The second day of JDays 2012 in Goteborg, Sweden. A lot of good talks!

Click here for the first day coverage.

Keynote

The keynote was done by Dalibor Topic, Oracle. Well done and boring at the same time. The good news is that Oracle/Java is moving forward in every possible direction be it server side (Java EE), desktop (Java FX), SE (Java 8 & 9 - including multi-tenancy support that Baruch mentioned yesterday), micro edition (Java Cards or whatever it is called) and even IDE (NetBeans). Predictable stuff, unfortunately.

The Talks

After the keynote I went to listen to Peter Norrhall talking about complex event processing. This is something that would be potentially useful for my team so I wanted to understand whether CEP tools can help us. Peter presented shortly available solutions (Drools Fusion, Storm, Disruptor, Esper) and then concentrated on Esper as this is the tool he uses. I enjoyed the talk, even though at some point it was hard to me to follow the examples.
After the talk I discussed with Peter the exact case of my project and it seems that Esper would do some dirty work for us. Gonna give it a try.

I wanted to learn about Akka since ages, so I attended Patrik Nordwall's talk. The first 15 minutes gave me a very nice overview of Akka. The rest of the talk was devoted to the Akka Cluster which is being currently under heavy development (but already ready to be used). Interesting.
When listening to Patrik I realised that I still live in a world of synchronous calls, and I need to do some serious mind shift to fully understand and utilize tools like Akka.

Next I went to listen to Alan Parkinson presenting his view on Maven deployment pipelines. A very nice presentation, however I haven't learned anything new. Seems like all Maven users fight the same issues trying to bend the tool to their will. Time to use Gradle (and fight completely different kind of problems...)

The last talk this day was by Tom Bujok. Tom presented his own project - soap-ws - which allows to easily handle SOAP without all the usual boilerplate code. I have really enjoyed this talk! It started with a nice rant regarding Java clumsiness (along the lines of "I had a problem and I decided to solve it with Java, now I have a ProblemFactory") but it quickly went to the main topic. There was lot of live coding including some Groovy stuff (XmlSlurper rules!).
My knowledge of SOAP solutions does not allow me to say how much does it differ from other competitive projects (I bet there are some), but comparing to traditional coding soap-ws looks like a life saver!
And BTW. there were also some licenses of Retrospective to win during the talk - nice! :)

Random Thoughts

I haven't seen any prezi slides. The initial boom (look mom, it is so cool!) is apparently gone and all people went back to oldschool PowerPoint/Keynote achieving differnt levels of ugliness ;).

Talk, ask, talk. Such a conference is a perfect opportunity to learn a lot, provided that you are not afraid to address speakers and fellow attendees directly. Curious about NetBeans development? Ask Geertjan Wielenga and you will spend next 15 minutes discussing various stuff more or less related to the question you asked (but very interesting things!). Want to know if Esper can help solving your problem? Have a chat with Peter Norrhall and you will soon find out. Not sure whether the next Akka talk is good for you (since you don't know Scala)? Just ask Patrik Nordwall and he will tell you. Interested in Artifactory? Ask Baruch Sadogursky and he will be more than happy to show you few cool tricks.
I have also had a great talk during the dinner about Akka, testing and Esper (with Peter Norhall and Patrik Nordwall), discussed some conference-related stuff with Thomas Sundberg, and training/TDD topics with Fredrik Wendt.
OMG!, I have probably learned much more talking to people than listening to the talks! (which were very good BTW)