I’ve just finished my Spring 2015 European conferences tour. I’ve talked about Integration Testing, Mutation Testing and Spring Boot for Devops at Spring IO (Spain), GeeCon, DevIT and JEEConf.
This is a resume of the sessions I attended and liked. Sessions I was not part of, I lost time in are or I slept in are not mentioned.
Spring I/O Barcelona (Spain)
- Boot your Search with Spring
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This is a nice introductory talk on the search feature brought by the Spring Data abstraction, over the SolR, Elasticsearch and MongoDB NoSQL stores.
- Is Groovy better for testing than Java?
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The title sums it all: checking whether Spock can/should be used for testing. I was pleasantly surprised to see the talk was well balanced and not an advertisement for Spock. I had already seen a talk on Spock and discarded it as inconclusive. Now, I should probably give it a try.
- Master Spring Boot auto-configuration
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Probably the best talk of the conference, it explains in a very comprehensive way how you can create your own Spring Boot module with auto-configuration capability.
- Testing with Spring 4.x
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Testing with Spring is not only very interesting to, it will be with the subject of my talk at Spring One with Sam Brannen. Good thing since the speaker was Sam himself. This was a good occasion to experience first hand the way he speaks at conferences.
- Document like the Spring team using Asciidoctor
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Though not related to Spring, this talk was an enlightenment! I’ve recently finished writing my latest book with simple Markdown and Asciidoctor would have just made the writing process so much easier! Now, I want to write another book just for the chance to use it.
GeeCon - Krakow (Poland)
- A Survival Guide to Resilient Reactive Application
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Scopes what is monitoring and defines related terms - the reactive part is not the most important.
- G1 Garbage Collector: details and tuning
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I’m not a system engineer but now and then, I try to attend related talks about it to have the feeling on what is going around. Most of the time, I end up disappointed - because the talk targets experts, this time I was not. The talk was clear and the speaker was entertaining.
- HTTP/2 & Java Current Status
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Same speaker, different subject. Good introduction to HTTP/2.
- Analysing GitHub commits with R and Azure
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I came to this talk by chance, because none during this timeframe really attracted me. Nice Data Mining example using Github as a use-case.
At this time, I had to take my plane to go to…
DevIT - Thessaloniki (Greece)
- The future of responsive web design
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web component queries:: Very interesting introduction to some important features of HTML5: shadow DOM, templates, web components, etc. This talk really made me want to try myself!
- Your Service is not Rest
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This talk defined what is REST and what is not and proved given the definition that most APIs provided are simple HTTP, not REST. Due to lack of time, the speaker couldn’t answer my question: how does HATEOAS details about which HTTP methods are available for which resources. Guess I’ll have to return next year.
Due to a lack of sleep due to my late flight from Krakow, I’m afraid my attention has been less than optimal during the rest of the talks.
JEEConf - Kyiv (Ukrain)
- Pragmatic Functional Refactoring with Java 8
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Some of Java 8’s features, including functions, currying, immutability and
Optional. - Painfree Object-Document Mapping for MongoDB
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Description of the Xenia library, a Java ODM for MongoDB. I put this into my list of available tools in case I’ll have such a problem.
- Making This Rhinoceros Thunder
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This talk I went to because no other talk was in english, and I was pleasantly surprised. The speaker works on the Nashorn engine and told not only how to make the compilation of JavaScript faster on the JVM but also what challenges the team faced in the implementation, and how they solved it.
Initially, I had 2 talks at JEEConf. Because a speaker had medical issues, he couldn’t make it and so I had the privilege of being invited by Josh Long to host a last minute talk with him on Spring Boot and Vaadin. Then, he also proposed me to be a speaker on the Spring panel. All in all, between the preparation of my talks and the talks proper, I couldn’t manage to attend any other talks.
This was a great experience again, with many occasions to meet new people and see again conference buddies. Many thanks to the teams of those conferences for their organization and their time! See you soon again.