Thanks to bridgingIT – the great company I’m working for – I was able to attend my third JavaOne conference in San Francisco this year, including the presentation of two of my own talks: A well attended The Web Application Strikes back on Monday and an almost packed room for Java Web Security Antipatterns on Thursday. All slides and demo projects are available here.
Keynotes and Welcome Reception
The whole conference did not offer too many Java news this year from Oracle. The keynote on Sunday repeated a lot of the information already delivered last year (except some more technical details, especially on Java 9 modularization). But most of the time it was pretty boring in an ice cold hall. Only the Scott McNealy video provided some real entertainment. Since I was more or less forced to follow the Oracle OpenWorld keynote on some screens during the welcome reception, I’ve noticed an even more boring keynote: Looked like someone was reading the release notes for their database products… At least the Community Keynote was way more entertaining after the first 30 minutes of sponsor messages. The welcome reception used to be better as well the past years, since JavaOne had its own one in the Taylor Street cafe. All the nerds closely together, nicer than to search for them in a huge OpenWorld crowd:
Sessions
Most sessions I’ve attended were good and informative, a lot of packed rooms. Received a lot of information, often directly from Oracle engineers or great other speakers. The security track was again a good decision, most sessions were well attended. Good to see more and more developers taking care of security in their applications.
Modularization played a big role this year, including a lot of information on how to prepare your own libraries and frameworks for the upcoming Java version. Java 9 modularization looks pretty well-thought-out, delaying it until now turned out to be a good decision after all. It will take an even longer time for full adoption, but it’s worth the wait.
Loved to see Spring/ Spring Boot in so many sessions and demo projects. Of course Java EE is more visible here, but it’s nice to see the conference provides more room for this great alternative and treats it as an equivalent alternative.
Food
Food (lunch) has never been good at JavaOne, compared to ANY other conference I have ever attended. Hard to call that even food. This year was the worst year ever food-wise. At least they started to serve local craft beer in the evening as an addition to their ‘traditional’ Budweiser polluted water. But some eatable lunch would be lovely.
As the last two times, JavaOne was worth the trip. Learning some new stuff, presenting my own sessions, meeting other nerds. What I missed were the bands playing in the evening at Yerba Buena Gardens. That was always a lot of fun. And the way warmer temperatures in September ;-) And of course some cool and new announcements from Oracle for the Java ecosystem. Maybe next time…