My Trip to JavaLand 2015

Last week, I attended the JavaLand 2015 conference in Brühl, Germany. If you follow me on twitter, you have probably seen me tweeting about it. And what shall I say, it was a great conference! Well organized, lots of interesting sessions, great discussions and everything happening in a theme park. Yes, that's right: it took place in the Phantasialand theme park!

And did I already mention that I hosted a Java quiz as one of the community activities? :-D

OK, lets start at the beginning. The JavaLand 2015 conference took place at the 24th and 25th of March in Phantasialand in Brühl and was organized by DOAG and the heise publishing house. The iJUG, the umbrella organization of the german JUGs, acted as a community partner and hosted several community activities. My Java quiz was one of these activities. But more about that later...

Organization

Both conference days were jam-packed with a total of 105 sessions and 2 keynotes. These were organized in 7 parallel tracks with 8 sessions on the first and 7 sessions on the second day. There was so much going on in parallel that it was often hard to decide for one session.
The only downside was the missing lunch break on both days. Don't get me wrong, the restaurant was open and offered a tasty buffet for more than two hours. But you had to decide which of the two talks, that took place during that time, you want to skip. The advantage on the other hand was that not everyone rushed to the lunch break at the same time and that everyone could at least decide which sessions he/she wants to miss. I am still not sure, if I see this schedule as an up- or downside but I really wanted to attend both talks on the first day.

Sessions

I attended lots of great sessions during these two days but I can't describe everything here. So I will try to keep it short and name only a few highlights:

• Mark Struberg gave an interesting talk about JBatch and Apache BatchEE. He started with an introduction to JBatch, gave some tips based on experience from real projects and ended the session with some special features provided by BatchEE. Especially the strongly typed API and the command line capabilities look great. You can expect to read more about it on this blog in the future.
• Lukas Eder gave a great talk about SQL and showcased some advanced language features to answer complex questions within the database instead of the Java code. JPA is an easy and efficient way to implement CRUD use cases but if it gets really complex, SQL is often the better choice.
• Jason Porter started the second day with a session about CDI Extensions. This is a topic I want to write about since I joined the CDI 2.0 expert group and even before that. By writing an extension, you can extend the container with your own custom logic and implement your own framework. I will provide more details on this in the near future.
• As you might have read during the last weeks, Java EE 8 contains a new Java EE Security JSR. David Blevins and some of his expert group colleagues used the session at the JavaLand to talk about existing ideas and to ask for additional changes that are required by the community. The open way of communication created a very special atmosphere and was the beginning of some interesting discussions after the end of the session.

Community Activities

As I already wrote, the iJUG organized several community activities, like a coding dojo, a hackergarten, workshops, an early adopters area, NightHacking interviews and much more. I had the honor to be part of it and to host a Java quiz, called J-Pardy, at the first evening. It was really fun (at least after I knew that my setup worked and I started to calm down ;-) ).

A similar quiz was hosted last year and I could reuse the hard- and software. A special thanks to Tobias Frech! That made it a lot easier for me. I just implemented some minor enhancements to the soft- and hardware and prepared the questions for several games.

There was a professional photographer who took pictures of the initial setup and the games. I hope I can get some of the photos and show them later. The picture above shows the stage at the Wintergarten before we added a few tables for the players.

Discussions

Several interesting discussions about existing and upcoming Java EE specifications took place between the sessions and community activities. As a result of it, Mark Struberg, Jason Porter and I pushed a proposal to the Java EE Security JSR github repository. We will see, what the expert group will make of it.

And we had a discussion about class loader isolation in EAR files and the effect on CDI extensions with all the people in the following tweet (I am the partly hidden guy at the bottom left). This input will hopefully be used in the Java EE 8 specification process.

CDI lovefest with @lightguardjp @holly_cummins @thjanssen123 @chkal @dblevins @brunoborges @struberg #JavaEE pic.twitter.com/vkDWFmvkKO
— Arun Gupta (@arungupta) 25. März 2015

OK, that's enough for this post. To sum it up: JavaLand 2015 was great and I am already looking forward to the next.