Steven Willems

Day 4, second day of the conference days. Again we started with a keynote from which I missed the first 2 speakers due some traffic jam. Luckily, I was just in time to see Robert C. Martin, maybe better known as ‘uncle Bob’. And he was good. Really good. Apart from the message he brought, he’s one of those speakers that get your attention from the first till the last moment. And I really liked what he had to say: professialism. Are we professionals? No we are not. Maybe some of us try to be one, but the majority is not. Something I’ve been saying myself for some time now. I even didn’t know there is a new manifesto out there for a while. So I feel good I am no longer alone in my queste It all starts at the education.. lets be honest, they are insufficient. OK, when I graduated from university, I perfectly knew how a computer works, I had a basic understanding of OO development and somewhere along I heard something about patterns. But that was merely it. So what happens, we are thrown in the field, start to do our thing, some of us are lucky and get a good mentor from who they can learn a lot, some get a bad one, some get none at all. So we end up all doing the same thing doing differently. So how professional is that? I should write a dedicated post about this one time..

But lets continue with Devoxx. Spring 3 was announced by Poutsma. Basically they added REST support (I guess almost like it is defined in the JSR) and added an API for configuring your application context (next to XML and Annotations). And that’s about it. So I was a bit dissappointed as I expect a bit more for a 3.0 release, but on the other hand, I don’t want Spring to get much bigger than it is now. It has to remain light. To me this is more a 2.6, but what’s in the name anyway. It’s marketing afterall..

After lunch break, Room 5 got completely full for Perfomance Tuning by Kirk Pepperdine and Dan Hardiker. And it was a bit of a disappointment. Sorry folks. They showed us JMeter, JPS and VisualVM. Nothing new. But maybe we expected too much as we don’t like to debug performance issues and maybe we expected something like a golden bullet. Anyway, up to the next session.

And there was the JavaPosse live show. Good entertainment in a Java context was exactly what I needed to give my brain some rest. It’s amazing how one gets tired just by sitting and listening to all this Java goodness

I continued with Dick Wall (from JavaPosse) about funky Java and OO Scala. It was about some handy Java frameworks like Google Collections and Lombok. Together with the JDK 7 closures, code could become much nicer to write and read. He didn’t tell that much about Scala, but I concluded again that I have to get a look into it. It’s powerfull, very expressive !

Jason van Zyl ended my day with the presentation of maven 3.0. It was quite a boring presentation, but what I remember from it, they did a complete rewrite of the core. They start now by making an execution plan first after reading all the pom files and when OSGI stuff is detected, they can switch internally to a OSGI context. They expect to release 3.0 around january and now they are adapting Nexus and Hudson.

So that was day 4. One more half day to go..