Java has a lot of innovation power, but what are main trends to follow? Currently I am writing this JavaOne research report of day 2 during a night-session (19:00 local time). Despite it is late, the audience of Java developers is filled with energy on the progress of presented Java innovations. And this First8 engineer also: many good concepts on software craftsmanship to explain. Let us start with main trends for me at JavaOne: Craftsmanship, Java SDK & Docker. These are explained below. (by @KoenusTweets)
Craftsmanship: the checker-framework
In the morning Kelvin and I visited the main people behind CheckerFramework.org for demonstrations of their static code analysis tooling. Static code analysis is really increasing in popularity: without manual effort for you, code improves because of the many healthy automated code inspections. Here, just add “-process checkerplugin” to the compile statement to extend the compiler. I have been using this framework in production 2 years ago and our teams really loved it. Thanks to this simple plugin you can provide an endless amount of smart checking annotations (like @NotNull: for variables that are never allowed to be null). The magic for development is that these checkings provide solid guarantees on the code quality. The checker framework is an easy compiler extension and can be implemented in any Java or groovy project to improve quality.
Java SDK: REST-full conversations
A session with a good speaker, a spec lead on REST at Oracle. In this night session, the speaker gave a very easy to understand demonstration about a REST cluster, for conversations with Twitter. He invited the audience to join him with his Open Source development at the JavaOne hackergarten: develop REST extensions together, providing a JSON plugin for the Jersey (REST) architecture. I asked him about the JSON possibilities of Jersey. He answered that JSON is working very well in REST, but its JSON dependencies will be replaced by the impressive lightweight JSON features from this Google project. The speaker asked the room to twitter “we love pluto” and this is what happened on twitter.;-)
Docker: a colleague presenting @JavaOne
At 21:00 the last session of this day started. This time a colleague from AMIS presents, the CTO Lucas Jellema. Both AMIS and First8 are part of conclusion, having 2 separate consultancy targets, respectively Oracle and Open Source. This session was really interesting for developers, with clever docker usages, combining it with Vagrant and puppet. Being already experienced in using docker, I was mainly impressed by the good code samples. If interested in learning docker, you can use his slides. However, docker may have a learning curve, so you can also call AMIS to help!
Closure: so many Java trends
At 22:00 it is the end of JavaOne day 2: time for drinks. After having followed 9 sessions today(!), I have a good view on powerful trends like Gradle, Docker and many other tools. Cool topics for later, in next blogs about Java innovations. For instance about exciting presentations from Redhat, a First8 partner. Tomorrow, I will also blog on using ZEN in software engineering. So thanks for following First8 at JavaOne and see you back at First8.nl/blog!
Docker is changing the world – here the start of the session with Lucas
