The last day of JavaOne – it’s a wrap! We had a hard time getting up this morning after long days and having been the Oracle Appreciation Event the evening before where Maroon 5 and The Black Keys blew us and thousands of other Oracle OpenWorld and JavaOne attendees away on Treasure Island in the middle of the San Francisco Bay.
One of the many T-shirts 🙂
The entire week was a blast and we enjoyed it very much. As Java developers we’d seen new tools, frameworks and insights and learned a lot of how our favorite platform made it’s way into various industries outside our own. For years Oracle (and formerly Sun) had us believe “Java is everywhere” – which actually seemed to be true. The Internet of Things – as described in the community keynote this morning – is on our doorstep and Java should play a very important role in it. Besides what Vice Presidents, Platform Directors and other important Oracle titles have said this week, if you see how Java ME is used in fully autonomous vehicles and how NASA visualizes satellites trajectories with JavaFX, I’d think the technology is speaking for itself. In short, we’d favor the Java ecosystem any day of the week.
If you’re not a Java developer but still interested in the highlights this week I’d suggest you take a look at the . We however would like to list our own A list – those of authors and sessions.
Top-5 speakers
It was hard to merge our favorites into one list, but we managed. These are our top speakers we would recommended anyone to go to if seen on the outline of any future conference.
- Adam Bien – The fastest German speaker ever. Lives and dreams Java EE and is not afraid to show it. “Lean and opinionated” describes it pretty well.
- Venkat Subramaniam – Talked about Java 8 lambda expressions and integration JVM languages. Knows his stuff, uses humorous analogies.
- Simon Maple – Does The Adventurous Developer’s Guide to XXX Series. The way he started The Adventurous Developer’s Guide to Application Servers with a awesome move-like trailer about the Great Application Server Debate immediately already got him a Oscar.
- Martijn Verburg – Garbage collection: The Useful Parts II. Is the Diabolical Developer. Nuff said.
- Nikita Salnikov – Tarnovski – Plumbr guy from Estonia. Funny, in an East-European kind of way.
Top-5 sessions
There were many good sessions – and of some just the intent was good – but we had to make a choice. Below sessions were pretty great.
- Demystifying Java EE. Adam Bien with a no-sheets presentation and full of live-coding using existing JEE 5 and 6 and some new JEE 7 techniques. In contrast with previous years he didn’t do a full application from scratch, but instead talked a bit more of the why’s behind some (anti)patterns, architectural sound decisions and decisions made by software architects .
- Rich HTML5 Web Apps: Typesafe Edition. The Errai Framework is a fresh new kid on the block. Jeroen wrote some bits about it yesterday.
- Programming with Lambda Expressions in Java. Java 8 is the future and lambdas will be a very essential part in it. Years too late of course, but this session clearly shows its incredible power.
- I Bet You Have a Memory Leak in Your Application. Nikita (see author #5 above) showed we should be more careful in cleaning up threads and such. Not doing so will result in a ticking time bomb… and maybe the person who uses your code is a homicidal maniac who knows where you live 😉
- Advanced JVM Tuning. Very informative session about the art of JVM tuning. David Keenan had good pointers on tuning CMS, Parallel and G1 GC’s for either throughput, latency or memory footprint.
After enjoying some hot dogs and Rolling Rock beers at the It’s a Wrap! event at the Yerba Buena Gardens, JavaOne 2013 came to an end. Until next year! We’ll be staying for a few more days just for some fresh air and to see some of the Bay Area.
Ted & Jeroen
Further Reading
If you haven’t seen or read enough about Oracle OpenWorld or JavaOne yet, we recommend the following resources:
- Official Oracle OpenWorld and JavaOne website
- AMIS Technology blog about interesting OOW13 sessions
- ReadSoft: The six big takeaways from Oracle OpenWorld 2013Â – they used Teds tweet.
