JavaOne 2014 - Bart Blommaerts

Last week I had to opportunity to attend JavaOne in San Francisco, as a speaker. JavaOne is the largest Java conference in the world and takes place at the same time as Oracle OpenWorld. In a way JavaOne is a conference, within a conference. JavaOne also had a very large (and crowdy) exhibition hall, featuring the usual suspects (Red Hat, Atlassian, GitHub, …) but also a number of exhibitors that I didn’t know before. For me it was the first time to attend JavaOne, but I’ve been to Devoxx for the past 5 years. While Devoxx and JavaOne share a lot of similarities, the specific focus of the 2 conferences feels quite different:

Devoxx has a wide(r) focus on technology and open-source. For example: Devoxx always has a lot of Google talks (Chrome Dev Tools, Android, Angular, ..). Devoxx (generally) features the latest and greatest technology that is worth looking at today. Actual adoption in an enterprise environment might require some time.
The main focus of JavaOne really is Java SE and Java EE and how these can support a business today.

From a developer’s point of view, both have their merits and they complement one another. Unfortunately I won’t be able to make Devoxx this year …

Key takeaways:

JEE: there was an obvious focus on Java SE 8 and EE 7, but also some first looks at Java EE 8. In the next few days / weeks, I'm looking forward to learn more about WildFly 8.x.
Project Valhalla: Planned for Java 9 (or later ..) Project Valhalla is looking at the implementation of Value Types (reference-free objects), Generics Specialization (primitive type support for generics), ... in the language and the JVM, with better performance as a goal. Brian Goetz showed some "early code" at the keynote that looked very interesting.
Project Panama: Also planned for Java 9 (or later ..) Project Panama seeks to introduce a Foreign Function Interface that can bind to native functions. Another exciting feature will be "Arrays 2.0".
Project Jigsaw: Project Jigsaw is better know as the "Modular JDK" project and aims to design and implement a standand module system for the Java SE platform. I think many people have been waiting for this (for quite some time). I'm definitely looking forward to this one.
JCache is final and an Ehcache implementation is also available.

My talk:

My talk “Efficiently building and deploying microservices” was hosted at the Hilton Hotel on Thursday. I was excited to have a full room (about 150 people. Almost all of them pre-registered.) and even more excited to get so much (positive) feedback afterwards. After the talk, I had conversations in the hallway for over an hour with different attendees. I particularly remember someone’s input regarding performance: I’m including that in the next talk on this topic! Of course it’s always nice to get feedback from the Spring team since I included a Spring Boot demo. They recommended me to have a look at Spring Cloud as it features some tooling that fit microservices well, for example Spring Boot Netflix that supports Service Discovery (Eureka), Circuit-Breaker (Hystrix) and Intelligent Routing (Zuul).

It did struck me few people seem to know that HP (Enterprise Services) also does software development. I think we need to promote that as we have quite a large and skilled developer base.

What