Being relatively new to the IT profession, I wasn’t really too sure what to expect from JAX. Over the years, I’ve been to plenty of other non-IT conferences; some of them great, some of them awful.However, JAX 2012 did not disappoint.
Located in the depths of Park Plaza, Victoria, the venue was pretty ideal. Spacious conferences rooms that easily accommodated any interested attendees (and then some) with plenty of communal seating areas to mingle with the other conference-goers. Plus, it’s directly opposite a Pret and, as any regular London commuter will tell you, that is no bad thing. The event staff were very efficient and helpful and there wasn’t a single hiccup in organization over the entire two days, which is a huge indication of the amount of effort that went into the planning of such a big event.
After a brief welcome by one of the conference’s organizers, the first session was a keynote by Brian Goetz (@BrianGoetz ), a language architect from Oracle, centered around Java 8, in particular, Lambda expressions. It was a really eye-opening insight into the evolutionary forces in play that drive forward Java as a language and a technology to adapt to the fast-moving technological landscape whilst, at the same time, maintaining backwards compatibility with legacy code. The new features of the language, due for release in Summer ’13, have definitely captured my attention. There are definitely a lot of features ‘borrowed’ from Scala, in particular the use of parallelism in iterating over Collections, but these can only work to Java’s advantage. Overall, a fantastic talk and has genuinely excited me over the future of Java.
Next up, a live coding session with Sandro Mancuso ( @sandromancuso ) as he showed us his philosophy on testing and refactoring legacy code. Whilst endorsing the traditional test-driven development (TDD) approach and the manta of always leaving the code in a better way than you found it, quite a few hints and tips that he gave, such as start testing from the shortest branch of code and refactoring from the deepest branch, are small changes that can make working with legacy code that much easier. A useful session overall.
I’d never really had much exposure to the Big Data world before so I jumped at the opportunity to attend a few of the Big Data lectures available. First up was a lecture on Apache Cassandra by Tom Wilkie ( @tom_wilkie ). Amongst the frequent plugging of Acunu, a reporting tool that sits on top of Cassandra, it gave me a decent understanding of the way that Cassandra works and the advantages, such as providing realtime analytics, and the disadvantages, such as having to declare your queries up-front, that the technology has to offer.
The second Big Data lecture I attended was regarding Hadoop and its evolution. Similarly to the previous talk, this gave me a good basic understanding of the workings of Hadoop and how it has progressed over the years. Very interesting indeed.
Having worked on mainly Agile Scrum projects at Smart421, I was quite keen to attend Roman Pichler’s ( @romanpichler )lecture, entitled ‘Choosing the Right Agile Innovation Practices: Scrum vs. Kanban vs. Lean Startup’. It was really interesting to see Roman’s take on when each of these agile processes are relevent depending on the level of risk and uncertainty in the product. Having never had any really exposure to Kanban and Lean Startup, this was a great session to get more of a feel for these paradigms.
Next up, was Heiko Seeberger’s ( @hseeberger ) ‘Scala In Action’ talk. I was very excited about this talk because I’ve heard great things about Scala and had been meaning to experiment with it for a while. I was not disappointed. This live coding session showed the basics of the Scala programming language, as well as its interoperability with Java projects. Whilst the syntax may take a bit of getting used to for existing Java developers, the readability of the code drastically increases, condensing what may take several lines of Java code into a single line of Scala. As well as this, there are a plethora of features, such as parallel collections and lazy values that make this language very appealing. A fantastic presentation and I’ll definitely be coding some Scala of my own very soon.
The second of Roman Pichler’s lectures I attended was about his concept of the Product Canvas. The Product Canvas, in a nutshell, is a document for a new piece of product functionality that captures the stakeholder’s needs, user journies and UX design, constraints and developer stories all in one document. It was suggested that, once created, this document is displayed for anyone in the business to see. This is perhaps quite handy for ensuring that all parts of the business are, quite literally in this case, on the same page, but in reality, I’m not sure if this would really be feasible in a fast-moving Scrum team where the requirements are constantly changing. Definitely an interesting concept though and provides much food for thought on how development teams can work more closely with the rest of the business.
‘Rock Arts and Rockets’ was the title of the next keynote from IBM’s Steve Poole. This talk was a captivating insight into the Java community as a whole and was a cry of help to encourage us, as Java developers, to get more involved to help drive the future of the programming language. An eye-opening talk that was very thought-provoking.
At conferences, I’ve always found that there is usually one talk where someone has a good whinge. Russel Winder’s ( @russel_winder ) talk on Closures didn’t let that hypothesis down. A lot of the content in this talk was material that had been covered by Brian Goetz’s keynote and the rest seemed to be a long rant about how Java isn’t object-oriented(!) and slides of squirrels. The wasn’t really much to take away from this talk, which was a pity, as it sounded quite interesting.
Next, was a high-energy and entertaining talk by Holly Cummins ( @holly_cummins ) and Martijn Verburg ( @karianna @diabolicaldev ), which seems odd for a lecture about Software Complexity. Covering a range of areas concerning software complexity, such as dependency management, issues with classloading and modularity principles, there was plenty to take away from this talk and apply to my day-to-day development with Java, which was fantastic.
Another keynote followed, given by Patrick Debois of Atlassian, regarding DevOps, in particular the importance of sharing in such a development methodology. Patrick took us through the 6-phases of implementing the DevOps way-of-thinking into a pre-existing workspace. The key theme throughout showed that improved communication can do wonders for development and operational teams working in harmony. I see this methodology getting a lot more attention over the coming years.
Having recently been involved in helping out with the performance testing for a client, I thought it would be good to attend a couple of talks relating to that area that could perhaps give me some useful skills to apply. First up was a FAQs about Performance talk by Trisha Gee ( @trisha_gee ). Aimed at the beginner performance tester, Trisha covered a wide range of different types of performance tests that can take place, as well as considerations and common pitfalls. A very down-to-Earth session and gave me some very useful advice to apply day-to-day.
The second performance-related talk I attended was by Kirk Pepperdine on the topic of garbage collection logs. I must admit, I’ve never really thought of analyzing garbage collection logs, purely because I wouldn’t really have a clue where to start. However, this session showed that it’s not quite a scary as it first appears. Kirk talked us through a few different garbage collection algorithms and how these can be applied to the heap, complete with practical examples. Whilst one would need to do a lot more research to become fully comfortable delving into the logs themselves, this lecture gave a great overview of how to tweak the garbage collection mechanisms to make your code more high-performance. Highly enjoyable!
The final lecture of the conference that I attended was entitled ‘Multi-tenancy in a Platform-as-a-Service’ and this was given by Paul Fremantle ( @pzfreo ). This talk seemed like a ‘shameless plug’ for a product called Stratos but it also highlighted the issues that Stratos came across when building their PaaS solution, which made for an interesting final session. It’s also made me keen to get more exposure to cloud-based solutions.
Overall, this was a fantastic conference, both is organization and in content. It’s a great opportunity for any developer to keep up to date with the latest goings on in the Java ecosystem. It’s given me plenty of mind-food to munch on for the coming year. The JAX 2012 team deserve a big pat on the back.
Jeff Barr has posted some info 
