Con-FESS 2012, Day 1

Although the Con-FESS conference attendance doesn't seem to be very high, around 200 people, it still was a good idea to come here. Look at this:

Nice view, eh? :)

First, I've attended to keynote talk by Jürgen Höller, Enterprise Java in 2012 and Beyond - From Java EE 6 to Cloud Computing. The talk was about the current trends towards cloud platforms. Cloud is a hot topic for Java EE 7 these days. The term "cloud" spawns across quite different technologies, not just Java. For instance, alternative datastores are quite popular among quite providers as these allow for better scalability. As the implementations are so different it is quite hard to imagine any reasonable standardization in this area. And even for Java, the vendors agree just on some bits of the standard, like Servlets, for instance. To my mind, the diversity will only grow in the cloud era.

Also, it will be interesting to see how to tooling will evolve in some time. I'm quite sure that JBoss Tools and STS, as well as Google Eclipse plugin are aiming for this use case. With JRebel, it is now also possible to update application code in the cloud. I'm quite sure, in near future we will see some new tooling specially designed for the cloud apps but as the diversity is quite high, these tools will most likely be PaaS-specific.

Next, I've attended the talk about Groovy ecosystem by Andres Almiray. It was an overview of the frameworks and libraries build with Groovy and for Groovy: Grails, Griffon, Gaelyk, Caelyf, Gradle, Gant, Codenark, GMetrics, Easyb. Not that much into the details, but a good overview.

I learned a lot from Mark Struberg's talk about CDI and it really terrifies me how complex it might get with all the annotation-based programming model that CDI offers. Especially with the CDI extensions. Especially if people will start use this extensively. It is fine if people could stick with the libraries like CODI, Seam3, or Apache DeltaSpike, but the perspective that the annotations are scattered across the source code and the developer can't see the full view at once really frightens me.

Mark covered the standardization pitfalls as well as the gotchas when writing a CDI-based apps - very informative! He warned us from using @ApplicationScope for the beans as it isn't quite clear how this should work and the application containers can interpret this a bit differently, either for a whole EAR deployment or just for WAR deployment boundaries. It seems he had a lot more information to tell and he didn't fit everything in this talk, but we also had an interesting discussion afterwards. Here's a rage comic I came up with afterwards :)

Last, I attended the talk about systems integration of could-based services by Kai Wähner. The presentation covered the introduction to Apache Camel and how it was used to integrate with Amazon Web Services and Google App Engine.

The conference is hosted in Leogang, a small village not far from Salzburg, in Hotel Krallerhof. Surrounded with mountains, this place is amazing!