JAX 2012 San Francisco

Throughout my career as a programmer I have been to a wide variety of developer conferences but today concludes four days of one I have never previously attended.  JAX, which originated in Europe and has been around since 2001 is focused on Java, other JVM languages, and anything that touches Java technologies.  The JAX conference is small when compared to JavaOne and others but the number of attendees is not a reflection of the quality of the conference.

If you have been around the Java community for any length of time you would recognize a significant number of the speakers.  We were fortunate enough to attend sessions lead by Stephen Chin, Neal Ford, Ted Neward, Kohsuke Kawaguchi, Arun Gupta, Rich Hickey, and Charles Nutter.  In my opinion, one or two of these guys makes it worth the price of admission but that's not even a complete list.  The material presented at JAX is both practical stuff you can take home and begin using in your development along with theoretical edge technologies which most of won't use today or tomorrow but probably will someday soon.  The stuff that's coming soon keeps what we do interesting, challenging, and fun. 


The conference was held at the Mission Bay Conference Center which is on the campus of The University of California at San Francisco.  This is a very nice setting albeit a bit off the beaten path if one is used to the Moscone Center or the nearby hotels and restaurants.  I don't know what cost if any it might add to the conference but it would be nice to have JAX held in a hotel saving us the cost and time of a cab or bus ride.


My conference evaluation form includes some very high marks and all sessions I attended with one exception was worth my time.  After tomorrow's final day, the one remaining issue I will use to judge JAX 2012 San Francisco is how quickly the slides and videos are made available to the attendees and others.


Thank you JAX organizers and speakers for time well spent learning in San Francisco.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

ClassCastException: JAXB

Image
A particular Java application I co-developed leverages both SOAP/WSDL and REST web services.  We use maven to manage the build process of this application which has been in production for a few years now.  It's been around long enough to have moved from Java 5 to Java 6 and now Java 7 (with limited testing using Java 8).  We have also had the experience of initially including JAXB jar files with our application and dealing with the "endorsed" directory because JAXB versions were a bit of a moving target for a while. Now that JAXB is neatly included with Java as it should be so we no longer include it.  I thought all of this was behind us (and unfortunately somewhat forgotten) until recently when we added Jersey 1.17 to the application to call some newer REST services. When trying to connect to the server, my stack trace included this: Caused by: java.lang.ClassCastException: com.sun.xml.bind.v2.runtime.JAXBContextImpl cannot be cast to com.sun.xml.internal.bind.api
Read more

Minishift on HyperV

Image
Although I would not consider myself as a heavy user of Windows, I believe I need to try to meet the challenge of supporting those running Linux, MacOS, and Windows. I recently ran into an issue running Minishift on Windows 10 and Hyper-V.  I suspect regular users of both of these technologies might already be aware of what tripped me up but I thought I would document it here just in case someone needs it.  In case you're not aware of it, Minishift is a very nice project that allows a developer to easily run OpenShift , also known as OCP or OpenShift Container Platform, on a desktop computer. Overall, I had a nice experience installing Minishift on a Windows 10 computer running HyperV but once I stopped and restarted Minishift, and had a new ip address address assigned to the VM, the instance would no longer start.   Now if you're doing any Docker development on your computer and you move around a good bit or perhaps you're on and off a VPN, you probably know that v
Read more

Parallel to Lincoln's angry letters never sent concept...

With all that I read, hear, and see these days about folks (not excluding yours truly) expressing themselves, I sometimes wonder about President Lincoln's idea of writing but not sending letters .  For better or worse, there is certainly a sharp contrast between that and typical use of today's communication. I was not necessarily thinking of opinions, emotions, and perspectives although I do see the wisdom in the Lincoln's method of dealing with such issues. My issue, at least this time, was being stuck with a particular problem using a technology which is not part of my regularly used skillset.  The technology itself is irrelevant to my point so I won't name it here. I had struggled with a solution after a bit of reading the documentation, searching for and modifying some similar examples, and experimentation.  The time I had put in was actually very little because I was simultaneously working on other parts of the solution.  That's another way of saying I wa
Read more