Day three was definitely the high point of the conference for me.  As anyone who has spoken at tech conferences knows, the point in time when all of one's sessions have been given is the turning point between tempered enjoyment and pure enjoyment of the conference.  I was blessed with the scheduling this year; I was all done after Wednesday.  This put me in a great frame of mind to enjoy the Oracle Appreciation Event.  Day three also saw the culmination of a long running project: the Web Framework Smackdown 2014 edition.

 

My friend and colleague Reza Rahman asked me to keep the web framework smackdown meme going for another year.  This year I called in quite a few favors to pull together a diverse group of celebrity panelists: Miško Hevery, creator of AngularJS at Google, Pete Hunt creator of ReactJS at Facebook, panelists preparing and Joonas Lehtinen, creator of Vaadin.  The panel was moderated by Neal Ford of ThoughtWorks.  I rounded out the panel representing JSF.  I've learned from previous smackdowns that a confident and comfortable moderator combined with a little prep time just before the panel are the keys to success.  We met at 11am for this purpose over Patxi's pizza. From the left you can see Neal Ford, Miško Hevery, myself, Joonas Lehtinen, and Pete Hunt.  I don't think Pete and Miško had met before, and it was interesting hearing them trade notes about their approaches to the performance of handling the model update side of their frameworks.  From what I gathered, they both see that feature as the most valuable aspect of their frameworks, and they both have spent significant time optimizing that part.  When it came time to take it on stage, we started by introducing our different approaches to the task of building a stateful and responsive user interface delivered in a web browser.  Angular and React are entirely client side, while JSF and Vaadin are entirely server side.  In spite of Neal's earlier recommendation that client side is the way of the future, Joonas and I made the case for where server side makes sense.  Briefly, reasons for favoring server side over client side include simplicity, security, integratability (such as mashups), and maintainability.  Client side is better when Facebook-sized scale is important, when JavaScript fluency is a non-issue, and when "modern" browsers are a given.  You'll have to check out the audio to get the full details.  My only complaint with the panel is that it really didn't get smackdown-ish at all.  I welcome comments about the client/server UI debate.  Perhaps we can get some smackdown action in the comments.

 

My last official obligation of the conference was my final booth duty in the Java EE both.  This session closed out the JavaOne exhibition, and as such the traffic was a bit light.  I was able to take a tour around the exhibition to obtain some schwag for my kids.  This year it was novel to see Target with a booth.  I've long been a fan (and shareholder) of Target, avoiding Wal*mart at all (unfortunately frequently too high) costs.  They were recruiting.  JavaOne is not a job fair, but it was still nice to see them representing Minneapolis, home of Facelets creator Jakob Hookom.

  

Geert and the NullPointers   Freddy, Frank, and Ed Booth duty done, it was on to a bit of fun in Duke's Cafe.  As I mentioned in my JavaOne 2014 Day One blog entry, Chicago JUG leader Freddy Guime had put together a band of musician Java enthusiasts called the NullPointers. They allowed me to sit in with them for some songs during their set at 5pm Wednesday.  This was a real honor and a great blast.  At left, from the left you see Zoran Severac, Mattias Karlsson, of JFokus, Geert Bevin of ZeroTurnaround, and Jim Weaver, Java Developer Advocate for Oracle.  At right, from the right, you see Freddy, Frank Greco of the New York Java Users Group and myself.  I think my keyboard stand was formerly in the Hackergarten.

 

The fun kept on rolling, with the Oracle Appreciation Event.  This used to be called the Customer Appreciation Event.  I'm not sure why they renamed it.  I would probably have given it a pass this year but for my 11 year old who is a big Macklemore fan.  I'm glad I went because Macklemore was very entertaining, and Aerosmith put on a great show as well.