2009-02-01
Whats wrong with JFokus?Leonard Axelsson | conference, java, jfokus
For being a thirdyear conference - not that much. Actually I'd say JFokus 2009 had a good mix of presentations to choose from, but not much more. To me it lacked interactivity - where were the competitions? the BoFs or even the time to make new aquintances? The conference was packed with presentations and short on breaks.
Things I'd like to see next year
- a third day (maybe JFokus could be accompanied by an unconference)
- a competition
- coding infront of a live audience
- a live(ly) debate
- evening BoFs (I might look into arranging this myself if there's interest)
- wifi (c'mon, a geekfest without internet?)
- a keynote with LESS sales pitch and MORE wow!!!
Now I fully realise a small conference such as JFokus prolly can't fit all of these, but surely there's room for more. A likely candidate for debate would have been: JavaFX vs Silverlight vs Flash. A dynamic language competition could easily be combined with a live coding event. It's been done before, just can't find the link right now (anyone?).
Rebellious Java makes a show
All in all it was a great experience - especially the JavaRebel talk was amazing. Jevgeni Kabanov is a great speaker and know how to present 2 hours worth of presentation in 1 hour while keeping us all wishing for more. I look forward to giving JavaRebel a go in our current project - what especially intrigues me is the support for production deploys (with rollback) promised in version 2.0.
Controlling your architecture is no rocket science
My other favourite was Controlling Your Architecture with Magnus Robertsson from Jayway. What he shared wasn't rocket science, it was something a lot more basic and a hell of a lot more useful. He started off with asking the gathered crowd if they were using architectural rules and how they were applying them. The rest of the talk was spent on the hows and whys to keeping code complexity at a minimum (zero anyone?). The highlight for me was probably Structure101 which instantly gives an overview of project-crossdependenices and code complexity.
Thanks
All said and done it was a great conference and the organizers did a good job! I look forward to seeing where they'll take the conference next year.
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2009-02-02 01:37
Little Big Planet enthusiast
Good review; agree that a "JavaFX vs Silverlight vs Flash" debate/deathmatch would be entertaining. Maybe next year I'll get the change to go myself. Btw, the "trackbacks" link is broken.
2009-02-02 02:25
Leonard Axelsson
Thanks. Trackback link ain't broken but I probably shouldn't even have made it clickable (http://tinyurl.com/tb-spec).
2009-02-03 13:37
Ronnie Kilsbo
JavaRebel surely is a hot topic, would like to see ambition on that field for sure. Also interesting to see how much of it's capabilities that can be implemented in production environments, especially due to testing politics.
2009-02-03 14:36
Leonard Axelsson
Personally I'd guess the biggest issue with using JavaRebel in production is the new demands it introduce. For example you can't do a deploy with JavaRebel if the new code changes the hierarchy. (http://www.zeroturnaround.com/javarebel/features/ - Replacing superclass). But you are probably right, JavaRebel will introduce new problems to testing as well. It will be harder to guarantee that the code running in staging is the same as the one running in production and that needs to be controlled in some way. In a worst case scenario deploys to staging that for some reason does not go on to producation will force full redeploys in production as well as staging.
