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Devoxx 2008 Highlights: RIA, Concurrency, Scripting Languages, and Working Smart!

Posted on | 23 December 2008 |
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At Devoxx 2008 I got to hear about new stuff and meet new people - everything I expected from the biggest independent Java conference in the world. From what I hear, it is a conference with more stuff and less fluff - even said by Sun employees in comparison with JavaOne. It is big enough so that you can move around between talks in the same slot and if you’re not going to talks, there are always other people to hang out with. Topics that are discussed at Devoxx usually become mainstream within a year or two in the Netherlands. Perhaps they become mainstream sooner in other countries. Devoxx is always interesting for consultants such as myself to keep track of the latest trend. Not everything however, become mainstream or relevant, so the trick is to pick out the right topics to dive into later.

Here are some highlights from Devoxx 2008:

JavaFX
Sun has been hyping JavaFX since 2006, but it finally had a demo that really caught people’s attention. It was a media player that was playing 9 videos simultaneously with nice effects. The key thing is that you can drag the player out of your browser onto your desktop while it continues running without a glitch. And because JavaFX apps run in its own container, it cannot crash your browser. The demos on the site somehow didn’t seem as cool as the demos from the keynotes and JavaFX presentations - I guess they save those for the conferences. I’m glad there is more and more means to create rich internet applications. Up until now there has only been Adobe Flex/Air - which are good developments in their own right. Competition brings innovation and pushes the technology forward. The more people get used to the tools available, the more they can start taking advantage of the new possibilities.

Java 7
In a keynote, Mark Reinhold gave a summary of the changes in the JDK for Java 7. Here is a good summary by a fellow Devoxx attendee. The main idea I got from this is the work started by Doug Lea with JSR-166 to introduce a light-weight concurrency framework into Java with the intention to take advantage of the increasing availability of multi-core processors. This has been in the working since Java 5, but is finally coming to light.

Smart = Agile++
Smart = Agile++

JavaPosse
At the JavaPosse talk, they did a recording of audience reaction to various topics. Beer was sponsored by Atlassian - makers of my favorite suite of tools. You can download the podcast here. One of the up and coming topics is non-Java languages - dynamic, scripting lanugages that should make development more productive by skipping the compilation, packaging, and deploying cycle for each change. Of the various scripting languages and frameworks out there, most Java developers prefer Groovy and Grails because of its tight integration with Java. Another plus in my book is because it was acquired by SpringSource. Groovy bridges the scripting world with enterprise Java - the world that we are familiar with. Some say that Groovy and Grails is Java’s answer to Ruby on Rails.

Summary
Here are my list of current and upcoming Java topics:

  • rich internet applications
  • concurrency
  • agile
  • scripting languages

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