your boss! What’s covered in many of these sessions would take weeks of research at the office. One of the values of JavaOne is that you get the big picture and really detailed technical information.

JDK IO Trip Report

I am back from presenting at JDK IO! JDK IO was held in Copenhagen January 19-20th. The conference was held at the IT University of Copenhagen. All of the sessions were given in English. The conference sessions covered a variety of Java topics ranging from core Java, Java EE, and JavaFX. I gave presentations on EJB 3.2 Best Practices and Apache Cordova + Java EE 7. Simon Ritter and David Delabasse from Oracle keynoted the conference with updates on Java 9 and Java EE 8.

I attended the following sessions:

During the session on Java and iOS I managed to get RoboVM up and running! When developing for iOS you can either use JavaFX or the Java wrappers around the Apple UI APIs. The session on reflection was interesting – I liked the example with messing with the internals of the Integer class (oh the chaos I can cause!). The modular cloud presentation was interesting with its coverage of micro-services and the use of Apache ACE and OSGI. I have to checkout the presenter’s book. I wasn’t familiar with Apache Camel – it has come up several times but I haven’t really dug into it yet. I’ll definitely have to investigate it more.

If time had allowed I would have attended all of the sessions – hoping the slides are posted soon. It was nice to see the coverage of JavaFX. We still need Java on the desktop and Swing is showing its age. JavaFX is a big leap forward.

The session by David Delabassee provided an excellent update on Java EE 8. Although it seems like Java EE 7 just came out the other day – development of Java EE 8 is progressing and should be released in 2016.

Summarizing the focus of Java EE 8:

  • HTML5 / Web Tier Enhancements
  • Ease of development / CDI alignment
  • Infrastructure for running in the cloud
  • Java SE 8alignment

Some of the more noteworthy Java EE 8 changes:

  • JSON API will be extended to support marshaling and unmarshalling JSON to objects. Annotations will allow for customization like in JAX-B.
  • Support for HTML5 Server-sent Events
  • Support for HTTP/2 (reduces latency/address HOL blocking)
  • JSF 2.3 to CDI alignment (also multi-field validation)
  • Authorization via CDI interceptors
  • CDI – asynchronous events, event ordering, event ranging
  • Java EE Management 2.0 (JSR-77)
  • Password aliasing (to avoid passwords in clear-text in deployment files)

The conference was excellent – all good speakers on a variety of topics. The sessions were 90 minutes so the speakers had enough time to dig into the topics but not too long. The bookstore at the conference also had a good selection of books (I am sure the baggage handlers appreciated it!).