Bruno Souza leaves SUN

I know you have expected to read about days 4 and 5 of Devoxx 2009 here, but there are more important things to blog about.

Bruno Souza, founder of SouJava, known as "Brazil's JavaMan" has left SUN. But I suppose this is nothing to keep him from being an (even more) outstanding member of the Java community.

In case you are wondering - Bruno is the guy on the left,

Stephan Janssen on the right and Juggy in the middle!

Bruno, lets meet again at Milliways, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (always near in space)!

Oh, and bring Juggy along, rrrright?

Braziiiiiiiiiiiillll!!!!

Devoxx 2009 - Day 3

Day 3 is the first real conference day. It started with a keynote

from Oracle which really gave no real new insights, since nobody is allowed to say anything at all. But just in case - a subset of the slides is available here. Did you recognize the tie on that "Orange Guy"?

Next was a presentation of Adobe on their new Catalyst tool (Fc) - Chat Haase did a real nice stand up again.

The main breaking news of the day came from Mark Reinhold in his update for JDK 7. Not only will it take longer to get JDK 7 out (due to the obvious reasons) but it even may contain closures. So once again it seems closures is the new pink.

After lunch James Gosling had his un-keynote. He demoed the new version of the JavaStore promising that it will be available worldwide ASAP, but no sooner.

During James talk some novelity happened at Devoxx - the first time in 8 years the audiosystem broke. So James had to wait for them fixing the problem, but the Devoxx-Magicians got it up and running again in no time (=few minutes).

Next up was a JavaFX session with Rich Bair, Jasper Potts and special guest Tor Norbye. They showed the planned features for JavaFX 1.3- regions with css styling support, new enterprise ready ui components and some smaller enhancements for threading. The eyecatcher was the demo from Tor. He showed the JavaFX Visual DesignTool, written completely (100%?) in JavaFX. I have to figure out how to build such a large application without a platform like NetBeans RCP (have to ask Tor). It was a real slick UI with lot of effects and , as it seemed to me, with ease of use.

For the afternoon the sessions were ScalaTest and Project Coin. Bill Venners talk showed how easy it can be to write easy understandable test with Scala - but I agree with James Gosling - you have to hear it 5(?) times to get it all right. the Project Coin session did not reveal many new details but showed how the process worked, made clear that not only because it looks simple to do a change it is that simple (the JLS complexity indicator from Alex Buckley). One new piece of information was that they may be considering further small changes, e.g. multicatch, due to the slip of OpenJDK 7 release.

Only two BOF's for day 3 - the JUG BOF with James Gosling (a must have) and the JDK 7 BOF with Alex Buckley, Brian Goetz, Joseph Darcy and Mark Reinhold.

The main things I took with me? Well Java was invented to trick C/C++ programmers into thinking Smalltalk was cool thing and no Java is not the new COBOL.

For the evening we had a meetup (hosted by the NetBeans DreamTeam) at the Axxes - and guess who was there - Juggy!

Was real good to meet you all again!

Devoxx 2009 - Day 2

So just a short resumé for day 2. First up was the Java EE 6 session, with AlexisMP and Antonio Goncalves. They did an impressive show for all the Java EE 6 technologies by example starting with JPA and ending with nice ajax based frontend.

After lunch there was a good session about JavaFX with Stephen Chin. He walked us through basic things like "How works a sequence?" and more complex things like the new layouts. This session really covered a lot of JavaFX, but my personal highlight was the a short demo from Tor Norbye (Sun Microsystems). He demoed a NetBeans IDE based JavaFX RAD tool that feels it like the famous "Matisse"-GUI-Builder for Swing based applications.

In between those two sessions there was a short private "Thank you, Aaron" ceremony, during which the Duke's Choice Award winning team from ND SatCom handed a T-Shirt with a team photo and the signatures of all the team members to Aaron Houston, who was the one who originally talked us into submitting our tool to the Duke's Choice Award.

In the late afternoon there was an interesting session about how to combine the power of OSGi and NetBeans Lookup with Toni Epple from the NetBeans DreamTeam and Geertjan Wielenga.

The evening (and a better part of the night) was spent discussing the future of Java with Aaron and some guys from french JUG's ending at our hotel getting into the traditional tuesday night party - meeting Kirk Pepperdine, Chet Haase, Romain Guy (too name just a few of those trying to drink a belgium bar out of beer).

Devoxx 2009 - Day 1

The first "University Day" started with a talk about "Generics" from Prof. Steegmans. It was quite interesting, although a bit more detail might have been nice, especially about wildcards. The afternoon session about JSF2 (and beyond) had a lot of information about all the changes that went into JSF 2 in comparison with 1.x and some hints on what is yet to come. The main mantra I think was "Go facelets - die JSP and never look back".

The "Tools in Action" talk about Scimpi was quite nice showing that it is possible to generate a web UI based on Naked Objects, but perhaps it should use more of the new JEE stuff, since all the major things are/can be now POJOs in JEE. The "Next Generation Performance Tools" talk showed the actual state of what is possible in inspecting the JVM, but only some minor(?) improvements for the new version of the JRockit toolchain.

From the BOF'S the talk from Kess Jan Koster was a real highlight. It was interesting discussing about the "Java Tuning Puzzlers" and his real good presentation style made this talk fun even though it was the 21:00-22:00 timeslot. There is one more talk with him this week - so it could be probably a good idea to go there as well, although that may be a bit more about selling and advertising java-monitoring.com. Oh and I nearly forgot - the DreamTeam once again helped out - this time with a power adapter for his Mac.

Devoxx 2009 - It has begun!

First session to attend is Java Generics by Prof. Steegmans. Hopefully adds some more information about the mysteries of type erasure and wildcards to pass on to fellow developers afterwards. Follow some details at Twitter!