The App Dev Trends conference was held December 4-9 in Orlando, Florida. Focused on practical enterprise development, it is a brand new part of the popular Live! 360 events. It is chaired by the well-respected veteran technical journalist John K. Waters, editor-in-chief of the Application Development Trends magazine. App Dev Trends helped bring a Java footprint to the otherwise Microsoft technology heavy Live! 360 events, so it was very important for me to help support it.
I was very honored to deliver the opening keynote for the conference. I talked about the critical importance of Java EE to the community, industry and global IT. I discussed the current state of Java EE 8 and Java EE 9, including the Java EE Guardians, the MicroProfile initiative as well as Oracle’s promising announcements at JavaOne 2016. Most importantly I covered what developers can do to help Java and Java EE forward. The heart of the keynote covered the key features Java EE 8 will bring in 2017 such as HTTP/2, a complete security API overhaul, even stronger JSON support, support for HTML 5 Server-Sent Events (SSE), CDI 2, more reactive programming support, more pruning and Java SE 8 alignment. The current slides I used for the talk are here (click here if you can’t see the embedded slide deck):
Later the same morning Kito Mann gave his extremely popular talk on PrimeFaces 6.
After lunch I delivered my talk titled “JCP, Adopt-a-JSR and You”. The talk covers the basics of what the JCP is, how it works and how ordinary developers can participate especially in Java EE 8 JSRs. The talk also covers possible areas of important reform for the JCP. The slide deck for the talk is below (please click here if you can’t see the embedded slide deck).
Concurrent to my talk, Kito delivered a talk on using JAX-RS with AngularJS 2.
The third day of the conference in the morning I delivered my talk titled “Down-to-Earth Microservices with Java EE”. The talk has two aims. The first is to try to do the right thing in explaining what microservices really are, what practical value they offer for most of us and when you should consider them (or not). The second aim is to demonstrate why Java EE makes perfect natural sense for developing sensible real world microservices, so called “monoliths” and everything in between. I also briefly cover WildFly Swarm as well as the MicroProfile initiative. The slide deck for this talk is below (click here if you can’t see the embedded slide deck):
The demo code for the talk is available here. The instructions for the demo are designed to help you set up the demo on your own. I presented this same talk along with Steve Millidge (C2B2, Payara co-founder) at JavaOne. You can view the JavaOne recording of the talk here.
Later in the morning I delivered my brand new talk titled “Java SE 8 for Java EE 7 Developers”. In the talk I cover some of the key features introduced in Java SE 8 including Lamdas, streams, the new Date/Time API as well as Completable Futures and discuss how they can be used effectively with Java EE 7 APIs like Servlets, Java EE Concurrency Utilities, WebSockets, JPA, JSF and JSON-P. I also cover what should be done in Java EE 8 to further improve Java SE 8 support. The slides for the talk are posted on SlideShare (click here if you can’t see the embedded slide deck).
I finished the conference by delivering my talk on HTTP/2 and Servlet 4 titled “HTTP/2 and What it Means for the Java EE Ecosystem”. The talk examines the very important changes in HTTP/2 and how these changes need to be adopted by various Java EE 8 APIs like Servlet 4 and JSF 2.3. The slide deck for the talk is posted on SlideShare (click here if you can’t see the embedded resource).
A screencast of the talk is available here.
All is all, App Dev Trends was worthwhile and I wish the event the best going forward.