The Conference Season Rolls On

Yesterday I gave the opening keynote at the JAX conference in Wiesbaden, Germany. JAX is one of Europe’s largest Java conferences, with over 2,000 attendees. The topic was The Future of Enterprise Java, and I expanded on the themes of my recent blog of predictions, going into more detail about the implications of Java EE 6 and the future of the application server.
I’ve uploaded the slides, which include 8 predictions for an interesting period in the evolution of enterprise Java. This is the first time I've referred to Joseph Stalin, Monica Lewinsky and Monty Python in the same presentation.
JAX was an enjoyable experience overall, with excellent speakers from both Europe and North America and great questions from attendees. The SpringSource booth looked great as always, and it was good to see so many attendees. And, of course, German beer tastes as good as ever!
This seems to be the most active time of year for conferences. In the last few weeks I’ve spoken at QCon in London and the ServerSide in Vegas, and I have several more conferences coming up:
- JavaOne. I’ll be speaking on Spring 2.5 (I’m giving the session twice, as there is so much interest), Ben Alex will take about Spring Security and Dave Syer about Spring Batch. SpringSource will have its biggest ever presence at JavaOne. Come to our booth to meet the ultimate Spring experts, and see demos of SpringSource Tool Suite, SpringSource Application Management Suite and other SpringSource Enterprise technologies.
- JAOO Sydney (June 2-3): I’ve spoken several times at the Sydney JUG (the first time, nearly 10 years ago, about JSP 0.92 IIRC) and the Sydney Spring Users Group, but this is the first time I’ll have spoken at a conference in Sydney. It’s exciting to see a major conference coming to Sydney.
- SpringOne in Antwerp, Belgium (June 11-12). With all the recent releases in the Spring Portfolio, this should be a great show.
- Jazoon, in Zurich (June 23-26). I’m giving a keynote, again on the big picture for the industry.
I hope to see you at at least one of these events!
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Markus Jais says:
Added on April 24th, 2008 at 9:35 amInteresting presentation.
Ron, what do you think of Grails? It uses Spring and other cool stuff and gives you the power of a scripting language and the productivity of Rails.
It would be very interesting to know your opinion of Grails.
I want to add to your predictions that I think that dynamic languages will become more important on the JVM and in enterprise Java, especially Groovy, but probably also Ruby and Python.
Rod Johnson (blog author) says:
Added on April 24th, 2008 at 5:03 pmMarkus
I do think Grails is interesting. I probably should have mentioned it on slide 12.
I don't believe that the productivity of RoR is entirely attributable to the Ruby language, and I believe there is plenty more than can be done to boost productivity in Java-based frameworks and platforms, regardless of whether or not people write their application classes in Java.
I agree that we'll probably see increasing use of dynamic languages on the JVM, which is a platform not merely a runtime for a single language.
Rgds
Rod
Markus Jais says:
Added on April 25th, 2008 at 1:44 amRon
thanks for your answer.
I agree with you that the productivity of Rails is not only because of Ruby (although Ruby definitely made some cool Rails stuff possible that couldn't be done with other languages). Some of the reasons why Rails is so productive for certain types of applications are:
- DRY
- Convention over configuation
- intelligent defaults
- not XML hell
It's great to see that Spring has also reduced the XML stuff to a minimum with version 2.5.
Markus