Notes on Devoxx 5th day

The fifth day notes is here, finally. I've been so lazy to write the 5th day notes, you know, kind of post-conference syndrome.

There were only 4 parallel sessions compared to the other days where there were 6, and the conference ended at 1 pm, compared to 7 pm the other days.


Keynote Panel on the Future of Java by Joshua Bloch, Mark Reinhold, Stephen Colebourne, Antonio Goncalves, Juergen Hoeller and Bill Venners

• Josh Bloch worked for Sun before, and he was the architect of the Java Collection, now he's working for Google. Author of Effective Java.
• Mark Reinhold, from Oracle, he's been in Java longer than Josh.
• Stephen Colebourne is a Java champion and active in Apache Software Foundation, he is kind of sitting between the two worlds: Oracle and ASF. During the conference he created an important buzz by telling that "Scala will not be the future Java".
• Antonio Goncalves represented the Java community. He's the Paris JUG leader.
• Juergen Hoeller is from Spring Framework.
• Bill Venners represented the new languages on JVM, e.g. Scala.

The panelists were asked couple of questions coming from Devoxx whiteboards or from a site specifically built for the panel.

There were couple of interesting questions like how Oracle would be perceived by Java community, Android, OSGi vs Jigsaw, around JCP and of course Doug Lea departure, impact of functional programming to Java, a modification in Java reflection, what Java does not have compared to .NET, whether Java should keep its backward compatibility, until what is a typical Java programmer.

The panel was really interesting, Stephen talked a lot, Bill talked a little. The others were in the average. I admired Mark Reinhold that was pretty available to answer the questions, while actually he could have avoided some. 

If there are two things that I should retain from the panel, it would be TCK: No restriction on TCK would be lifted, that's final (bye ASF), and the wait and see of Java User Group regarding the possiblity to be included into Oracle User Group. I should also mention that Josh said "but Java has already functional programming capabilities". 

At the end, the panel was quite informative, and it was nice to see Josh Bloch and Mark Reinhold sat side by side. The image would be good for Java community.

Apache Camel by Claus Ibsen

As a user of JMS, JMS is damn complicated. The messaging should not be that complicated. That's exactly what Apache Camel proposes: simplifying integration of n-tier systems.It is done through Enterprise Integration Pattern, which is a catalog of patterns. Messaging, Remote Invocation, Message Filter are some random picks of the patterns.

Oh, yes. Apache Camel has Scala DSL and from the Akka presentation the day before, Akka supports Apache Camel too.

Quite a cool presentation although I didn't know Enterprise Integration Pattern that much, but this one is worth to have a look though.

Elastic Search by Shay Banon

Elastic Search is a free-text search engine, specially designed for cloud environment. It is a Lucene-powered system, and in this regard it's just like Solr or Hibernate Search. 
Unlike Hibernate Search, however, elastic search works on document-oriented database.
The data model is represented in JSON, the query is also in JSON DSL.
Finally, the elastic search is distributed, so Shay explained the index replication algorithms (sharding, etc.).

--
Devoxx ended by attending Elastic Search and Apache Camel sessions. Quite good presentations to finish the conference. I took some times to visit Diamant Museum in Antwerp downtown and then flied back to Nice from Brussels in the evening.