JavaZone 2009

Photo by André Eide

Last week I attended JavaZone 2009, one of the biggest developer conference in Scandinavia. I had a great time, both learning-wise and on the social level. Nothing beats Club Zone Wednesday night

The agenda was filled with good talks this year as well, and it’s always a big puzzle to make it all fit and attend as many interesting talks as possible. I spent a couple of hours at the javaBin stand this year as well, as I am the leader of the Southern Norwegian branch of the user group. It’s a good way to meet the rest of the javaBin crew, as well as other people stopping by either for information, a cup of coffee, a discussion, or ice cream – yeah we had an ice cream bar this year. Guess who dove into that one on Thursday morning, with a sliiiiiiiiiight hang over…

BeerDuke - Providing the javaBin Heroes with free beer (An RFID modified soda vending machine)

Among the most interesting talks I attended this year was Arjen Poutsma’s talk on Spring 3.0,  Jevgeni Kabanov’s talk on class loaders as well as his Lightning Talk on JavaRebel, Erik Hatcher’s Solr talk and Jason Van Zyl’s talk on Maven 3.0, Nexus and m2eclipse. There were several more excellent talks, and I would probably cite most of the agenda listing them all, but these were the ones that resulted in something concrete that I will sit down and get my hands dirty with.

The first thing I have started looking at is JavaRebel. I got it up and running today, and it’s clear it’s going to make a lot of our development much more stream lined. I am giving a demo of it to the rest of our team on Friday, and hopefully they will find it just as useful Then it will only be a matter of convincing the boss to purchase the licenses!

We also joined a Solr and Lucene meetup at Oslo Plaza on Wednesday evening, and had three hours of very interesting talks and discussions with other’s in the search business. Hopefully we’ll manage to have a couple of more meetups over the next year

Anyways, it was a great week and it’s fun to be back at work having loads of stuff to start studying and working on