The third edition of Devoxx UK 2015 was in London, between 17th and 19th June. This was my first conference since I joined Tomitribe. The dynamics were a little different for me this time. I actually had a triple role: attendee, speaker and exhibitor. Since Tomitribe was also sponsoring the event I had to spend some time at our booth to interact with other developers using TomEE and to promote to the ones that don’t know it yet. During that time, we also worked to push out the latest release of TomEE with most of the Java EE 7 support!

Venue

Devoxx UK was held at the same location as last year: The Business Design Centre. This year, more rooms were available, since the number of attendees was also higher. I don’t have the exact number, but I guess that close to 1 thousand might have attended the event. The Exhibition Hall was more or less the same, but I was surprised to see that some usual sponsors didn’t make it this time. The Community Hall pretty much had a non-stop Hackergarten well managed by Heather VanCura. By the way, what is wrong with the picture? I rule as a photographer, right? 🙂

Sessions

The program was interesting enough, a lot of diverse subjects and you had five options to attend on each scheduling bracket. I was not always into sessions, since I also needed to spend some time in the Exhibition and Community Halls. Not a problem, because all the sessions were recorded and are going to be available on Parleys, which is cool. These are my top 3 sessions (from the ones I have attended):

• What Were You Doing In 1995? A 20 Year Retrospective of Java by Simon Ritter and Steve Elliot
• Java EE 8, a snapshot overview by David Delabassee
• Apache TomEE from Dev to Ops by David Blevins and Simon Maple

(this was actually a live vJUG session).

You should get the first two sessions on Parleys. But the third one is already available:

Also, have a quick look to this awesome Ignite Session by Tonya Rae Moore:

My Session

I’ve got to speak about the Five Ways to Not Suck at Being a Java Freelancer. It may sound a little strange, since I’ve put the Freelancer life on hold. I’ve submitted the session before that event and I think it’s still valid to provide some of my experience during my Freelancer life. Here is a session about it:

vJUG Reading Club

This is not exactly related to the conference itself, but since I was in London I’ve met with my good friend Simon Maple to conduct our second Book Reading session. If you are not aware, vJUG started a new initiative: the Book Reading Club. The idea is for the attendees to gather around a book, read it and discuss it. We started with the awesome book Effective Java by Joshua Bloch. We had our second meeting around the book and it was fun to hear Josh explain some of the decisions made around the development of the Collections API, Generics and For each statement. A must see:

Community

The Community was awesome as always! This time I had the pleasure to have with me some very good friends from Portugal:

Hackergarten

When thinking of stuff to do in the Hackergarten, I had the idea to write a small piece of code to perform Method Caching using the new JCache API. I’ve soon discovered that I’ve gotten beaten by Andy Gee (no hard feelings). Anyway, we had some interesting discussions about it with Bruno Baptista and Sebastian Daschner. Check the result: JCacheExamples.

Java EE BoF

Also on the Java EE BoF we had the usual discussion between Java EE and Spring. In my honest opinion, I think this discussion is pointless. Both technologies can be used together and everyone is free to pick the parts that fit their project more. On the other hand, I think that Spring has done a fantastic job with Spring.io website. Java EE has a lot of information, but it’s all spread around the Internet. I believe that this causes a bad impression to new developers and in the end they may end up favouring Spring more.

Also, the adoption of Java EE 7 has been slow in the organizations. There is no Application Server support yet and companies are lacking the resources to perform the migration. I’ve personally been working in a Java EE 5 to 7 migration and I intent to make a session about it.

20 Years of Java

Do you have any idea what was going on when Java was born?

During the event, there was a lady taking polaroid pictures of developers. These pictures went into a wall and organized by the year you wrote the first line of Java code. I remember that it was in 1996 for me. I was writing an HTML website, but was unhappy that I couldn’t do any kind of dynamic behaviour. Searching on the web, I’ve found the solution: Java Applets! I bought a book called “Learn Java in 30 Days” and I wrote my first line of Java in the Notepad. I wondered where was IntelliJ at that time!

Final Thoughts

That’s all! Hope you enjoyed this report. Cya next year!