a little madness

Conference Day 1 (Devoxx Day 3) is done, and on balance it was decent, but hit-and-miss. “Special guest” RoxorLoops — a Belgian Beatboxer — brought some variety to the opening. He is a seriously talented guy and I think most enjoyed it as I did.

Of course the meat of the conference is the talks. Here’s a rundown of those that I attended:

• Keynote: JavaFX: I have not taken much interest in JavaFX so far, so it was interesting to see a bit of it in action. The most interesting part was the demo of dragging a JavaFX application out of a browser and having it run standalone. It’s high on cool factor, and could be quite useful (though I doubt any user will think themselves to try it, so…).
• Keynote: Java and RFID: IBM and partners managed to take an interesting idea, namely running a live project at the conference tracking attendees with RFID, and turn it into a yawn-worthy presentation. I kept wanting to see the actual software details behind it (not which RFID printers I can buy…). When they did get to some software stuff, it felt like seriously over-engineered ADD (Acronym Driven Development).
• From Concurrent to Parallel: Brian Goetz gave a polished overview of the fork-join framework. I’m into java.util.concurrent, so it’s good to get a look at the next logical step.
• Effective Pairing: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: Dave Nicolette had previously done this talk with rehearsed players for various pairing scenarios. As the players weren’t available, Dave took the ambitious route of getting audience volunteers to ad-lib instead. It didn’t go too badly considering the obstacles (e.g. audio not set up for the job), but on balance it was probably too ambitious. At least the audience did get involved, though.
• The Feel of Scala: this was my favourite of the day. Bill Venners is a very clear speaker, and this talk was polished (perhaps done before). I enjoyed the focus on real code samples, which were presented in an easily-followed fashion. Bill’s own motivations for using Scala reminded me of my own desire to check it out, which I now plan to do more seriously than before.
• Filthy Rich Android Clients: I’m planning to get a G1 so thought I’d check out some eye candy. Sadly, this talk was much too heavy on details and not enough on illustration. Learning how things work is great, but packing slides full of points won’t do it – there needs to be more sample code/hands on work. And this topic was just crying out for some eye-catching demos, of which there were too few in my opinion.
• Jython: Jythonistas Jim Baker and Tobias Ivarsson made a sometimes-awkward pairing for this talk. They focused too much on Python and Django and not enough on Jython itself for my taste. These are fine topics and we even use Django for zutubi.com, but I was expecting more content about Jython and cool ways to leverage Python on the Java platform. They did cover some of this territory, and get full marks for live coding and real demos.

Oh, and free beer and frites is always a good way to end a day…

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This entry was posted on Thursday, December 11th, 2008 at 9:07 am and is filed under Java, Opinion, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.