Tuesday, July 29, 2014

Java Forum Stuttgart 2014

tl;dr: Great as every year.

On July 17th, I attended the Java Forum Stuttgart conference, a one day conference with 49 talks in 7 tracks. This years edition marked a new record with 1600 attendees from all over Germany (and probably also from other countries).

Conference itself was awesome as every year with good talks and good food, 30+ exhibition stands and some free beer at the end :) The conference is organized by the Java User Group Stuttgart e.V. and as such is a non-profit event, which for sure partially explains the success.

I was lucky that my talk "Slim Fast" about a "diet for the application memory footprint" was accepted and I was positively surprised that the room was full despite the fact that the abstract did not contain any buzzwords like IoT or Cloud :-) (German) slides are attached to the above link, JUG Stuttgart now also has posted some pictures.

JUG Stuttgart also posted more pictures of sessions and also some general impression on their G+ page<./p>

Other talks that I've attended were:

"Java FX everywhere" by Gerrit Grunwald, who showed an app that he wrote for the desktop with Java FX and then ported over to devices like Raspberry PI, Android, iPad etc.

"Android ist anders - Android dependency management". This was about dependency management for Android - and for all those that blame Maven hell, check this out and you will like plain Maven afterwards :)

"IBM BlueMix". In this talk a guy from IBM explained a bit what BlueMix is and then demoed creating an app from a simple template and deploying it to a live BlueMix server in the cloud.

"TypeScript - JavaScript für Java Entwickler". Kai Toedter showed the TypeScript language as an alternative to JavaScript. While I was a bit skeptical about "yet another language", the talk totally made me change my mind and I can really see it as good alternative for future UI-work.