Devoxx 2009, day 3

Last day of Devoxx today, actually it was only half a day as the conference ended at 13h. Devoxx was a nice experience for me: interesting presentations from famous and less-famous speakers, a relaxed atmosphere and an opportunity to encounter old class mates or former colleagues. I heard many people say that the previous editions featured more exhibitions, but that’s likely caused by our economical climate. After an event like Devoxx, there is quite a lot of new (to me) technology I want to try out, such as Scala, JavaFX, Android, …

Pomodoro Technique by Staffan Nöteberg First session I attended today, was on the Pomodoro Technique. The goal of this technique is to focus on 1 thing for a fixed amount of time, referred to as a time box (25mins). The Pomodoro Technique is an adaptive process that consists of 5 stages: plan, track, record, process and visualize. During a time box (= a pomodoro) you should only focus on the planned task. After this time box, a small amount of time is assigned to take a break.  Of course external and internal interruptions are likely to occur. If possible, you should invert the dependency of these interruptions. In my opinion the session was quite interesting, but I don’t see how I could personally practise it … nevertheless the inversion of dependencies is something I’m going to give a try.

Modular Web Applications with OSGi by Andy Wilkinson Modular Web Applications with OSGI, showed us a Spring implementation to horizontally and vertically divide an application in to modules, using SpringSource Slices. This presentation was also interesting, but didn’t bring much new ideas. I expected to learn more about web applications with OSGI …

Project Lombok: Bye Bye Boilerplate by Roel Spilker and Reinier Zwitserloot Project Lombok is a project that offers solutions to reduce or even eliminate boilerplate code: getters/setters/finally blocks/toString/equals/hashcode/unchecked exceptions/.. Using simple annotations (@Data, @Getter, …), it is possible to write Pojo’s, without accessor methods. I believe this project certainly has a future, however at the moment it felt unfinished: only integration with Javac and Eclipse, not possible to refactor once generated, …  It would have been nice if some of it’s features were part of the Java language as is the case in C#.

So far, my 3 days at Devoxx. I hope to be there next year!