My JavaZone 2013 Blog
I had the pleasure of speaking at JavaZone in Oslo this year. Here is a collection of links of the talks I attended.
Hadi Hariri from JetBrains plugs his Kotlin based JavaScript web app framework. Ample context is given to place this offer in the context of the new crop of thin-server architecture solutions.
Mario Fusco from RedHat gives a masterful session that drove home the practical use for Lambda Expressions in the Java language. The entire talk was given in the IDE with no slides.
Mario's talk isn't up yet, but when it is, it will probably behere.
Kevlin Henney pontificates about how to write a method. I applaud him for emphasizing fundamentals. It takes courage to get up there and take a strong stand on such personal matters as the meaning of column 80 and the need for injection and validation in enterprise software.
Brian McCallister's talk garnered a whole slew of re-tweets. It really is a treasure trove of open source projects that you can pick up and start using right now (if your employer's third-party license policy allows it). This talk is essentially a curated list with explainers for each item.
I've never been to TED, but Matthew McCullough's excellent talk made me feel like I was at one. Though it felt through and through like a recruiting pitch for GitHub (and a very compelling one at that) there was plenty of great soft skills content to make any workplace more effective.
Viktor Klang also got back to fundamentals in this entertaining talk about the essential art of software maintenance. Amusingly some of his advice contradicted that of Mr. Henney.
It's hard to disupte that the JavaEE world owes a debt of thanks to Gavin King for his contributions to Hibernate and CDI. Personally, I think CDI has been a big success factor for JavaEE. Unfortunately, this talk about Ceylon did not do a very good job convincing me of its value. I'll chalk it up to Gavin just having an off performance. Lord knows I've had those myself.
Trisha Gee gave a nice soft-skills talk about the importance of design in a post-agile methods world. I probably asked too many questions. Sorry about that.
Ulf Lilleengen from Yahoo!'s Oslo office talks about how they handle configuration in their gigantic enterprise. I was very interested in this one because I'm a big believer that we need a JSR for this in Java. See Mike Keith's talk at JavaOne next week.
I was a bit skeptical coming into this one, but Nate's stage command carried the day. Again, the value of this talk was his curation of the content. You could plug yourself into this talk and come away knowing where to invest further time learning how to use one of these MV* things in practice.
I'm just including my own talk here in the interest of completeness. As far as delivery goes, I was happy with how it went off. The camera angle in this room (which was the same as Gavin King's room) makes it look like no-one was there, but there were in fact about 20 - 30 people there.