JDK IO Trip Report

I am back from presenting at JDK IO! JDK IO was held in Copenhagen January 19-20^th. The conference was held at the IT University of Copenhagen. All of the sessions were given in English. The conference sessions covered a variety of Java topics ranging from core Java, Java EE, and JavaFX. I gave presentations on EJB 3.2 Best Practices and Apache Cordova + Java EE 7. Simon Ritter and David Delabasse from Oracle keynoted the conference with updates on Java 9 and Java EE 8.

I attended the following sessions:

• Architecting Large Enterprise Java Projects
• Java on iOS? Yes you can!
• Building Modular Java Applications in the Cloud Age
• The Live Reflection Madness
• Java EE8, a snapshot view
• Wild Flies and a Camel Java EE Integration Stories

During the session on Java and iOS I managed to get RoboVM up and running! When developing for iOS you can either use JavaFX or the Java wrappers around the Apple UI APIs. The session on reflection was interesting – I liked the example with messing with the internals of the Integer class (oh the chaos I can cause!). The modular cloud presentation was interesting with its coverage of micro-services and the use of Apache ACE and OSGI. I have to checkout the presenter’s book. I wasn’t familiar with Apache Camel – it has come up several times but I haven’t really dug into it yet. I’ll definitely have to investigate it more.

If time had allowed I would have attended all of the sessions – hoping the slides are posted soon. It was nice to see the coverage of JavaFX. We still need Java on the desktop and Swing is showing its age. JavaFX is a big leap forward.

The session by David Delabassee provided an excellent update on Java EE 8. Although it seems like Java EE 7 just came out the other day – development of Java EE 8 is progressing and should be released in 2016.

Summarizing the focus of Java EE 8:

• HTML5 / Web Tier Enhancements
• Ease of development / CDI alignment
• Infrastructure for running in the cloud
• Java SE 8alignment

Some of the more noteworthy Java EE 8 changes:

• JSON API will be extended to support marshaling and unmarshalling JSON to objects. Annotations will allow for customization like in JAX-B.
• Support for HTML5 Server-sent Events
• Support for HTTP/2 (reduces latency/address HOL blocking)
• JSF 2.3 to CDI alignment (also multi-field validation)
• Authorization via CDI interceptors
• CDI – asynchronous events, event ordering, event ranging
• Java EE Management 2.0 (JSR-77)
• Password aliasing (to avoid passwords in clear-text in deployment files)

The conference was excellent – all good speakers on a variety of topics. The sessions were 90 minutes so the speakers had enough time to dig into the topics but not too long. The bookstore at the conference also had a good selection of books (I am sure the baggage handlers appreciated it!).