JCON 2021 Conference Report

JCON 2021 took place October 5-8. This is a world-class conference run by the German JAVAPRO magazine. Due to the pandemic, the 2021 event was virtual. Jakarta EE had a strong presence at the conference with talks on the Jakarta EE Core Profile, Jakarta EE Security, Jakarta NoSQL, MicroProfile 4, Quarkus, Helidon and Open Liberty from speakers such as Ivar Grimstad, Adam Bien, Otavio Santana, Emily Jiang, Werner Keil, Ed Burns, Grace Jansen, Rudy De Busscher and Graham Charters. I delivered three talks and a workshop at the conference focused on Java, Jakarta EE and Azure.

A Freakonomic Take on Open Standards and Jakarta EE

On the first day of the conference I delivered one of my most favorite talks – “A Freakonomic Take on Open Standards and Jakarta EE”. I am very grateful JCON decided to accept this talk. This isn’t a talk about APIs or features but rather some of the much more foundational reasons I have chosen to contribute to the Jakarta EE technology set for such a long time. It speaks to the importance of open standards like Jakarta EE in maintaining the long-term competitive health of an ecosystem. The talk looks at this topic through the lens of well-established economic theories on competition, monopoly power, the network effect, innovation, open source and open standards.

The slides for the talk are available on Speaker Deck. The video for the talk is now posted on YouTube.

How Microsoft Learned to Love Java

On the second day of the conference I delivered my Java on Azure focused talk “How Microsoft Learned to Love Java”. The talk is essentially a tour of the broad range of services, tools and APIs Microsoft provides around Azure to better serve Java developers. I also briefly discuss the Java on Azure roadmap at a high level. The slides for the talk are available on Speaker Deck. There is a brief end-to-end demo that is part of the talk. You can run the demo yourself using step-by-step instructions available on GitHub to get a feel for how the Java on Azure experience looks like (please reach out if you need help). The video for the talk is now posted on YouTube.

Effective Kubernetes for Jakarta EE and MicroProfile Developers

I finished the conference by delivering my entirely slide-free workshop – “Effective Kubernetes for Jakarta EE and MicroProfile Developers”. The workshop covers some of the key things Jakarta EE and MicroProfile developers need to know while using Kubernetes. This includes:

• How Kubernetes primitives (such as deployments, services and ingress controllers) align with application server administration, clustering, auto-scaling, auto-discovery, and load-balancing.
• How to add self-healing capabilities using Kubernetes probes and monitoring with open source tools like Prometheus/Grafana.
• How Kubernetes can be extended using Operators to effectively manage application server clusters.
• How the CI/CD pipeline of your application can be adapted to Kubernetes.

All the material for the talk is available in self-paced workshop format on GitHub. The workshop will take you about a day to complete end-to-end (please reach out if you need any help).

On the same day, my Microsoft colleague Ed Burns and Graham Charters of IBM delivered the workshop titled “Running Your Enterprise Java with Open Liberty on Azure Red Hat OpenShift”. The material covers the key work Microsoft and IBM is doing to enable Jakarta EE, MicroProfile, Open Liberty and OpenShift on Azure. The essential material for the workshop is available on the Microsoft documentation site as a how-to guide.

It is worth reminding that myself, Ed Burns and our team are always ready to work closely with Java/Jakarta EE developers on Azure migrations – completely for free. To take advantage of this, you simply need to fill this survey out or reach out to me directly.

All in all, I am happy to have had the opportunity to speak at JCON. I hope to speak there again in the future.