Devoxx 2011

Once again, more than 3200 passionate developers gathered for one week in Metropolis, Antwerp. The Devoxx event is split in two parts: the “University Days” on Monday and Tuesday (long conferences, tools, trainings and hands-on labs), and the “Conference Days” from Wednesday till Friday noon (keynotes, conferences, quickies and “BOFs” (round tables)).

Devoxx rocks!

What is unique in Devoxx, is that it is made by and for the developers (the real ones: those that are actually writing code!). You will see almost no commercial presentation there. On the contrary, speakers don't hesitate to display code, or even to write it live! You come back from Devoxx with tons of practical information and lots "things to try at home by myself".

It's also giant live Twitter walls all over the venue; 29 companies presenting their products and distributing their goodies at heir booth; 59 JUGs (Java User Groups), many whiteboards, and hundred of places to sit and start coding.

There is of course free WiFi, with this year a 1Gb/s internet pipe! Enough to give easy access to any participants (easy, except maybe for the few unlucky ones that are still using Windows instead of OSX ;-)).

Wednesday was the day of free French fries, Thursday of free movie ("Tintin" this year). There was also free beer and after parties every night... and countless occasions to meet members of the Java community, from all over the world. Devoxx is the place where any lambda developer can talk with the Chief Architect for Java at Oracle, for example.

To celebrate the 10th anniversary of Devoxx, each participant received a nice free mug (I chosen the HTML5 collector!), and was invited to a memorable free clubbing party at the Noxx.

Content, content, content

This year, Devoxx was 167 speakers giving about 174 sessions happening in 7 theatre rooms in parallel: 3 Keynotes, 1 discussion panel, 86 Conferences, 16 University, 10 Labs, 19 “Tools in Action”, 14 Quickies, and 25 “BOFs” (informal discussions)! These sessions cover 9 tracks: Java SE, Java EE, Web, Mobile, New Languages on the JVM, Methodology, Architecture, Security, and "Partner slots". There were up to 8 talks running in parallel.

Devoxx is initially focused on the Java ecosystem, i.e. not only the Java language, but also other languages based on the Java Virtual Machine, and all Java related frameworks in general. Also, more and more pure Web and mobile technologies are gaining importance in this conference. This year, HTML5 and Android talks were amongst the more attended ones (btw, let's highlight here the big presence of Google at this conference, and the quality of speakers they sent). Beside these, there are also a number of talks about the job of developer (or, should we say about the software craftsmanship).

Highlights

As usual, one of the big theme was the evolution of the Java language, especially with the long awaited release of Java 7, but also Java 8 profiling in the near future, and Java 9 added to the roadmap.

Probably the second most popular track was HTML5. The Web platform has evolved very rapidly since two years and it provides now a complete stack for developing client side rich application. Bye bye Flash...

Mobile platforms were also very present, especially the Android platform (whose programming language is Java) and mobile web technologies.

Several new JVM languages (non-Java languages running on the JVM) were present in the talk: Scala (lots of hype), Groovy, JRuby, Fantom, Ceylon. Some of these languages have now went past the experimental status and are used in critical enterprise context. "Web languages" were also present: JavaScript (and jQuery), Dart.

Let's also mention the iconoclastic talk from Martijn Verburg, the "Diabolical Developer", full of refreshing behavioral (anti-)patterns for the developer.

Sogeti

This year was also marked by the return of the presence of Sogeti. More than 10 consultants attended the conference, but also Sogeti was a Medium partner of the event and had a nice stand in front of the Google one. This was made possible thanks to a collaboration between Sogeti France, Netherlands, and Belux. Kudos for all the people who spent their time answering questions at the stand! And, last but not least, Laurent Guerin from Sogeti France made a well attended presentation about the Telosys web framework.