Episode 18

That was a longer break from writing. Jax 2014 conference is over, time to do some recap. The proper event was held in London 14 – 15 October in Business Design Centre, Islington, London. There were also some workshops 13 October, but I decided to skip those. Primary topics were Java, web and mobile, development practices, agile and big data.

Some quick numbers:

• 60+ sessions in 5 parallel tracks
• 15 exhibitors
• around 500 attendants I guess

Here is the quick summary on day one session I’ve participated in:

Connecting the World keynote by Paul Fremantle.

A lot of charts of how quickly the number of things in the “Internet of things” grows. Quite a few interesting examples: cars, jackhammers, or even individual plants water level monitors.

Lambdas and Streams in Java SE 8: Making Bulk Operations Simple by Simon Ritter.

Everyone is talking about lambdas in Java for two years, so nothing really new. I’ve taken this one as a refresher since I wanted to do some coding using Java 8 features eventually. I’ve learned some new things about streams though.

‘Bootiful’ Code with Spring Boot by Josh Long.

Very lively session. The guy literally wrote a web application with web services, view and few other features from scratch, mostly by hand in half of an hour. Very entertaining and also useful. There is a web page for Spring Boot, where you can select few things, tick few checkboxes hit a button, and voilà, it generates working project stub for you.

The Art of Destroying Software keynote by Greg Young.

Also quite entertaining, although probably could be delivered in half it’s time without losing much data. Micro services, objects, actors -they all the same, they are old, and still we don’t follow their principles of cohesion and coupling. Split your code into modules you can throw away and rewrite from scratch in a week. Why week? It’s reasonable time you can hide from your boss behind the “some cleanup” banner.

Reflection Madness by Heinz Kabutz.

Reflection is bad, bad, bad. There are however some tiny spots where you can use it, mostly in testing probably. Lots of nifty hack from the “do not do this never ever in production code” realm.

The Full Stack Java Developer by Josh Long again.

And entertaining again. Extension of previous talk, rapid development again, perhaps even too rapid to follow in so short time. There was Vaadin, Thymeleaf and few others. And also Hoff and Doge ;)

Detecting Events on the Web in Real-time with Java, Kafka and ZooKeeper by James Stanier.

You want to know who’s talking about you and what? Go to guys from Brandwatch. James presented how they deal with the challenge of crawling millions websites and social media to get their clients what they want using open source message broker and resource manager.

Beer by waiters ;)

And plenty of cute little mini burgers and mini hot dogs. Nice idea.

Event Sourcing keynote by Greg Young again.

You should not delete any data from your system and relay on state. Instead, have some starting points and store events that brings new data. Then the state of the system at any point can be calculated from those. In case of performance problems use snapshots.

That’s about it regarding day one. Day two and some further insights are on the way in the next episode. See you in a few days.