DevNexus 2017 was held in historic Atlanta on February 22-24. For those of you not familiar with it, DevNexus is the most significant Java centric conference in the South Eastern US and now perhaps even at a national level. It was started by JBoss Java Champion Burr Sutter and organized by the Atlanta JUG (currently lead by Vincent Mayers, Gunnar Hillert, Pratik Patel, et al). I guess at this point I am somewhat of a DevNexus veteran myself. As usual DevNexus attracted a bevy of world class speakers including Ed Burns, David Blevins, Ivar Grimstad, Simon Ritter, Heather VanCura, Stephen Chin, Simon Maple, Geertjan Wielenga, Victor Orozco, Edson Yanaga and Enrique Zamudio. This was another solid year for DevNexus. Java EE had a strong showing at the conference as usual, including my own sessions.
I started the conference late afternoon on the first day with my talk titled “Java EE 8 and Java EE 9 – What You Need to Know!”. I discuss continued Java EE adoption, the importance of Java EE to the ecosystem, the contents of the upcoming Java EE 8 release as well as the tentative Java EE 9 plans that Oracle shared at JavaOne 2016. I also talk about the key MicroProfile initiative that aims to bring a collaborative, fast-paced, vendor-neutral approach to microservices in the Java EE ecosystem. The heart of the talk covers the key features of Java EE 8 such as HTTP/2, a complete security API overhaul, even stronger JSON support, support for HTML 5 Server-Sent Events (SSE), CDI 2, Bean Validation 2 and Java SE 8 alignment. The current slides for the talk are here (click here if you can’t see the embedded slide deck):
Later in the afternoon my former colleague Ed Burns did a deeper dive on three specific Java EE 8 APIs – Servlet 4, JAX-RS 2.1 and JSF 2.3. For those unaware, Ed is the specification lead for both Servlet 4 and JSF 2.3.
Early in the evening I delivered my talk on Cargo Tracker/Java EE + DDD titled “Applied Domain-Driven Design Blue Prints for Java EE”. This talk overviews DDD and describes how DDD maps elegantly to Java EE using code examples/demos from the Cargo Tracker Java EE Blue Prints project. Below is the slide deck for the talk (click here if you can’t see the embedded slides):
A screencast of my talk can be found here. Concurrent to my talk, my friend Kito Mann delivered his very cool talk on JSF and HTML 5 Web Components.
The second day of the conference in the late afternoon Ivar delivered a deep dive into the MicroProfile initiative. Concurrent to his talk Heather delivered a talk on JCP and Adopt-a-JSR. Later in the afternoon Ivar delivered a talk on the upcoming MVC specification. For those unaware, MVC was originally slated for Java EE 8 and is now a separate, community led JSR.
Overall this was another great year at DevNexus and I hope to be part of the conference next year.