Background Info
Last month, I was at one of the biggest conferences of JAVA world – Devoxx Belgium. As a software developer, it was a big chance to attend presentations and talks from big names like Venkat Subramaniam, Brian Goetz and Mark Reinhold.
As a first-time-Devoxxian, I would like to give some information about the conference to those who don’t know Devoxx very well. It was founded in 2001 as JavaPolis. Today it is one of the largest community-driven conferences. It is organized by the Belgian Java User Group (BeJUG). The tickets have already been sold out months ago. Moreover, the organizers create a really nice atmosphere that thrives on its venue: one of the biggest European cinema complex – the Kinepolis – located in Antwerp, Belgium.
My Top List
If you were looking for some cool materials to watch during holidays, here is a list of talks from Devoxx Conference which I found ‘worth hearing’.
Parallel and Asynchronous Programming with Streams and CompletableFuture
by Venkat Subramaniam
Venkat has always been my favorite lecturer. In my point of view, his presentation technique is a unique combination of thorough instructions and sheer entertainment. In Devox 2017, I joined all 3 presentations (they were all fully packed). The one that I’m describing here was one of my favorites since I would consider this talk a comprehensive guide to understanding parallel and asynchronous programming with Stream APIs and CompletableFutures. It was a privilege to hear ‘the catch’ behind the idea of asynchronous programming and its implementations in Venkat’s own words.
‘A stream is either parallel or sequential. Not both. Venkat’
Building Cloud Native Progressive Web Apps
by Matt Raible & Josh Long
A not-so-serious (how can it be with Josh Long 😊) – but still very informative – presentation about building progressive web apps using Spring Boot at backend and Angular at frontend. The most interesting part was that Josh built the whole backend using Kotlin, and it was the first time that I have ever seen the use of Kotlin with Spring Boot. I am also recommending this presentation for those who want to see Spring’s new Kotlin DSL.
‘Make jar, not war’
Deploying Spring Boot apps with Kubernetes
By Thomas Risberg
This presentation was sounded interesting to me, since these two technologies were heavily used on microservices environments in these days and as a developer who is working on microservice architecture, it was inevitable for me to join this presentation. Also, I had a personal interest in Kubernetes since it is the fastest growing production-grade container orchestration tool in our sector. In this presentation, Thomas Risberg made a live demo of how to deploy Spring Boot applications with Kubernetes.
Building Event Driven Services with Apache Kafka and Kafka Streams
by Ben Stopford
This talk was one of the most interesting and entertaining presentation in the conference since it would be interesting to see event-driven design on real life use cases. Event-driven design is considered to be one of the main aspects of creating scalable services and Apache Kafka is one of the projects that satisfies this design-criteria by implementing a distributed streaming platform. Ben Stopford, who is an engineer actually working at Apache Kafka Core Team, gave some real-life use cases, and explained us how to deal with them by using a streaming platform.
‘Streaming = Manipulation of data in flight’
Going Reactive with Spring 5 & Project Reactor
by Josh Long & Mark Heckler
The recent release of Spring 5 resulted with a bunch of interesting presentations from Pivotal and this talk is one of them. Spring 5 comes with many core features, like dedicated Kotlin support and functional web framework, but the support for reactive programming is maybe the most promoted feature. In this presentation Josh Long and Mark Heckler presented functional reactive endpoints which come with Spring 5. They also did a live coding demo, for both server and client side, to show how to integrate reactive endpoints with existing Spring-stack technologies. I would recommend this presentation to those who want to be familiar with Spring 5 reactive support.
Kotlin for Java Programmers
by Venkat Subramaniam
Since Devoxx is not just Java conference, you can find talks about other JVM languages, too. Kotlin is one of the most popular JVM languages and it has gained good reputation for various good features like type inference, null safety and extension functions. A programming language with those features was just enough for a presentation to gain some interest from Devoxx attendants, but the fact that the presentation was given by Venkat multiplied the participation. I found this talk a very good introduction to Kotlin spiced up with Venkat.
Container Orchestration Considerations
by Patrick van der Beek
We are constantly hearing the term ‘Containers’ recently and developers are increasingly deploying their applications by using containers. But do we really know how to manage our containers in production successfully? Moreover, do we realize what is the real benefit of a good container orchestration tool? Patrick van der Beek was trying to answer these questions in his presentation by comparing the main orchestration tool options available: Kubernetes, DC/OS, Rancher, Docker EE. Since he is working as a Solutions Engineer at Docker, I found his statements very useful for any developer who is familiar with containers.
This was my list of most informative presentations on recent developments in Java world. Feel free to comment about your own favourite presentations from Devoxx (you can find all of them on the official YouTube account).
