Conference Report: JUG Saxony Day 2014

Last friday (2014-04-04) I visited the JUG Saxony Day 2014 in Dresden, Germany. It was the first event organized by the JUG Saxony and to make it short, it was great! The event was well organized and had lots of interesting talks.
But let's get into more details ...

The conference offered 4 tracks with 5 sessions each:

1. Software development process
2. Java technology
3. Research
4. Java mobile and enterprise applications with Java

So I had to make a hard decision to select 5 tracks for the day...


The keynote was presented by Wolfgang Weigend (Oracle) who gave an interesting overview of the new features of Java 8 and the internal process of getting there.

After that I joined the very entertaining and informative talk by Sven Oppermann about Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery with Jenkins, Git, Gerrit and Ansible. For me, this was the best session of the day. He talked about his 5 phases of a Continuous Delivery process and how they can be automated with the right tools. The usage of Jenkins, Git and Gerrit is quite common nowadays, but I did not know Ansible so far. It looks interesting. I think I will have a more detailed look at it in the future.

The next session was about the ideal database and how it might look like by Kai Spichale. He talked about the different kinds of databases that currently exist (RDBMS, graph databases, document based databases, ...) and their strength and weaknesses. The bottom line of his talk was: Design follows function. Or at greater length, look at your requirements and compare them with the features and tradeoffs the different kind of databases can offer.

Then it was time for lunch and nice talks with other attendees.

The afternoon started with a session about Angular.js and CouchDB by Dr. Frank Dressel. He showed how to use Angular.js and CouchDB to create dynamic web applications.

My second session on the afternoon was about RESTful services with DropWizard by Uwe Petschke. This was an interesting presentation on how to use the DropWizard framework to create small and reusable RESTful services. DropWizard is an annotation based framework on top of several well established libraries like Jetty, Jersey, Jackson, etc.. The implementation of a service looked easy and straight forward. It seams like DropWizard takes care of most of the overhead and glue code that is required when creating a web service. And it offers several management and administration services on top of it. I will definitely try it out and maybe this will be the framework for one of the next enterprise projects. It looked really promising!

The last talk of the day was by Lukas Eder about the jOOQ framework. The main idea of the framework is to get rid of additional abstraction layers on top of SQL (like JPA e.g.). In general, SQL is more powerful than these frameworks and can be used to create more elegant and faster solutions. Well, most of us know this already but prefer the additional abstraction to handle the complexity of JDBC. jOOQ is a library that hides the complexity and pitfalls of JDBC and enables the developer to use the features of SQL in a type safe way. I like JPA (as you might have noticed) but jOOQ looks interesting. Maybe I will give it a try in the future.

The (official) day ended with the closing event where I won a paperback edition of The Geek Atlas. Thanks guys! :)
But the day was not over yet. There was a barbeque where all attendees could enjoy the evening sun and end the day with some nice steaks, beer and (hopefully) interesting discussions.

This was my day at the JUG Saxony Day 2014. I really enjoyed it and I hope can come back next year. Big thanks to the team and all speakers!