Devoxx 2008 - Day 1

First thing after breakfast today was an extensive presentation on JavaFX done by Richard Bair, Jasper Potts and Martin Brehovsky - "JavaFX in Practice". It was an amazing thing to see and to try it out in parallel. There are lots of interesting features in JavaFX already and more to come. The downside is that deployment is not finally solved (how to get it to a customer, who uses a closed network) so no easy way to get around the actual deployment limitation.



The afternoon session was "Groovy and Grails in Action" with Guillaume Laforge - presenting all this small niceties Groovy has to offer in comparison with Java. But I have to admit - I did not find the flexibility very appealing; e.g. that it is possible to overwrite the operator "+" so that it always returns 1 (reminded me of my good old C/C++ days).

For the "Tool in Action" series we went to "VisualVM - new extensible monitoring platform" done by Kirk Pepperdine and "Building Java Projects With Gradle" by Hans Dockter. VisualVM is a must have troubleshooting tool ranging from Heap-Analysis to CPU-Monitoring. If you need anything else, just create your own plugin and extend the existing functionality, e.g. like TDA. The best is you now get it with your favorite JDK (and it brought the NetBeans Platform into the JDK). Gradle seems to be a quite flexible tool for creating a build environment, but somehow I missed a bit the declarative nature, as it can be found in Maven. So check it out and give it a try.

Afterwards we attended another session for JavaFX (from Martin Brehovsky) showing a bit more about the integrated workflow between developer and designer. Next up was "Tune It!" a performance related session with Kirk Pepperdine. For the finishing session at Day One we had a session about SwingLabs. The expectations were quite high I think after all those long e-mail discussions about Sun stopping funding for SwingX.

So what's the Story about JavaFX and Swing? Well I'd say that nothing special will happen - so there is still Swing and for more advanced fancy UI code there is now JavaFX coming up. Will there be a possibility for a mesh-up? Yes. The NetBeans plugin is already quite usable, but it still seems to lack some of the features a typical Java developer will try to use (e.g. in place rename, comment out, code completion) - hope there will be updates quite soon (next year)

So what may be on the roadmap for Java7 from a Java Desktop User's view?

• Integration of Scenegraph API and other tools and laguages should be scheduled
• JWebPane is still in the works
  
• Full Java/JavaFX Meshups still to be done
• JavaApplicationFramewrk
• Beans Binding
  
• JAM (???)
• ....

My personal subjective impression - there is a cool technology coming up - so please stop whining - if you need something be part of the community and contribute.

Devoxx - Registration

To avoid long queues for registration, we decided to already pick up our bags on Sunday evening. Everything went smooth - so now we are prepared for Devoxx 2008.

We have already met some cool people - had a small chat with Stephan Janssen (make sure to visit his talk/BOF about Parley TNG), met Aaron Houston from Sun, Kirk Pepperdine (Master of Java Performance Tuning), Bill Venners (Artima Software) and just got a short glimpse at Josh Bloch.

Seems this years conference is again packed with a lot of real interesting people. So if you are already registered - cu at Devoxx from tomorrow on (or better today already past midnight here in Europe).

Last Day in Brussels - Atomium

After the rainy evening yesterday - today the sky cleared and it was sunny. Since we had some more time to spend before starting for Antwerp - we decided to visit the Atomium.

Looking at the photos you should remind yourself that the Atomium has been built for the EXPO 1958.

Photos documenting the trip can be seen at the usal location (once I got to uploading them).

Brussels Day 2

So what to do in Brussels on a Saturday? First breakfast then go shopping - try to find Manneken Pis and afterwards meet with Toni ;-) .

The live performance on the "Grote Markt" was an astonishing event - music, light and performance met rain. So it was a bit wet, but nevertheless something you have to experience yourself to get a real feeling for it.

Some photos are available at the Devoxx-Album or in the sidebar as a preview - I apologize for the quality - it was quite dark and rainy.

First night in Brussels - approaching Devoxx

Last night was our first night here in Brussels. We enjoyed the christmas market - as planned - and tasted good belgium beers and "Gluwhein".

Especially cool are the "The Electrabel Nights ..."- a fantastic mindboggling lightshow taking place in the "Grote Markt" - come and see for yourself. Tonight there is a live performance scheduled for 19:00.

See photos from this journey in the sidebar or visit the Picasa-Web-Album directly.

So still 48h hours to go before Devoxx opens.

Devoxx 2008 - The Adventure Begins

It has started. Just a few minutes ago the "Katamaran" has left Friedrichshafen towards Konstanz - the first leg of a multi-part journey to Antwerp.

... and it's only the beginning ....

So first stop is Brussels - enjoying the chrismas market and preparing SQE for Devoxx.

SQE and Devoxx 2008

Interested in exchanging ideas how to make SQE better?
Want to share your preferred workflow with the SQE developers?

Meet the SQE Team at Devoxx - just leave a comment and your e-mail - so we can get together over a Belgium beer or just have a chat over breakfast / lunch or a coffee break.

BTW expect some news on SQE for Devoxx - following our tradition we are actually working full steam for a new stable version of SQE compatible and best to use with NetBeans 6.5 Release. More news to follow ...