Devoxx 2013 - Java, Android, HTML5 and Belgian Chocolate

Devoxx 2013 was big. 5 days brimming with talks, workshops and meetings. Was it as good as they say it is? We’ve sent a strong team to find out - here are some of their notes!

Jarek and the Flying Drones

All's well that ends well - that’s my summary for Devoxx 2013. Although I heard “Day 1” was full of good talks, I always made a wrong choice. Now I cannot wait to watch the presentations at parleys.com about “Fault tolerance”, “Patterns, Shmatterns” and “Efficient coding in IntelliJ IDEA” just to name a few.

Day 2 made my day :) It started with “Java EE 7: What’s New in the Java EE Platform”. Sure, it was just a wrap up and I did not quite well understand the web socket example, but then Arun Gupta had a dedicated talk right after, called “Java EE 7’s Java API for WebSocket”. Great guy, great talk, very interesting topic. Thank You Arun!
Then it was time for lunch, and as usual, the Devoxx Wednesday Salad forces you to pay a visit at the nearest burger store to grab some food.

In the afternoon I attended the talk about parsing pdf files and the message I got was: you do it all wrong. Steve Hawley, former Adobe Acrobat guy, a master of the pdf format, gave us tips on how to proceed when it comes to parsing files. You have to think out of the box, since it is actually not a parsing but a mapping problem. Who said that you have to do a one-to-one mapping of a pdf file to a java class?
Last talk I attended that day was about best practises when organising an event like Devoxx - but for kids. I’m a little bit surprised that you can invite children starting at the age of 5. And there are many tools and applications suited very well for them. Actually the real challenges are parents, a proper place, parents and … did I mention parents? Anyway, thanks for sharing, definitely something to think about :)

Day 3 started with “Batch Applications”. Very interesting topic, especially the clustering part. Then Google Glass - I’m still suspicious about it. Though I’d love to have it!! But I cannot imagine how I could focus on the little display and then quickly focus on what is in front of me, like people, cars or trains ;) I wonder how my eyes would survive one day. Still - I’d love to wear it :)

Last but not least there was this talk about drones. Luckily the Devoxx Team opened another room since the first one was fully packed. What can I say, I’m not really convinced of flying drones over a field and gathering data about damage caused by heavy rain, but still - guys, nice work and I’m jealous :P

All in all it was well spent time.

Tomek - Older and Wiser?

This year, like the last couple years I had some fun on the Devoxx conference.
As usual I was not disappointed - met some new friends, lots of the old ones and enjoyed the good Belgian vibe in Antwerp and Charleroi (best tavern in the world!).

Technologically still non-java(script) languages are super hyped - Groovy, Dart, Kotlin, Ceylon everywhere. There's plenty of robots (especially super cool quad-copters) and alternative control devices (like Leap Motion or Myo) which make your life miserable and boring in comparison ;-).

The last thing worth noticing about Devoxx, is that there's more and more soft presentations which are more and more interesting the older you get. Something for me I guess.
Going next year definitely.

Jacek - +1 and -1s

Fault tolerance made easy (Uwe Friedrichsen)

This was a very informative overview of some techniques which help prevent our applications from failing completely in case something goes wrong. I saw real-life examples of dealing with such situations.

CQRS for Great Good (Oliver Wolf)

Having listened to some 2-3 CQRS talks before, this was the first time I actually understood what is it all about. Oliver began with a traditional multi-tiered architecture and introduced subsequent small changes that eventually led to the full CQRS approach, emphasizing that actually any or all of those changes are enough, depending on the particular use case.

Link Analysis in Networks, or "Finding the Terrorists" (James McGivern)

This talk disappointed me a little bit, as I was expecting some practical examples of link analysis on some real data. Instead all I got was a reminder of some discrete mathematics fundamentals (graph theory and matrices) - way too theoretical for me.

Spring Framework 4.0 - The Next Generation (Sam Brannen)

This was the last time I attended a "What's new in the latest version of technology X" session. Instead of going to this talk, I may as well have read the release notes for Spring 4 with a similar result.

Devoxx4Kids best practices and lessons learned (Daniel De Luca and company)

During this session and BOF I got a lot of inspiration and a bunch of practical advice on organizing such an event - when the kids learn the basics of programming an robotics. Who knows what the outcome will be...

What Makes Groovy Groovy (Guillaume Laforge)

I was expecting just a reminder of what I already know about the power of Groovy, but, to my surprise, I learned about a few even more powerful language features at which I am certainly going to have a look.

Taming Drones: How Java Controls the Uprising of the Drone Force (Eva Veenstra-Kazakov, Timon Veenstra)

I was for sure not the only one who wanted to see the drones in action during a live demo. However, although there was a demo, it only showed that the project is at a really early stage and really needs some improvements at least when it comes to controlling the drone.

Adam - The Speaker

I've been attending every Devoxx since 2007 (it was called Javapolis back then), so for quite a long time! During this year's edition I also had the pleasure to attend the conference as a speaker (for the second time).

Both of my talks were scheduled on the first conference day, Wednesday, so as an effect I only really saw the Oracle keynote. For the rest of the time I was either prepping or actually standing in front of the giant cinema screen.

My first talk was a quickie on ElasticMQ and its internals: a reactive, fully asynchronous REST API written using Scala, Akka and Spray (slides). The second talk was a full one, an overview of modularity concepts, various sizes of modules, and two new practical approaches: Veripacks and Ceylone (slides). I'm quite happy with how both of these went, got some good feedback and ideas for the future.

The second and third day where much more leisure, as I was done with the talking part. I enjoyed some Internet-of-Things presentations (e.g. Myo, quadcopters) as well as presentations on subjects I'm currently working on (Recommender Systems and Mahout with Ted Dunning). And above all, I got the occasion to meet a lot of old and new friends; and I would say that this is the main value of Devoxx.

Overall, Devoxx continued the good tradition of being the largest Java conference in Europe. It feels very familiar to go back to Antwerp, try the traditional belgian fries with mayonnaise and, of course, many of the belgian beers. See you next year!