Our impressions from Devoxx 2010

Last week we had the opportunity to participate in the largest European conference on Java – Devoxx.

The conference, held in Antwerp as always, had over 3 thousand participants from 40 countries. The organisation was good, although the fact that there wasn’t enough room for all the interested at some presentations was a drawback.

Java 7, 8, 9…

Traditionally, Mark Reinhold presented plans for Java for the next few years. Version 7 of Java, which includes a number of small enhancements in the language itself from the Coin project, is planned for mid-2011. More revolutionary changes such as lambda expressions and support for modules will have to wait for version 8.

Presentations

Our subjective selection of the most interesting presentations:

• In his great lecture on “Implementing Emergent Design” Neal Ford showed how to design systems incrementally, how to avoid creating unnecessarily complicated software and how to discover and manage “debts” that can arise during projects.
• Heinz Kabutz presented “Reflection Madness”, a number of coding tricks using Java Reflection API that make your life easier (or harder).
• Michael Coté and John Willis in “Does dev/ops matter for me?” tried to convince listeners that good practices concerning the creation of application codes can also be implemented in the IT department, resulting in software that is better, and gets written and put in production faster

We think the conference was a success and will probably be back in Antwerp in 2011, with Java 7 installed on our laptops.