Highlights From Java One: Day 1

Java One - San Francisco

Today was my first day at Java One, and my first international conference. It has been an immensely fun day with loads going on.

8.15 AM - First talk of the conference - ours!

The first session we attended was our talk titled "The bluffers guide to terminology". The talk walked through terminology that complicates our industry, and made observations on how business, technical and academic domains are complicated enough without additional terminology. We walked through the different sections explaining terms and simplifying them so everyone could understand. For 8.15am the audience were very engaged, and it was clear that this was something everyone could relate to. We concluded that you have to be very careful when picking terms to represent your domain model objects in software development. You need to think about having a suitable abstraction that is clear as to what it represents in the domain, but doesn't complicate the domain further.

Winning an award

For the last 18 months, myself and colleagues from the London Java Community have been working on two key initiatives - Adopt a JSR and Adopt Open JDK. Today we were awarded with a Duke's Choice Award for the hard work we have put in inspire the community to be more involved in contributing to the future of Java. It was very exciting to see the LJC's name on the big screens at the Java One keynotes. Although winning an award was not something we set out to achieve, it is an honor. It has inspired me to carry on pushing on the initiatives we started and to use Java One as an opportunity to encourage global participation. It's also got me thinking about a future initiative, but for now that will remain top secret.

Technical Keynote

I'm still processing some of what was in the keynote, but my initial reaction is how excited I am about Java on the desktop. Having experienced the pain of Swing and context switching between .Net and Flex as alternatives, I can really see a future for Java on the desktop. That wasn't all however, we actually got to see Java FX running on a Raspberry Pi and other embedded devices. There's actually an embedded version of the Java One conference scheduler deployed around the hotels! This has really steered my interest for the conference as I'll be looking to attend a large number of Java FX talks this week at Java One. We also have our talk on visualising the Java GC model on Tuesday, which will go into building an application from the beginning in Java FX what we have learnt about the technology and how to use Java FX as a teaching and visualising technology from a slightly different perpective to grids and graphs.

Party

The day ended with collecting the Duke's Choice Award and a party in the street next to the hotel. Most of us have now returned to try and shake the jet lag before a packed day tomorrow.